Nazis and Sci Fi: Issues of Humanity and a Musical Soundtrack

A number of differing and yet, I think, related issues have been troubling my mind this last week. Partly, this is because this last week included my birthday, a once yearly chance for me to contemplate my mortality as the life clock gets another year added to it. Further to this, I came to the end of my tether with Twitter which has seemed to me increasingly pointless.  The sense of pointlessness it engenders is something that's happened to me before with other social media. Its fair to say I have a love/hate relationship with such things. I tend to amass thousands of followers then wonder what the point of it all is before deleting everyone, one by one, followed shortly after by the account.

On a more positive note I was doing research into the Nazi concentration camps (Konzentrationslager or KZ in German) of the Second World War which is a harrowing subject to say the least. This is partly because I've grown fluent in German over the years (thanks to living there) and as I have aged studying this period of history, in the language of those who were on the Nazi side, is something that has become very meaningful to me. You start to get nuances of meaning that its impossible to do in translations or through the official records of the war from the other side. In addition, whilst living in Berlin I had seen Nazi architecture such as Tempelhof Airport or the Prora "Kraft durch Freude" holiday apartments on the island of Rügen which stretch for 3 kilometres in one huge building and wondered at the mindset of those who would build such things. I find it fascinating to wonder at the mind of such people and ask what this says about humanity.

Also this last week I watched a number of great films. The most impactful of these was a film called "Under The Skin". Its quite hard to describe the film because whilst ostensibly it is a sci fi film about an alien who comes to Earth to lure men to their deaths and what happens to her (the alien in question is played by Scarlett Johansson), it ends up being so much more than that. It is openly an arthouse film not intended for general or mass consumption and it shows no interest at all in exposition or explaining itself. Aside from a quite bare plot the viewer is very much left to decide what the film was for, what it was about and what it means. The answer seems at least partly to be that this film is concerned with ideas of humanity, what that is and seeing us as just another species. (The film might be said to view humanity from the perspective of the alien.) Perhaps the key idea in the film, on my initial understanding of it anyway, is the moment the alien feels some empathy with her prey, men looking for sex with her in her alluring female disguise. For when she does feel empathy she lets one of her prey go and deviates from her mission. The idea seems to be that once you feel empathy with someone you start to see them differently. I would talk more about the film but wouldn't want to spoil it for anyone who might want to see it. It is perhaps the most thought-provoking film I have ever seen. But its not an easy watch. Viewer reaction appears to be that you either love it or hate it. There is no in between. Either way, its left me with more questions then any other film I've ever watched.

So how else could I react to all these various stimuli except by making more music? In the last 48-72 hours I have been busy creating a 2 hour suite based around ideas of humanity informed both by my reflection on the film and the Nazi death camps. It is in 2 parts, roughly of an hour each, and each part is named after a German phrase usurped by the Nazis for their propaganda purposes. The first section is called "Jedem Das Seine" (German: To Each His Own). The Nazis had this phrase wrought into the iron gate at the entrance of Buchenwald concentration camp where tens of thousands were murdered. Under Nazi ideology the meaning of this phrase was "You Get What You Deserve" and the slogan was visible to those inside the camp, silently mocking them as a virulent piece of psychological warfare and torture. The second section of my project I called "Arbeit Macht Frei" (German: Work Sets You Free) which was famously the sign at the entrance to Auschwitz but also, before that, wrought into the gate at Dachau, the first concentration camp of them all which is 10 miles north west of Munich. This was yet more Nazi psychological warfare as the only way millions got free in these camps was by being forced to inhale Zyklon B cyanide gas.

I'd like to say a little about each of the 8 songs in the project and the ideas behind them in a moment. The project overall is entitled "Human/Being" and the musical style here is largely informed by the Berlin School of music, long synthesizer pieces containing electronic noise, synthesized patterns and so on. Everything is synthesized in the music and there are no samples or drums. The pieces are of appreciable length and all are between 13 and 18 minutes long. I wanted to treat the subject seriously and create a piece of artwork that acted as a soundtrack to the ideas I was focusing on. So I was consciously making a thoughtful soundtrack and crafting my ideas on this occasion. Let me briefly go through the project, track by track:

