Distances, Temporal and Aural

Music is more than connectivity to varied emotional states.

Reflect upon how little is done to extend boundaries so narrowly defined.

Time Past, Now Future

View time, hear sound, as perceptual continuum.

This is presence of mind for the artist as composer: past and future surround a single moment, and there is no beginning, middle, or end.  The word "nonlinear" is weak, incomplete.

I call it real life, as experienced and expressed.

Ways of Being and Will to Create

The reality of nature neither speaks nor instructs; its lessons are learned by observation.

Human reality observes, conceives, expresses, and acts. Yet of both realities, only one is always true.

Picasso, Eliot, Warhol, Burroughs

The modern becomes the traditional, and tradition is reconsidered.

Think. Nothing exists without precedent and foundation. Only ignorance is unmoored and adrift.

Permanent Loss

Complacency is a prison.

To embrace innovation in technology without accepting innovation in cultural expression is a complete waste of potential, a contemptible surrender to profound and prolonged cultural stagnation.

What has vanished before reaching fruition can only be imagined; work that will never be brought into being because creative thinkers will refuse to participate in efforts deemed existentially worthless is unimaginable.

The Power

Universal condemnation of artist and intellectual portends evil.

There can be no doubt that suppression of speech, perspective, and artistic expression signals the worst sort of calamity, one that drives culture underground and into the wastes.

The artist and intellectual must defend themselves. No one else grasps the force of moral reason that is necessary to overcome the rage of the ignorant and benighted, for whom nothing is acceptable but the extinction of light.

Struggle

Culture must reach beyond contrived ignorance and brute materialism.

There is always a need for enlightened perspectives, even if they conflict with each other.

Free Hand

The listener should be engaged without being subjected to sounds.

In real-world conditions, listening is selective, and the listener engaged by interesting environmental events by choice.  Composition of atmospheres with attention to the ways sounds rise and fall in the locations and settings of everyday perceptual experiences creates musical pieces that do not imprint themselves upon consciousness, but rather enhance awareness. 

That, then, is the goal of these works. Their relationship to minimalism, "ambient music", classical music, popular music, or even music in general is slight, if, in fact, it exists at all.

Obscure Terrain  by Black Mountain School

Delmarva (Excerpt)  by Black Mountain School

The Voice of Time in Gold  by Ghost Radio Orchestra

Art, Music, and Purpose

These works are produced as imitations of natural atmospheres and human reality within them.

Rather than force sounds into predetermined patterns, I compose by combining sounds and allowing the combinations to determine direction, pattern, effect, and arrangement with minimal interference.

With this understanding, the listener may compare and contrast these works to other concepts and forms of music, with which they have very little in common.

Identity (Excerpt)  by Black Mountain School

Prescience (Excerpt)  by Black Mountain School

Ancestral Shadows  by Ghost Radio Orchestra

Take This Moment

Thank you.

Lead, Or Be Led

I don't presume to speak for artists. They can speak for themselves, as I do on behalf of my work.

I believe reality is far more than that revealed by the senses, and that it can be perceived, by degrees, in the light of reason and free will, the spiritual faculties. Insights and understanding gained in such a way may be artistically expressed, and thus refute the debased assertions of the narrow-minded, the materialistic, and the totalitarian who would dictate the terms of human experience.

Popularity Chasm

Few things impede artistic communication more than ignorance, nihilism, and complacency.

Increasingly apparent are voices of those who parrot absurdities and stridently demand that reality conform to worthless propositions. Art is dead in such collective mentalities, fit only to serve as the vehicle for broadcasting propaganda.

Free expression, rejected out of hand, can never be supported by those who cannot tolerate the world of ideas. The infantile cannot withstand it, as it illuminates things as they are in devastating clarity.

One does not waste time with those who would insist that human nature and moral reason have no real existence, or that there is no such thing as history. They must simply be left behind, as it is only among the utterly benighted that such abominable "ideas" gain currency.

Temporal Movement

Trace the arc of mediocrity and cultural stagnation as it leads to failed perspectives.

Passionate, self-obsessed assertions in the arts do not replace superior ones by virtue of novelty.

Pressure, Manipulation, Clarity, Possibilities

Things perceived in dim light appear distorted and unclear.

Even so, consciousness retains fundamental understanding of objective reality. Perhaps this sense of balance holds in the face of media-generated demands upon human attention, but that may be rather too optimistic a perspective.

 Artistic endeavor in every form has the potential to express this balance, but this can only be so as far as it reflects the honesty and integrity of the individual artist.

Time Vanishing

Any extended observation of culture will witness the diminishing and extinction of certain shallow, once dominant, yet short-lived forces in society and the arts.

Unlike the personal effects of a deceased individual, the artifacts that remain have no connection, however brief or tenuous, to a past reality that is gone as surely as if it had never existed.

This is a defining principle of the arts: to lift perception, and thus experience, beyond the common currency of bombast and poorly engaged ideals, into a realization of abstract, permanent things.

Ahead, Beyond, and Alone

These sound works represent elevation.

Better to explore the silences with genuine curiosity than accept the mundane simply because it conforms to common ideas of being "impassioned".

Beam in the Eye of Imagination

The artist's fund of experience informs expression.

Yet, if all that enters within the perception of the artist is understood to be the appearance of reality, expression will reflect the underlying nature of reality, or else, illusion.

It is the difference between any individual's mastery of life and the "demands" of society and culture at any given time.

Past Shadows

There is no such thing as a tragedy with a happy ending.

Apologists for prolonged cultural and intellectual decline invariably claim the "necessity" of bellicose and "transgressive" reactions to fundamental expressions of human dignity. These arguments are not only absurd, but intentionally destructive.

The good is self-evident, its enemies easily distinguished from the merely ignorant by their slavish adherence to failed 19th Century ideologies, beginning with "scientific materialism" and extending throughout all the mindless drivel associated with it.

Art, Reality, History

The word "narrative" has come to mean any amalgam of lies and propaganda.

This changes nothing. Work, for its own sake, with or without acceptance or respect.

Perception and its Opposite

Light and sound elevate life.

Yet nothing can be done for those who refuse to see and hear, who call day, night, and night, day.