- 1Side A [ A1. Philip K. Dick - The Martian Time Slip ]
- 2Side B [ B1. Brian Eno – B2. Black Creek Swamp, NY – B3. The Schumann Resonance, Accompained by Loi Ta Tu ]
H004
•
Open edition
To whom it may concern, and to some others who it may not,
I greet thee. Wednesday, December 2nd. 2009.
Introduction:
When John cage was asked about his completely silent composition 4:33, whether or no it was a whimsical or spontaneous creation, He replied:
“Do you mean, was it a joke?” Cage furthered that "spontaneous" could not be the right word in any case, that it took several days to write, but more importantly it had taken several years to make the decision to do so. What compositional eloquence he had, a javelin thrower who trains to throw only once, perfectly and on point.
Alas my work here on this album is only the hapless product of stumbling fingers, hammering out by so many orangutans fighting over garbage. 2 years in the making and I am still wishing I had cut my fingernails closer before I began banging on the keys.
There is a small lie in there, inconsequential but true. I barely play any real keys here. I was never a great instrumentalist and it grows less important to me by the day. It is ideas now I will try to dance upon, talk about, and bloody fist pound down to a handful of compositions that I have entitled “impossible”.
The first four of these have been lovingly set into vinyl by my sweet Italianese collegues at Hundebiss. God Bless their courage.
Notes
About duets.
I do not need to tell you that we all live in a remix and sampling culture. At this point, there is very little doubt about the subject, and it might easily be argued that in addition there is nothing new about the phenomenon, particularly in regards to music.
This issue, of re purposing work, where elements are removed from its original continuity for a something new, I find a bit boring. It is not at the heart of this album and not what is being considered here. Of course it would of course be easy to grab a few loopable phrases from Here Come the Warm Jets and begin something from there- a loose tribute with a nod in the direction of 1974: Thank you for your hard work everyone, and boy those vocal sound great.
A traditional remix is not a duet in any form, and hardly a collaboration. Rather than treat the originals as some kind of resource available for mountain top removal, or a shabby Lego kit ready for reassembly, I strive for a kind of coherence of the original material.
I have avoided chopping and selecting, because a collaboration, across space and time- the voids, is what this album is about. . To do that I and my partners must have a place to stand where neither one has chopped the legs out from the other before we have begun
In these 4 small hand holding adventures, I take no more than can I give. if I were sitting down with Brian Eno, or Philip K Dick and talking through our collaboration, I would say,
"You have done your half, please allow me to do mine…
Let me bring to this conversation about impossibilities an imagination,
let me ask what is possible if we were not so separated by time, or fame or death.
And Now For The Show
Side A
1.PKD is one song, originally entitled IS:IS and an early draft for it was released on Gods of Tundra as a limited cassette. It is a spell- between myself and Philip K Dick. Philip K Dick’s (Or PKD as he is often referred to by fans) wrote the stories that inspired fTotal Recall, Blade Runner, The Minority Report and A Scanner Darkley among others. Though only The Scanner Darkly remake was in line with the originals depth and depravity. Dick is without a doubt one of America’s greatest visionary writers, and until recently he was one of our living ones. His subject: How do we survive, as regular people in the face of un imaginable, unknowable change. His enemy was fascism in all its forms, whether it be capitalist, socialist, self afflicting or religious.
Not since Walt Whitman has my country seen a more appropriate bard.
However for most of his life he was consigned to the coal bin of genre, lost to "science fiction" and treated as one whose audience only recently left puberty. Though hardworking, he was poor much of his life.
Our duet is a battle about king Time. PKD was obsessed with the meaning and manipulation of time and dealt extensively with it in The Martian Time Slip (1964)
Here a small boy, possibly autistic, moves in and out of our time stream.-- seeing the past and future simultaneously. Every beauty therefore rots before him. At the center of the story is a recurring meeting witnessed repeatedly in different forms. Like a fractal event, or musical phrase each time the scene evokes with subtle differences. In a carefully constructed retelling by Carlos Gonzales, this I have taken the sections spread across the book, but occupying the same space narratively and treated it as a musical composition rather then a literary.