Human/Being

A. Jedem das Seine

1. Jedem das Seine

I have already explained what this phrase meant but I haven't explained just how horrific it seems to me. The idea that you might forcibly incarcerate people based on ideology (and this ideology was not merely racial. The Nazi ideology included the forcible death of many who were homosexual, disabled, with incurable medical conditions, the mentally ill, the ideologically opposed and others who didn't "fit in") and then tell them that they are in a death camp "because they deserve to be there" is, to my mind, sick and horrifying. It is illustrative of an idea that is key to the thinking of both the Nazis and the protagonist in the film. Its the idea that in order to hurt someone or kill them you must first think that they deserve it or think nothing of them at all. You must dehumanise them, see them differently to how you see the things or ones you love. If you saw them as the same then how could you hurt them? But see them as nothing, as less than nothing, as things who deserve what they get, and you can kill them without emotion or mercy. Noticeably, in the film the female killer at first kills her male prey in an almost emotionless state.

And there is another idea involved here too. Does everyone "get what they deserve" in life? I don't think they do. As a biblical writer says, "The evil prosper and the good suffer".

2. In Memoria Hominum

The phrase is Latin and means "In memory of Humanity". I wanted to write a piece here that soundtracked the idea of humanity and what it is. What, indeed, is humanity? What does it mean to be human? The film addressed this in an interesting and unique way by having some other being look at us as a class. Through the film you start to ask yourself as you watch who we are, just some strange species on a planet, not special, not particularly moral or good. Just other creatures. And yet do we feel there is something inherent to being human? Can we lose that? And then you think about the men and women who fought for the Nazis, who killed millions, so many men and women that they needed industrial machinery to bury them all. One story I read told of the liberation of Belsen concentration camp in April 1945. There were around 13,000 emaciated bodies openly lying on the ground around the camp when The British Army liberated the camp. Where was the humanity in that? Was there any humanity left? I ponder in this piece on the question of if humanity even exists anymore in an age when we can kill millions at the press of a button, safely shielded from even having to see the death we can deal.

3. Gut und Böse

This piece takes as its starting point the idea of good and evil which is what "Gut und Böse" is in German. It comes from something attributed to the Jewish Austrian concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl who is, as an aside, also a famous psychologist. His psychological method was honed in a number of death camps, Auschwitz and Dachau among them. Not all his family were as lucky as him to survive. At the end of the war he resumed his medical practice and one of the things he said has stuck with me. He noted that wherever you go there are basically two types of people, decent and indecent or, in my terminology, good and evil. These are found, so Frankl says, in all walks of life, all groups and all classes. So there would have been both good and bad prisoners in the camps and good and bad Nazis. This piece is me pondering on that thought.

4. Endlösung

It is common today to talk of "The Holocaust". But this is not a term from the war itself. Neither Nazis nor Allies would have any idea what you meant if you went back in time and referred to this term for it is not a contemporaneous one. It came into fashion some years later in the late 1970s. At the time the Nazi term for the serial extinction (especially of Jews) was Die Endlösung. Endlösung means "final solution". This piece is very simply my solemn meditation on this very idea and the fact that it was a real thing with millions of casualties.

B. Arbeit Macht Frei

5. Arbeit macht Frei

The phrase, as already noted, most famously wrought above the entrance to Auschwitz where millions were murdered. It is harrowing in the extreme to read of how prisoners were brought to the railway station there. The Nazis made attempts to fool them into thinking they were just being taken to another holding camp, fearing panic if the prisoners at once sensed what was about to happen to them. Here I meditate on humanity again and ask what kind of species does this? If one can do it then surely anyone can? Is evil a virus? Can it be caught? Is it contagious? Or perhaps to be human is to have the capacity for horrific acts?

6. In Plain Sight

My point of departure here applies equally to the film and to the Nazis. Both were in plain sight. The alien killer in the film takes the form of a sexy young woman to lure men to their doom. She doesn't hide and snatch them in the shadows or transport them away or shoot them with a ray gun. She drives round in a van and tries to pick them up. In fact, this actually happens too since in the film Johansson really wore a disguise of a fur jacket and a black wig and actually tried to pick up Scottish men (the film was made in Glasgow) who didn't know it was her. Her van contained concealed cameras and the men were retrospectively asked to sign a waiver so they would appear in the finished film. This was done for the purpose of realism and only Johansson knew what was really happening.

The idea I explore here is that evil does not hide. Its right there in front of you. But you need to see it for what it is.

7. Empathie

This, for me, is a key idea both in the terms of my two areas of inspiration and in terms of what being human means: Empathy. This is where it begins and ends. As already hinted at, if you lose empathy then all sorts of horrors become possible. And if you have it, as in the film, what is and isn't possible changes. So here I write a soundtrack for empathy and meditate on the idea in a very reverential way.

