i am forever asking the same questions of myself and of the world.
not forever, though.
theoretically i will some day be a person who has gained a certain amount of wisdom from a lifetime full of experiences and,
at that point,
will i still have the same questions to ask?
will i still be a cup full of cracks?
will i stop looking both into future and past, but rather toward something for which i as yet have no words?
asking questions in question of questions.
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l a b r a d f o r d
Prazision (1993)
post-rock.
i am actually listening to post-rock again. it has been years! to be quite honest, i am nearly at a point where i am so unused to long and quiet parts in songs by bands that when they happen i feel slightly confused for a second before i realize what's happening.
this is the very first album by Labradford, a Virginia-based all-bass trio active throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
here you will find music that is quiet, meditative and spacey with some really warm moments.
"Soft Return" (@ 3:28), in all its soft sweetness, is now in the running for one of my new favorite songs of all time (which changes often), followed incredibly closely by the Bark Psychosis-esque slinkiness "C of People" (@ 4:58).
which reminds me,
my favorite genre of music in the past 2 or 3 years would belong to a genre called something like "Driving Alone at Night while Stars and Melting City Lights Illuminate Dirty Backstreets and Distant Suburban Trees."
there's something so fascinating about being alone in such a self-indulgently introspective mood, somewhere as isolated yet freeing as within your own car on an empty highway at night.
American Football, Mogwai, Slint, Bark Psychosis, Talk Talk, Suicide, Rothko.
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r o t h k o
In The Pulse of an Artery (2001)
~sadly no track available~
Wish for a World Without Hurt with Blk. Bear (2003)
Track 4, "Dropped From Clouds"
Not Gone. Not Forgotten. (2001) live album
Track 12, "Time Out"
Rothko was a UK-based post-rock/minimalist/field recording/noise artist, primarily (if not exclusively) instrumental, and active during the end of the 1990s and throughout the first decade of the 2000s.
i listen to albums like these by Rothko because of the same reason that i listen to a lot of music i enjoy - without words, the mind can truly be free.
music, when not overlaid with words or concepts that conjure pre-configured associations, naturally speaks this wordless language. when this unspoken language is given a world in which it can thrive it communicates in a very similar language to the one i have always spoken in my head (if that makes any sense).
some of my favorite music that i listen to and find to be a completely soul-drenching experience (where all senses and mental energies are focusing on what is being heard) like Debussy or Frey or Bach or Scelsi is almost exclusively wordless instrumental music (a term which does sometimes include vocals sung in a foreign or nonexistent language).
i prefer these wordless sounds because to me they convey the purest expression of music - sound. like noise. or silence. this freeform existence is the truest state of "music" because it -is- despite being heard and comprehended. it must only be heard to be identified with by any sentient being, to be felt.
// i realize i'm speaking in rather abstract terms but the subject of emotion is a highly relative one anyway - how can one's emotional response to a piece of music be exactly the same as that of another? how could two disparate beings agree on a definition of any emotion in totality? //
the way that Rothko's wordless instrumental sounds speak to me is peculiar, perhaps, because i am a wordless instrumentalist myself. i much appreciate their indeterminate repetition of bare musical ideas, which always seem to be stripped of any excess.
Forty Years to Find a Voice (2000)
"Shock of Self"
do you see what i mean now? if a band were to take away everything but the beating heart of the beast, perhaps along with some shadows of fire and emotion, it would sound something like this.
"A Search for No Answer"
and this, THIS could easily be seen as something like a Bach fugue. it is pretty much identical in form - a canon, if you will, of two crystal-clear guitar voices intersecting at precise angles, looping around each other - unmapped twists and turns of both harmony and melody. what more could you even want?
in addition, the track's title - "A Search for No Answer" - strikes me as descriptive of what composition essentially is. the search itself is what is heard or not heard, experienced or not experienced, but it always occurs within a duration of passing time. whatever answers that do exist are never experienced - the end of all is indeed silence, nothingness, absence but... not relating to sound or time.
true silence and nothingness occur when there is no longer silence or nothingness.