To dismantle the communicatory aspect of the speech the intonation, affect and prosdy (tonal aspects) are stripped away both through direction of Gonazales’ performance as well as more complicated digital strategies. What is left is a parallel the singsong poetry of many non literate cultures, whose patterns have been shown to resemble that of Eriksonian hypnotic induction. Properly performed this composition should last at least 30 minutes, each quasi looping movement dropping more and more of its literal nature as the brain slowly cares less and less about the present content of the words.
You may if you like, allow the turntable to repeat.
Side B
1. In the case of “Eno and I,” I like to imagine a glissando glide between our two distant minds, laughing and meticulous, airy and dark. There is a pirate ship that follows us through its transition, I hope it remains on tack, despite our relative noodling. The original is of course, “Spider and I” from the 2004 release, Before And After Science. However the real reason Eno is here, is because of the previously mentioned album he recorded 30 years earlier:Here Come the Warm Jets. There attempted, to bring together musicians he thought otherwise incompatible. The resulting album is a recording of that dissonance and energy brought back into the studio to be cooked and rendered as something long distant from its original source. The songs of Here Come the Warm Jets remain alive and well despite the cauldron’s heat.
Our duet, remains a tribute not so much to the content of any particular song, then to the legacy of the co-composer. His argument, as I see it is that the last thing a recording must be is literal. It’s does not desire the same rigure or goal as does documentation. We have living life for living life. Recordings are an opportunity to create something that could not exist in any other manner.
Why trade it for a shallow photocopy of what had been?.
Though technically this first short track is the introduction to only the B-side, it long fought for the introduction of the album as a whole.
2. Black Creek is a field recording that offers you a center stage seat at choral ensemble of a certain slice of nature in time and space. Together, we are allowed by the grace of God, to make ourselves small, crawling face first through the deep mud and slime- to croak and crow along. It is a spell of transformation if have ever been one.
That nature can be said to have some kind of shape built in way down deep- a kind of fractal motion or synestisiac sort of texture throughout is implicit in this work. The marsh tune, in its ever resonant and reflective wave form expresses that geometry as music in time.
It is no small thing to work in this form, one I find more exacting than any sonnet or haiku. It requires the observational skills to sense the sameness of things over their differences, and to compose as such- - it is no small feat for a brain genetically wired to hear in black and white, up and down.
So, if I collaborate with anyone in this composition between myself and a damp swamp and flock of geese- it is a young student at the feet of an old master where I am allowed briefly to kiss the mouth of a frog.
If I am lucky I will be stripped of my princehood and returned to murk, to lay my eggs and swim among the lilies.
Music at this construction becomes about one thing only, which is the guided experience, the human state change. It is not a question of genre, instrumentalism, good, bad or even liking or disliking. The Black Creek piece in particular is too awkward and foreign to make these kind of distinctions. Rather, it is rather a question of spellcasting. Did the spell succeed or not? Is the transformation, or transportation complete?
You do not ask the spellcaster what wood his wand is made of- it is irrelevant.
And in any case, there is only the listener to blame if they are not in wet in the feet, by the time it is all done. In the end the real work is theirs, done by the target, the audience- the spellcaster can only provides the tools and the architecture by which to allow for the changes within the subject that would be unavailable otherwise. It is not his, or her, fault if the target has only heard and hasn’t listened.
In this I sway backwards in time.
Once the musician, and the priest, and the healer were not so different, and at once been a singular profession. Perhaps the first one. The experience guider, the knowledge creator- toward various ends. Only modern specialization has fractured this job, creating medical doctors and astrophysics philosophers and movie makers, and choreographers and popes.
If technology is the application of scientific principles, and magic the application of religious ones, then what then is the machinery of music built on? Surely it must be a language for the manipulation of experience, something old in the back brain where we remain largely reptiles.