8. Prey/Pray

Here the idea was notions of hunter and prey. This applies to the film but in ways I can't explain without revealing too much plot. See the film to explore that. It also clearly applies to the Nazis too who viciously hunted down all those their ideology identified as inferior. The Nazis even had a term for these kinds of people: "Lebensunwertes Lebens" - lives not worthy of living. Many people who they decided fitted into this category were forcibly euthanized. My idea here is twofold: that people, human beings, can become prey and that that should therefore pray - to who I cannot say.

So, in the end, what I have produced in Human/Being is a two hour electronic score musing and meditating on these ideas of humanity, human being and being as a human using contexts where these things were very much attacked and under threat - exposed to the analytical gaze. They are not meant to provide any answers but they are meant to bring some context and act as a soundtrack to the ideas.

You may now be wondering where you can hear this project and the answer is that currently you can't. I have fallen out of love with putting my music online. It garners little attention which is, frankly, depressing - although I have never needed external appreciation to create and don't seek pats on the back from others about it. The only purpose it ever served was to talk about it but that has happened less and less. It now becomes burdensome to keep doing it for nothing. What I will say as a compromise is this: if I get ten requests to make it available I will upload it somewhere. If not then I won't.

And that was my week. I rejoice, at least, that it had a creative outlet.

The Definitive All You Will Ever Need To Know About Elektronische Existenz

What is Elektronische Existenz? Elektronische Existenz (which is electronic existence written in German) is a 13 chapter music series which I started writing in the Spring of 2014. It started in dubious circumstances. At the time I was writing under the project name 13LFO and I wrote these four tracks which were stand out tracks, probably the best I had ever done to that point. I was going to mix them in with some past work (that was far inferior) and put it out as the first 13LFO album. But I wasn't happy with that. These four tracks were head and shoulders better than the tracks they were with. I decided to put them together as a four track album of 36 minutes in length. I called that album "Elektronische Existenz" after some thought because the title perfectly positioned the work in the musical and philosophical contexts that I work in - electronic music and existential philosophies.

I was so pleased with this album that I wanted to repeat the trick. This is always a dangerous thing to do because you set yourself a standard. I always think in general that the more work you do the more chance some of it will dip below the standard you expect. Elektronische Existenz was and remains a special album to me in which every sound, note and beat is perfect - just as it came from the "womb" of my imagination. I work improvisationally so this is an important consideration. I captured some perfect moments - or as perfect as any moment can be. But those moments can't be repeated or captured forever. I made three more four track albums and I had a series of 4 albums.

It was at this point that things really began to take off. I was happy with the four album series. But I wanted to double it. What happened next was that I created four more albums, each with only two tracks this time but of longer length. Along with this I started thinking about the mythology behind the tracks and how they were related. Elektronische Existenz tells the story, in music, of a character called "The Wanderer" (German: Der Wanderer). I envision the whole project as a story or mythology of this character. I'll flesh out the detail of that below. But, for now, its enough to know that this is a story that has three acts and an epilogue. Chapters 1-4, 5-8, 9-12 and chapter 13 as epilogue.

For several months the project stayed at 8 chapters or albums. At this point The Wanderer was "dead tired" (the final track of the 8th album being titled "Todmüde" - dead tired) and his status (alive or dead) was ambiguous at best. I was happy to leave the story there though until a chance event took me in a new direction. I watched a video about a Japanese forest at the foot of an active volcano, Mount Fuji, named Aokigahara. This is the second most popular suicide spot in the world, a creepy, impenetrable forest growing straight out of past volcanic lava. Each year several hundred Japanese go there to die. And so I imagined The Wanderer, dead tired, fleeing to this forest. I did two more albums of two tracks each making a total of 10 albums in the series.

But I wasn't finished. Thirteen has always been a very important number for me (I was born on the 13th) and, lately, I have become fixated with it and mathematical or other uses of it. (Elektronische Existenz is 346 minutes long. If you add 3+4+6 you get 13.) The Wanderer, as a character, is based on me and my own life. Elektronische Existenz is an autobiography in music using the mythology of The Wanderer as a literary device. Because of all this, and having come so far, I wanted there to be 13 chapters or albums to the story. But at that stage, with 10 albums in the bag, I wasn't ready to do 3 more albums. And so I did a sort of epilogue and made EEXIII, chapter 13. I wanted to make it clear at this point that The Wanderer wasn't dead. Chapter 10 had ended with "Conundrum" and the idea that, for all his travel and travails, The Wanderer was still faced with the same existential issue at the end as he had had at the beginning. The epilogue was purposely "The Wanderer is not dead" hence the "In place of" in the titles of the three tracks that make up album 13.