can you imagine working on a piece of art, a work of music, for 5 years? for decades? for a lifetime?
it always astounds me, stops me in my tracks, when i hear of something like that. how can an artist ever consider his or her or itself "finished"?
in 20th-century composer Morton Feldman's writings, Give My Regards to Eighth Street, it is related that his friend, the painter Philip Guston, "tells us he does not finish a painting but 'abandons it.' at what point does he abandon it? is it perhaps at the moment when it might become a 'painting'?"
that book is incredible, by the way. incredible in a different way than i have found Feldman's music to be. so many thoughtful remarks on the construction of music, the nature of the process of creation, and plenty of lengthy expositions on the multitude of similarities between painting/painters and music/composers that command study and contemplation.
i stand before you today as a new human, completely reborn. my cells are still in the process of regenerating themselves but my mind can regenerate much more rapidly, as it is located outside of an observable place. my whole body is my mind, the entire universe is my mind.
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I Am I, And So Are You
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helpful in the fight to resist the belligerence and vulgarity of parts of this human world is an act which has taken on new meaning for me: meditative stillness.
as thoughts and desires swirl around and inside of me i liken myself to a leaf that has fallen from a tree onto the surface of a pond. currents come and go, push and pull me in every direction, but i strive to be like the leaf.
calm, stable, still. this, like a mountain does, endures - watching passing winds.
nothing makes feel so peaceful, so ready to fill my life with love and admiration for the natural world, for music, for my own capacities to learn and grow. it might sound too good to be true, but it is nothing of the sort. it is truth found through practice. the truth of the universe is revealed to the mind that is open, receptive, grateful. everything passes in phases - from unbearable pain to unbearable beauty, and all moments in between.
as i grow older and gain wisdom, impulses to fret, anticipate, even to analyze, are losing all meaning, all urgency.
breathing and being alive does not require anything more than to be.
it is now time to dive into that world where sound rules the oceans and skies. here, a moonlit landscape of field and rock is juxtaposed against crashing waves lit by a constant sun.
mapping musical sources and their contributions creates a topography of that which lies inside all living beings, translated from thought into sound and word, conceived by a singularly-exiting brain. on the receiving end is me, Allison, who is affected and transformed so strongly by the process itself; birth to death to rebirth.
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transcend
i have decided that the greatest place to start is with the music of claude debussy. his piano music accompanied me for a large part of the past several months almost incessantly.
after discovering the book Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy at my school's music library, i realized things about Debussy's music that had completely escaped me beforehand. the influence that ukiyo-e, "pictures of the floating world," and colored woodblock prints of the Japanese had on Western European artists during the late 19th-century is monumental. the artists and painters surrounding Debussy during this period of Impressionism and then post-Impressionism were concerning themselves not so much with the redundant ornamentation and elaboration of a subject but with the minimalistic structure of portraying a subject - visual art as "arrangements of lines and color," as put by painter Gauguin, or in the case of Debussy's compositional language, a certain “glue-less”-ness that bears "striking similarities to the traditional Japanese arts" (source).
when listening to Gieseking play Debussy's Préludes i can visualize a painting with all its brushstrokes and colors placed beside each other brusquely, clearly, and unashamedly. the music is "angular without any harsh bends," as my friend observed. in the following piece, Debussy's Prélude No. 11, Book 1, "La danse de Puck," i hear brief, texturally-unrelated fragments placed beside each other with no explicit threading tying them together - blocks, bare structures of color and mood, just as in (post-)Impressionist visual arts.
to further exemplify this quality of Debussy's music (which isn't always apparent on the first listen, or even the hundredth), here is an excerpt from the aforelinked blog post which compares traditional Japanese flute music to Debussy's compositional style:
"The shakuhachi honkyoku tradition, for example, is carefully attuned to the aesthetics of 'the single tone.' Rather than focusing on the relational 'glue' binding phrases and sections within each honkyoku piece, players focus on sound itself as the most important single parameter of the music. This attitude is best summed up by the adage ichion joubutsu (一音成仏), 'with one sound, one attains Buddha-consciousness.' In other words, the sound’s the thing, not the syntax. This idea probably would have resonated with Debussy, who once remarked that he loved development sections during symphony concerts because they gave him an opportunity to go out and enjoy a cigarette.
