Pantheist naturalism sound art: The sounds are all there; now we just have to make sense of them.
October 11, 2013 at 4:10pm
In a lot of ways I'm a pretty straightforward no-nonsense kind of guy, whatever that means. In a lot of ways I'm a highly rational dude. I don't coat my audio work in layers of bullshit meanings that it doesn't have.
To a great extent the sounds on the tape are just what they are and are presented as such. Hence, some of my album titles, like "My New Tape" and "Collaboration With Myself". Near the beginning of my tape "Wired For Sound" you hear me urinating and then I say to the tape recorder (and the listener): "sounds on a tape. sounds on a tape."
I think that sounds are interesting enough on their own - in the way that the composer chooses to frame and arrange them - that I don't need much else. Sounds have a "magic" of their own... or maybe the magic is in our perceptions of them, our engagement with them.
If I have any kind of "mystical" ideas about things, it's this: that there is an indwelling "spirit" in all matter and phenomena - it's there - we are unaware of it until we direct our attention to it. It's this directed attention that creates music.
I consider myself to be kind of a pantheist naturalist, in the sense that I described above.
I generally consider myself to be an atheist...
My family weren't big churchgoers when I was a kid...
One time, when I was very young, and I asked my mom what God is, she said:
"God is IN all things".
This is partly why I insist on using tape for initial recordings. It's very physical, and seems to be IN "Nature".
There is a video on YouTube about the secret life of video recorders - in it the guy demonstrates in "there it is!" terms how audio tape works - "This recording was made with sticky tape and rust".
Even though his explanations were very rational and no nonsense, he kept talking about how it was all somehow "magical"...
Now, to tell the truth, when I have a tape recorder in my hand, I have a form of "faith" - a detachment of sorts, and still in a big way, an engagement with the tape and the sounds.
- I KNOW when to turn on the tape recorder
- I KNOW to let go and just feel it and I TRUST that the next sound that I choose to record after the previous one, will be what it is and will form a relationship with the sounds before and the sounds that will come after in such a way that they form their own reality - the chain of sounds is what it is - the collage of sounds laid out one after the other becomes its own thing, an organism of a sort, that exists like any other "thing" in the world.
Good, bad, worthy of being bought? Worthy of being appreciated or listened to? Whatev.
It is.
Once it's captured on tape and I publish it, it is.
I'm thinking of a line from a Monty Python episode:
"The words are all there. Now we just have to put them in the correct order."
Which I take to mean, in terms of the practices that I described above:
"The sounds are all THERE/HERE. Now I just have to make SENSE of them."
----------
Pantheism, in the sense that I have used it is this, perhaps:
"Pantheism is a non-religious philosophical position...the view that the Universe and God are identical."
and Naturalism, perhaps this:
"Naturalism is "the idea or belief that only natural (as opposed to supernatural or spiritual) laws and forces operate in the world; (occas.) the idea or belief that nothing exists beyond the natural world."[1] Adherents of naturalism (i.e., naturalists) assert that natural laws are the rules that govern the structure and behavior of the natural universe, that the changing universe at every stage is a product of these laws."
In a lot of ways I'm a pretty straightforward no-nonsense kind of guy, whatever that means. In a lot of ways I'm a highly rational dude. I don't coat my audio work in layers of bullshit meanings that it doesn't have.
To a great extent the sounds on the tape are just what they are and are presented as such. Hence, some of my album titles, like "My New Tape" and "Collaboration With Myself". Near the beginning of my tape "Wired For Sound" you hear me urinating and then I say to the tape recorder (and the listener): "sounds on a tape. sounds on a tape."
I think that sounds are interesting enough on their own - in the way that the composer chooses to frame and arrange them - that I don't need much else. Sounds have a "magic" of their own... or maybe the magic is in our perceptions of them, our engagement with them.
If I have any kind of "mystical" ideas about things, it's this: that there is an indwelling "spirit" in all matter and phenomena - it's there - we are unaware of it until we direct our attention to it. It's this directed attention that creates music.
I consider myself to be kind of a pantheist naturalist, in the sense that I described above.
I generally consider myself to be an atheist...
My family weren't big churchgoers when I was a kid...
One time, when I was very young, and I asked my mom what God is, she said:
"God is IN all things".
This is partly why I insist on using tape for initial recordings. It's very physical, and seems to be IN "Nature".
There is a video on YouTube about the secret life of video recorders - in it the guy demonstrates in "there it is!" terms how audio tape works - "This recording was made with sticky tape and rust".
Even though his explanations were very rational and no nonsense, he kept talking about how it was all somehow "magical"...
Now, to tell the truth, when I have a tape recorder in my hand, I have a form of "faith" - a detachment of sorts, and still in a big way, an engagement with the tape and the sounds.
- I KNOW when to turn on the tape recorder
- I KNOW to let go and just feel it and I TRUST that the next sound that I choose to record after the previous one, will be what it is and will form a relationship with the sounds before and the sounds that will come after in such a way that they form their own reality - the chain of sounds is what it is - the collage of sounds laid out one after the other becomes its own thing, an organism of a sort, that exists like any other "thing" in the world.
Good, bad, worthy of being bought? Worthy of being appreciated or listened to? Whatev.
It is.
Once it's captured on tape and I publish it, it is.
I'm thinking of a line from a Monty Python episode:
"The words are all there. Now we just have to put them in the correct order."
Which I take to mean, in terms of the practices that I described above:
"The sounds are all THERE/HERE. Now I just have to make SENSE of them."
----------
Pantheism, in the sense that I have used it is this, perhaps:
"Pantheism is a non-religious philosophical position...the view that the Universe and God are identical."
and Naturalism, perhaps this:
"Naturalism is "the idea or belief that only natural (as opposed to supernatural or spiritual) laws and forces operate in the world; (occas.) the idea or belief that nothing exists beyond the natural world."[1] Adherents of naturalism (i.e., naturalists) assert that natural laws are the rules that govern the structure and behavior of the natural universe, that the changing universe at every stage is a product of these laws."