We now fast forward a few months and it occurs to me that there is a lacuna in the story, a chapters 11 and 12 sized hole. What happens to The Wanderer between realising he still has the same conundrum as at the start and the epilogue? I am very happy to say that this gap has now been filled and the story has been completed since I have now written albums 11 and 12. And so my 13 album project, 346 minutes of it, 37 tracks of it, my Meisterwerk, my Magnum Opus, is completed. It started from just 4 tracks I thought deserved better than to be chucked in with some others and grew to be a whole mythology in music.

Let me lay out the track order for you:

Elektronische Existenz

ACT ONE

1. The Wanderer and His Shadow
2. The Wanderer and His Shadow II
3. The Wanderer and His Shadow III
4. Metal Blue LFO

Elektronische Existenz II

1. Adamantium
2. Serious Philosophical Question
3. Bleak Disturbances
4. Feld

Elektronische Existenz III

1. Blau
2. Existenz
3. Überlebensstrategie
4. Beängstigend

Elektronische Existenz IV

1. Existential On Your Ass
2. World
3. Vergessen
4. Logjammin

END OF ACT ONE

ACT TWO

Elektronische Existenz V

1. Lament für Existenz
2. Die Störung

Elektronische Existenz VI

1. The Man in The Photograph
2. The Man Behind The Photograph

Elektronische Existenz VII

1. Schmerz-Symphonie
2. Panzer Tanz

Elektronische Existenz VIII

1. Existenzkrise
2. Todmüde

END OF ACT TWO

ACT THREE, PART ONE

Elektronische Existenz IX

1. Aokigahara 青木ヶ原
2. Yūrei 幽霊

Elektronische Existenz X

1. Das Bedauern
2. Conundrum

ACT THREE, PART TWO

EEXI

1. Im Schatten
2. Apocalypsis
3. Interrupted

EEXII

1. Fantasia 1
2. Fantasia 2
3. Fantasia 3

END OF ACT THREE

EPILOGUE

EEXIII

1. In Place of An Ending
2. In Place of A Parting
3. In Place of A Dying


A perusal of those titles will perhaps reveal a number of things of note. Yes, my character The Wanderer is inspired by my reading of and intimacy with the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche who added an extra section to his 1878 book "Human, All Too Human" entitled "The Wanderer and His Shadow". Yes, it is intimately bound up with the last 10 years of my life in which, never before expecting to ever leave the shores of England (and never really seeing why I needed to), the fates cast lots and I found myself living in Germany, a land I came to love more than my own. Yes, the story is cast as a play with 3 acts and an epilogue. These three acts are, in broad brush strokes, an introduction to The Wanderer in Act One, his life and circumstances. In Act Two his fall or down-going is recounted. Act Three is his "dark night of the soul" and the Epilogue is, naturally enough, a resolution of the story that isn't a resolution at all.

Perhaps now is a good time to go through Elektronische Existenz, album by album, chapter by chapter, track by track, and tell the musical story of The Wanderer.

1. The Wanderer and His Shadow

Our introduction to The Wanderer, a hesistant, sensitive, thoughtful fellow.

Musically, here everything is about taking your time, appreciating slowly, getting to know your surroundings. I always wanted to write music that had gravitas and substance but that was also thoroughly cutting edge, even ahead of the curve. In many ways much I do creatively is about marrying together diverse things. Because this is a reflection of my character.

2. The Wanderer and His Shadow II

The Wanderer is further characterised. Here ideas of slowness, even sloth, come to the fore. The music is at a slower pace, never too slow but slow, taking its time. The music of a man who goes at his own pace, maybe even out of step with the world. Much was played in Elektronische Existenz by hand without being quantised. Hence you will often hear things where they feel awkward or dissonant. This is deliberate and characterises The Wanderer.

3. The Wanderer and His Shadow III

A large part of the story of The Wanderer is about how people suffering much pain and trouble in life can still manage to see or conjure beauty. Or maybe to even ask the question of if they can. The testimony of this story is that they can still indeed. It is, I think, something of a miracle. This track is about conjuring some of that beauty. There is also a further theme, that of innocence. The Wanderer values innocence above all other things. The bell tone melody here is all about conjuring innocence.