[To give you a sense of the timbral richness and variety of the shakuhachi, I’ll close with a video of one of my favorite honkyoku pieces, shika no tone ('The distant cry of deer'), performed by the masters Aoki Reibo and Yamaguchi Goro.]" videos below~
the following album, Persian Surgery Dervishes, is a recording of two live solo electric organ concerts, the first held in Los Angeles on 18 April 1971 and the second in Paris on 24 May 1972. the performances were done by American minimalist/avant-garde composer terry riley.
in a continuously flowing display of improvisatory magic, daydreaming is induced by a naturally-unfolding current of soundwaves that appear to be almost nearly identical in color. almost nearly.
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following in a similar meditative mood, here is a brand new artistic figure in my sphere of influence - giacinto scelsi.
he was: a self-taught and composer from Italy who kept to himself, active in the early to mid 20th-century, and a frequent traveler to India and Eastern Asia who therefore became interested in Buddhism, meditation, and Eastern philosophy.
"Scelsi’s artistic ideas and compositional procedures thwarted Western concepts of composition, improvisation, interpretation, and performance. He did not consider himself a composer, but rather a medium or vessel who transcendentally received musical messages while meditating and improvising at the piano or on the guitar and percussion instruments" (source).
the following piece in particular off of a mode record of Scelsi's complete works for double bass is completely meditative in nature. a single note is explored in a dimension beyond time; time appears to stretch and break free from human-made musical laws, such as barlines and measures. through indeterminancy (durations of sound being solely the choice of the performer), time becomes a purely variable element.
Dharana (1975) for cello and double bass
Robert Black, double bass
Felix Fan, cello
first recording
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last but not least, in our journey of transcendence, i have placed jürg frey's string quartet no. 3.
a small excerpt of the piece can be listened to here.
i really want to hear the rest of his string quartets. i have obtained this, the third, released on the edition wandelweiser record label and listen to it for days on end, it seems. i feel like i am purposely wanting to never leave the dreamlike world where it takes me.
from the liner notes:
"The string quartet sounds sometimes like the silence of a square, a room, a wall or a landscape. The music is silent, but not absent. It is not speechless, and it also does not move with virtuosity bordering on silence. The music gets its vitality and its radiance, not from gesture and figuration, but in quiet presence – everything is there: colours, sensations, shadows, durations. The music is silent architecture."
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descend
everything is good
don't say anything
close your eyes
think of nothing
believe me
everything is good
everything is good
please, turn your volume up as far as you can possibly bear and click play.
two beautiful men. one beautiful album of exremely danceable tracks. this is another example of music that i hypnotically listen to on repeat and subconsciously internalize, like a sonic mantra. i begin to breathe it and speak a language that requires no words at all.
it is bodily, sexual, the way those synths hit you. experience this album.
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this is a short album and i have been meaning to mention it for a while because i listened to it non-stop during the month of July and have since moved on to other things but it's been difficult to come up with some kind of summation of my impression of this album.
simultaneously sweet as candy, innocent, reminiscent of 50s rock-and-roll and sinister, trance-like dark-as-black house from the slimy backstreets of New York,suicide made sounds that none other had ever dreamed of before.
between alan vega's moans and martin rev's surprisingly decadent organ harmonies which so frequently overlay such intrinsically sick beats i find this album also sexual and bodily to the extreme - a fucking magnificent trip through some kinda delicious hell.
my personal favorite song is "Girl" (see: moans) which can be found around the 12:45 mark.
here is an electrifying live performance of the duo performing the first track, "Ghost Rider," off their 1977 (can you fucking believe it?!) self-titled album in 1980:
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and if those two weren't enough, there is even more goodness to be found in late 70s/early 80s industrial/techno new-wave music~
with each day that passes i can feel perceptual shifts inside of me, inside of this world. while they are indebted largely to the presences of new musical and artistic ideas in my mental sphere, i am noticing that thought as a process of discovery is becoming clearer and clearer, more purposeful, even more optimistic. i wish i could say it is through some personal strength found on my own but no, it is from willful immersion, soaking in ideas fresh out of oblivion. how else do i open myself up to possibility?
i can't keep up with the changes of the mind, but life gets its infinity from such things, does it not?
i like to think that it does.
still ruminating on the thought of what it means to be an artist and how to even reconcile one's self as one when you are perpetually unconvinced.
