Sonic Artifice

Brightness, shade, temperature, and other atmospheric conditions have their equivalents in sound.

Surfaces dappled with sunlight suggest different tones than those in bright light or deep shadow. Textures and colors bring to the mind and inner ear diverse auditory images, as do gestures and movements.  

Instrumentation and composition cannot replicate these perceptions with exactitude, but may imply the sounds of their reality.

Resurgam

Originality is an imposition of will athwart the mundane.

The artist is the individual who will not be subsumed into mediocrity and mere chaos.

Every stroke of pen or brush, every release of note and tone, sound and pattern, is an existential act.

Sounds of Future History

Listen forward.

Predictive analysis always suggests combinations of the real and the potential, out of the deepest possible past and through the broadest present awareness.

Listener and composer lift wind through reeds to the Anemoi, and upward to the spaces between the stars.

The Angel Passing Through

In the sudden silences, the inner ear acclimates to surroundings.

For listener and composer, this is simply the continuum of aural imagery and the moment now.

Aural and Sensory Clarity

In large measure, external motivation fuels attention, narrowing perception and focus to objects of immediate desire.

This concentration on the appetites, essentially limitless in nature, diminishes awareness, being, and meaning. A deficit of moral reason will not be replaced by the transient and temporal, nor will these supplant vision.

Begin by taking notice of the surroundings, giving consideration to those elements of the outer and inner worlds that are disregarded; as directly as possible, perceive without subjective distraction, and contemplate experience and atmosphere with the mind's eye and the inner ear.  See, hear, and listen in such ways as heighten awareness and consciousness across the sensory spectrum, refining and bringing lucidity to feeling and thought.

The way of the artist demands intention, force, and balance.

Shaping, Restraining, Releasing

Sound and vision cohere in art through systematic approaches.  Even so, spontaneity, improvisation, and experimentation are critical elements to original concepts.

The nature of atmospheric sound composition includes selective input, shading and juxtaposition of tones, and flexibility in ordering processes and arrangements; the extemporaneous and unexpected bring vivacity to these methods and applications.

Ultima Thule

The sounds of urban environments tend toward the metallic, electronic, strident, pale, and brightly reflective.  Street, shop window, old brick and new concrete, restaurant, business, hiss of elevators, radio night air traffic.

Suburbs bring voices, automobile society, games, radio and television, air conditioning thrum, floor plan, patio, murmuring landscapes constructed for pleasure and altered by weather conditions.

Rural sounds flow with wind, wood, water, and wildlife.  But there is asphalt, railroad, shopping center, institution, home and garden.  And, like the cities and their environs, the sounds of cultural order and disorder-- intellectual and emotional, physical and spiritual, social and personal.

But even yet there are sounds at a distance to all human contact, beyond society, media, and culture --unimagined geographies, uncanny and otherworldly.  The real challenge is to perceive, discover and bring these atmospheres into being.

Potential Musics

Everything related to aural perception may be considered music.

By engaging perception and approaching expectation in diverse ways, listening for pleasure--  and information-- expands and becomes more acute.  Imagine extravagantly; hear symphonic works and concertos developing through the composition of atmospheres.

Shifting Forms

Impressions of formlessness, though briefly perceived, reflect the intrinsic beauty of nature and the mind's eye of imagination.

Apply the concepts of art to sound constructions, and strictures are loosened; predictability is not as important as process and aesthetic effect.

Input, Output

Apply one set of ideas to another concept.  Sustain this pattern of thought and action.

Representations form according to a different order of thought, perception and meaning.

Art moves according to historical forces, but does not follow.

Appearance, Impression, Interpretation

Auditory sensations, with the responses of the mind and emotions, yield meanings.

Listener and composer realize, reflect, and transmit these meanings, in personal and cultural terms.

Contemplative Ear and Spirit

Move outside the current, rather than with or against it.

Music is considered mostly in terms of active listening, although some music is designed for passive awareness, as background music, or "aural wallpaper".

When neither perspective applies, both happen, by the composer's intent.  For the listener, this may bring about changes in perception, and consciousness, enhancing ways of listening and hearing.

Essential Order

Avoid the extraneous; if a sound does not contribute to the total effect of the work, eliminate it.

When a composer establishes limits, the tendency to be limited by ideas and events outside the composer's range of experience and influence can be mitigated.  This is of peculiar moment when assessing the considerable impact of a superabundance of information and continual technological progress on the development of a body of work.

Shock of the Real

Aesthetic richness is measured by simplicity as easily as extravagance.

In a state of lucidity one perceives directly, unfiltered and unadulterated by cognizance of self and culture.

Transformation Design

Developing electronic music through generative processes alone places the composer at a distance from sonic events and their final forms, often resulting in works of serene and highly nuanced beauty.

Transformation designs are the result of direct and indirect involvement on the composer's part; the object is to create conditions in which sound structures evolve while directing that development in such ways as enhance the total aesthetic effect of the work.

Echos, Reflections, Waves

Learn, perceive, think, and contemplate.  Action emerges.

In painting with sound, as it were, tones are mixed and set in motion.  Among innumerable things, they blend, spread, coalesce, dissipate, develop patterns, move in and out of focus, fade, become darker or lighter, and take on the ultimate form composed with the artist throughout the dynamic processes.

Art as Sound as Art: The King Krill

As discussed here in variable contexts, diverse sound elements may be presented in asymmetrical manner, designed in ways that defy anticipation.  The King Krill is a recording by Diode and Rick Holland that synthesizes unique elements of poetry, vocals, percussion and electronica to create an experience of rare aesthetic beauty.  This is a work that draws the future into the moment now.

The King Krill, featuring I am Fya, Beth Rowley, Chris James, Onallee, and Andrew Plummer, as brought into being by producer Old Man Diode and poet Rick Holland

Listeners familiar with Drums Between The Bells and Panic Of Looking, Rick Holland's 2011 collaborations with Brian Eno, will note the distinctive qualities shared by those works and The King Krill in combining musical and poetic elements. Each approaches and explores sound settings for voices from various artistic perspectives that bring to life diverse atmospheres and moods, and all three reflect creative interaction and experimentation seasoned over the past decade. As a poet of critical imagination and integrity, Holland proves at ease with both the ethereal atmospherics of Eno's arrangements and the elastic sonic power Diode wields with energetic bravura.

Read more of my review of The King Krill at The Quietus.com:  http://thequietus.com/

MP3 Album of Old Man Diode and Rick Holland: The King Krill at Amazon.com:  The King Krill

Sounds of Shadows

Sensory perceptions conceal as well as reveal.

For the artist to render honestly, a degree of subjectivity may palliate or exaggerate the reality fixed as a representation of objective experience.  This individuality suggests personal and demonstrative perspectives brought into being in any medium.

The inner ear of the composer must have the free reign of the eye of the visual artist, and the balance of lucid imagination.  Clarity of style and execution reflects coherence of concept, most peculiarly in emphasis of the more subtle elements of sound.

Auditory Imagination

The sounds of experience may evoke the broad vistas or small corners of the world.

The aural events and atmospheres of these settings may be expressed by the composer in all manner of ways.  Microcosm and macrocosm may be still and serene, or seething with activity.

But there is an essence of vision that the listener and composer must share, one difficult to define yet glaring in its absence, that of integrity of expression.

Emergence, Depth, Presence

There are sounds that can be heard only within the inner ear.

Such sounds form the narratives of mystery and epiphany, of insight and the unknown.