From this perspective, I would argue that this song in partiular, but the record as a whole is a spellcasting device- using with music only as a kind of machinery. This not to derogate the value of the music, because as a craftsperson, a knowledge creator, as a composer- my skills remain in the tool first- only through the manipulation of it can I work backward to the spell.
And this then is the question that interests me at last the most
What does music DO? How does it work? Is there any difference in the language of Madonna and Debussy, or only different goals?
3. The Schumann Resonance
The final piece therefore is a scientific approach to the question. A duet largely with the listener’s own mind. Underneath the track is a “binaural frequency”- two distinct low frequency tones, one for the left ear, one for the right. When heard simultaneously, in stereo, the brain automatically hallucinates a third frequency, implied by the mathematical difference of the two audible ones. This auditory hallucination of about 7.3 hertz, the same frequency at which the Earth physically vibrates, like a slow plucked string. Known as the “Schumann Resonance”, it is the subtle fundamental throb of the planet from which all life has evolved. Through its provenance of being a hallucination, the imagined sound has the strange effect of slowly aligning your brain wave with the hallucination. In this case it means over the course of a few minutes a reading of your brain waves would show a slow switch from an active Alpha state (about 12 htz) to a pre-sleep, meditative pattern associated with the lower frequency Theta state. You may feel a strange calmness or physical heaviness. You may be locked into your seat.
Above this sound is Loi Ta Tu, a vietnamese singer found on a golden cassette tape. Loi Ta Tu is responsible for keeping your left hemisphere occupied.
When you think of Loi, think of swinging clock, a dripping faucet or a dying fire. With some keyboard additions by mudboy, the resonance, and your own hallucinations form a four way duet, no small feat, since at the very least we have yet to all meet.
Conclusion: It has perhaps now taken you longer to read this small thesis as it would have been to listen to the record. I am not accustomed to confusing my music with words, I hope it adds more than it takes- and you are left room to dream your own impossible dreams should you still wish to do so. You may find me in the bog.
Sincerely,
mudboy
– R lyon
credits
released May 1, 2009
Realization Mudboy in Lexifur's Lair, Providence RI
2008 - 2009
©Rapahel Lyon ©Hundebiss Records
I greet thee. Wednesday, December 2nd. 2009.
Introduction:
When John cage was asked about his completely silent composition 4:33, whether or no it was a whimsical or spontaneous creation, He replied:
“Do you mean, was it a joke?” Cage furthered that "spontaneous" could not be the right word in any case, that it took several days to write, but more importantly it had taken several years to make the decision to do so. What compositional eloquence he had, a javelin thrower who trains to throw only once, perfectly and on point.
Alas my work here on this album is only the hapless product of stumbling fingers, hammering out by so many orangutans fighting over garbage. 2 years in the making and I am still wishing I had cut my fingernails closer before I began banging on the keys.
There is a small lie in there, inconsequential but true. I barely play any real keys here. I was never a great instrumentalist and it grows less important to me by the day. It is ideas now I will try to dance upon, talk about, and bloody fist pound down to a handful of compositions that I have entitled “impossible”.
The first four of these have been lovingly set into vinyl by my sweet Italianese collegues at Hundebiss. God Bless their courage.
Notes
About duets.
I do not need to tell you that we all live in a remix and sampling culture. At this point, there is very little doubt about the subject, and it might easily be argued that in addition there is nothing new about the phenomenon, particularly in regards to music.
This issue, of re purposing work, where elements are removed from its original continuity for a something new, I find a bit boring. It is not at the heart of this album and not what is being considered here. Of course it would of course be easy to grab a few loopable phrases from Here Come the Warm Jets and begin something from there- a loose tribute with a nod in the direction of 1974: Thank you for your hard work everyone, and boy those vocal sound great.
A traditional remix is not a duet in any form, and hardly a collaboration. Rather than treat the originals as some kind of resource available for mountain top removal, or a shabby Lego kit ready for reassembly, I strive for a kind of coherence of the original material.