Cy Twombly "Scenes from an Ideal Marriage" 1986 *
the beginning of this, dare i say it, romantic (though not in any way related to the Western art movement) phase began with a work. a masterpiece. something that, were i to claim it as my own (an idea that actually seems grossly unholy), would be sufficient to define my whole life as transcending a typical existence.
the piece is Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. Reich was an American composer who dedicated his life to things that truly inspired him. the definition of a composer. he didn't really teach, as he felt it would take away from his creative energies. he took odd jobs that had nothing to do with composition, really, until he was able to sustain himself purely on composing and performing his own music (an artist's dream in this society).
the work was completed during 1974-1976 and lacked a traditional score for 22 years due to it being primarily a collaborative creation between ensemble and composer, in turn preserving the work largely as a sort of oral tradition. i followed the admittedly challenging score throughout the piece's entire duration one day and could hear the audible cues that Reich often talked about, the ones that link him to his main influences - West African drumming and Balinese gamelan, where the head drummer/rhythm-keeper in a collective is in charge of cuing sections. Reich was incredibly interested in the idea of music-making as a gradual process (he wrote a manifesto of sorts on the idea in 1968, Music as a Gradual Process, which served to distinctly voice his chosen ideals and laws regarding composition), one that didn't attempt to conceal factors of the music's structure and mystery from its listener.
to me, it seems like he arrived at these ideological conclusions of his purely by accident, or by a chain of events that did not intend to result in his becoming a revolutionary musical thinker. he began experimenting with tape loops, first, realizing that by allowing two electromechanical elements to play a small fragment of original music simultaneously, naturally-occurring intervals will begin to form between the two, something that he would call phasing. this concept followed him throughout his entire compositional career and i would say shaped a large amount of his artistic thought, but he left the tape loops far behind once he began experimenting with how to reproduce this "natural" process in a live setting. this, he found, could be achieved in two ways: by instructing performers to play a compositional fragment simultaneously at first but then slightly faster in one voice, thus naturally changing by varying degrees the space in between them; or, as i believe was most directly influenced by the Eastern music traditions mentioned above, objectively syncopating the musical lines by placing and displacing beats. tapes were still used in some of his other compositions but i believe he really liked the process of constant metaphormosizing, and the span of his life's work underwent changes due in part to his environment and to his own maturation.
Music for 8 Musicians is separated into 14 or so sections all based around 11 chords. these chords are then elaborated upon by various groups of instruments including pianos (4 of them!), voices, clarinets, strings, vibraphones, marimbas, and xylophones, throughout the entire duration of the piece - around 55 minutes. each group of instruments that is dependent on human breath is instructed to time their phrases exactly as long as it takes to draw a breath, with a natural crescendo to the middle providing those alluring "waves" of sound you hear. there is a rhythmic spine to the piece in the low notes but also in the constantly-pulsing percussive instruments, but with all of the changing sections which highlight varying instrument groups i feel a sense of controlled timelessness (Reich made a point to say in an interview that there is no chance in his music, none).
it is structural music, as a friend pointed out, but i find it meditative in a really intellectual way. you aren't hypnotized into a state hazy confusion, you are witnessing pure rhythmelodical (what a wonderful word) expression that, i believe, truly exemplifies Reich's desire to create a sound that is at once process and sounding music. i can't stop listening.
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* i know nothing about this artist but i love visual art that does not attempt to construct our known reality, but rather portrays something completely indifferent to us, something almost unrecognizable. it shows that the mind can create worlds untouched by learning and evolution using something as simple as color, something as mechanical as physical motion. mindless creation that is entirely mindful. rejecting what the brain wants to see, what it wants to construct. at least that's what i believe is happening here.