I have avoided chopping and selecting, because a collaboration, across space and time- the voids, is what this album is about. . To do that I and my partners must have a place to stand where neither one has chopped the legs out from the other before we have begun
In these 4 small hand holding adventures, I take no more than can I give. if I were sitting down with Brian Eno, or Philip K Dick and talking through our collaboration, I would say,
"You have done your half, please allow me to do mine…
Let me bring to this conversation about impossibilities an imagination,
let me ask what is possible if we were not so separated by time, or fame or death.
And Now For The Show
Side A
1.PKD is one song, originally entitled IS:IS and an early draft for it was released on Gods of Tundra as a limited cassette. It is a spell- between myself and Philip K Dick. Philip K Dick’s (Or PKD as he is often referred to by fans) wrote the stories that inspired fTotal Recall, Blade Runner, The Minority Report and A Scanner Darkley among others. Though only The Scanner Darkly remake was in line with the originals depth and depravity. Dick is without a doubt one of America’s greatest visionary writers, and until recently he was one of our living ones. His subject: How do we survive, as regular people in the face of un imaginable, unknowable change. His enemy was fascism in all its forms, whether it be capitalist, socialist, self afflicting or religious.
Not since Walt Whitman has my country seen a more appropriate bard.
However for most of his life he was consigned to the coal bin of genre, lost to "science fiction" and treated as one whose audience only recently left puberty. Though hardworking, he was poor much of his life.
Our duet is a battle about king Time. PKD was obsessed with the meaning and manipulation of time and dealt extensively with it in The Martian Time Slip (1964)
Here a small boy, possibly autistic, moves in and out of our time stream.-- seeing the past and future simultaneously. Every beauty therefore rots before him. At the center of the story is a recurring meeting witnessed repeatedly in different forms. Like a fractal event, or musical phrase each time the scene evokes with subtle differences. In a carefully constructed retelling by Carlos Gonzales, this I have taken the sections spread across the book, but occupying the same space narratively and treated it as a musical composition rather then a literary.
To dismantle the communicatory aspect of the speech the intonation, affect and prosdy (tonal aspects) are stripped away both through direction of Gonazales’ performance as well as more complicated digital strategies. What is left is a parallel the singsong poetry of many non literate cultures, whose patterns have been shown to resemble that of Eriksonian hypnotic induction. Properly performed this composition should last at least 30 minutes, each quasi looping movement dropping more and more of its literal nature as the brain slowly cares less and less about the present content of the words.
You may if you like, allow the turntable to repeat.
Side B
1. In the case of “Eno and I,” I like to imagine a glissando glide between our two distant minds, laughing and meticulous, airy and dark. There is a pirate ship that follows us through its transition, I hope it remains on tack, despite our relative noodling. The original is of course, “Spider and I” from the 2004 release, Before And After Science. However the real reason Eno is here, is because of the previously mentioned album he recorded 30 years earlier:Here Come the Warm Jets. There attempted, to bring together musicians he thought otherwise incompatible. The resulting album is a recording of that dissonance and energy brought back into the studio to be cooked and rendered as something long distant from its original source. The songs of Here Come the Warm Jets remain alive and well despite the cauldron’s heat.
Our duet, remains a tribute not so much to the content of any particular song, then to the legacy of the co-composer. His argument, as I see it is that the last thing a recording must be is literal. It’s does not desire the same rigure or goal as does documentation. We have living life for living life. Recordings are an opportunity to create something that could not exist in any other manner.
Why trade it for a shallow photocopy of what had been?.
Though technically this first short track is the introduction to only the B-side, it long fought for the introduction of the album as a whole.
2. Black Creek is a field recording that offers you a center stage seat at choral ensemble of a certain slice of nature in time and space. Together, we are allowed by the grace of God, to make ourselves small, crawling face first through the deep mud and slime- to croak and crow along. It is a spell of transformation if have ever been one.
That nature can be said to have some kind of shape built in way down deep- a kind of fractal motion or synestisiac sort of texture throughout is implicit in this work. The marsh tune, in its ever resonant and reflective wave form expresses that geometry as music in time.
It is no small thing to work in this form, one I find more exacting than any sonnet or haiku. It requires the observational skills to sense the sameness of things over their differences, and to compose as such- - it is no small feat for a brain genetically wired to hear in black and white, up and down.
So, if I collaborate with anyone in this composition between myself and a damp swamp and flock of geese- it is a young student at the feet of an old master where I am allowed briefly to kiss the mouth of a frog.
If I am lucky I will be stripped of my princehood and returned to murk, to lay my eggs and swim among the lilies.
Music at this construction becomes about one thing only, which is the guided experience, the human state change. It is not a question of genre, instrumentalism, good, bad or even liking or disliking. The Black Creek piece in particular is too awkward and foreign to make these kind of distinctions. Rather, it is rather a question of spellcasting. Did the spell succeed or not? Is the transformation, or transportation complete?
You do not ask the spellcaster what wood his wand is made of- it is irrelevant.
And in any case, there is only the listener to blame if they are not in wet in the feet, by the time it is all done. In the end the real work is theirs, done by the target, the audience- the spellcaster can only provides the tools and the architecture by which to allow for the changes within the subject that would be unavailable otherwise. It is not his, or her, fault if the target has only heard and hasn’t listened.
In this I sway backwards in time.
Once the musician, and the priest, and the healer were not so different, and at once been a singular profession. Perhaps the first one. The experience guider, the knowledge creator- toward various ends. Only modern specialization has fractured this job, creating medical doctors and astrophysics philosophers and movie makers, and choreographers and popes.
If technology is the application of scientific principles, and magic the application of religious ones, then what then is the machinery of music built on? Surely it must be a language for the manipulation of experience, something old in the back brain where we remain largely reptiles.
From this perspective, I would argue that this song in partiular, but the record as a whole is a spellcasting device- using with music only as a kind of machinery. This not to derogate the value of the music, because as a craftsperson, a knowledge creator, as a composer- my skills remain in the tool first- only through the manipulation of it can I work backward to the spell.
And this then is the question that interests me at last the most
What does music DO? How does it work? Is there any difference in the language of Madonna and Debussy, or only different goals?
3. The Schumann Resonance
The final piece therefore is a scientific approach to the question. A duet largely with the listener’s own mind. Underneath the track is a “binaural frequency”- two distinct low frequency tones, one for the left ear, one for the right. When heard simultaneously, in stereo, the brain automatically hallucinates a third frequency, implied by the mathematical difference of the two audible ones. This auditory hallucination of about 7.3 hertz, the same frequency at which the Earth physically vibrates, like a slow plucked string. Known as the “Schumann Resonance”, it is the subtle fundamental throb of the planet from which all life has evolved. Through its provenance of being a hallucination, the imagined sound has the strange effect of slowly aligning your brain wave with the hallucination. In this case it means over the course of a few minutes a reading of your brain waves would show a slow switch from an active Alpha state (about 12 htz) to a pre-sleep, meditative pattern associated with the lower frequency Theta state. You may feel a strange calmness or physical heaviness. You may be locked into your seat.
Above this sound is Loi Ta Tu, a vietnamese singer found on a golden cassette tape. Loi Ta Tu is responsible for keeping your left hemisphere occupied.
When you think of Loi, think of swinging clock, a dripping faucet or a dying fire. With some keyboard additions by mudboy, the resonance, and your own hallucinations form a four way duet, no small feat, since at the very least we have yet to all meet.
Conclusion: It has perhaps now taken you longer to read this small thesis as it would have been to listen to the record. I am not accustomed to confusing my music with words, I hope it adds more than it takes- and you are left room to dream your own impossible dreams should you still wish to do so. You may find me in the bog.
Sincerely,
mudboy
– R lyon
credits
released May 1, 2009
Realization Mudboy in Lexifur's Lair, Providence RI
2008 - 2009
©Rapahel Lyon ©Hundebiss Records