4. Metal Blue LFO

Maybe this track should be "The Wanderer and His Shadow IV" - but it isn't. We start to move ground in our story. An LFO, of course, is often used in a synthesizer as a modulation source, lending movement to another sound. Here this track oscillates our story as we head out deeper into the character of The Wanderer. A common theme in my work, in terms of sounds and timbres, are machine sounds. These are often used as threatening cues. Machines speak of regularity and order, things The Wanderer does not like. He feels more at home in the chaos, symbolised here by the monotone that underpins the track. The harsh drums indicate work and the world of work, something The Wanderer finds alien and harsh and completely unsuited for. The "metal blue" refers to the colour of the sky on the cover for this album, brooding and foreboding.

5. Adamantium

This song represents both vulnerability (the bass drum pattern a crude imitation of shivering) and the desire for strength, an adamantium shield. It is the soundscape of a man alone in the world. The rising and falling sound is the sound of the rest of the people in the world going about their business. I imagine a vista, a huge desert and The Wanderer stands on a hill and surveys it. This is his world.

6. Serious Philosophical Question

Albert Camus said that there was only one serious philosophical question: why we should go on living. This track puts this question, the question of suicide, into focus as it strikes The Wanderer. So this track is a track of uncertainty, perhaps slightly to do with fear or strangeness. Again, it is about imagining a place, this time a mental place, and giving it sounds.

7. Bleak Disturbances

Perhaps this track is self explanatory, especially once you have heard it. It recreates the bleak landscape inside The Wanderer's head, full of questions he cannot answer with healthy doses of nothingness and meaninglessness on top. It is a hymn to a troubled and serious man. Here I tried to use sounds that suggested thought, but troubled thought, thought that was difficult to have and that led nowhere.

8. Feld

Feld is a hymn to a place - Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin. A former Nazi airfield and the place through which the Allies saved the people of West Berlin during the Berlin Airlift of the late 40s, this magnificent place is now a municipal park of outstanding size and natural beauty. It is The Wanderer's favourite place and spiritual home. Musically, then, I tried to give it a beautiful, mythical quality. Whilst not exactly the choir of angels, here I attempted to make this place seem like a dream.

9. Blau

A track about feeling blue. And yet still keeping it funky. You may find that contradictory. Yes, it is.

10. Existenz

A track to give substance to the everyday, boring, dull, always the same existence of The Wanderer. And yet, musically, the challenge there is to put that across whilst writing interesting music. The key, I think, is not to think about it but to just do it. Every track in this project is based in, and comes from, improvisation.

11.  Überlebensstrategie

The title means "survival strategy". This track has to make real the idea of The Wanderer thinking of ways that he can survive his life. Thus, again, we have sounds that are meant to suggest thought or thoughts. Do they lead anywhere? Sounds were very important to me into this project. I wanted to use ones you don't hear everywhere and put them in original combinations. This track is one such example.

12. Beängstigend

Frightened. Here I attempted to create a nightmare, not necessarily a terrifying nightmare, but a creepy, strange one.

13. Existential On Your Ass

Could you take a philosophy and put it to music? That is what I did here with this track. As The Wanderer considers his life in existential terms, so the music considers Existentialism in musical terms.

14. World

Once more we have another soundscape about The Wanderer's world. Again, I used sounds to try and suggest activity out in that world as The Wanderer looks on. This idea of things happening that The Wanderer observes is prevalent throughout the whole first act of the story. The sound palette suggests a slightly Eastern influence.

15. Vergessen

Vergessen is a unique track in this project. Its the one track I am never sure if I like or not. It was made in much the same way as the rest using my usual practices and habits. But, I don't know, it doesn't convince me. However, in the context of the story it fits. "Vergessen" means "forget" and, in the story, it functions as The Wanderer pointing out to himself that not everything is sacred, not all things must be valued. Sometimes things just happen and the best response is to forget them and move on. So the music fits in the story. You may or may not like it. But narratively it is every bit as right for this project as any other track. So whilst not necessarily being totally convinced by the track, it serves many useful functions besides. Why should a composer like all his work anyway?

16. Logjammin

The title is random (and comes from "The Big Lebowski"). The idea here was to wrap up act one (originally it was to end the project of course when the project was just four albums). So the track works as a marker, an ending of sorts. Here the idea was something about complexity. The Wanderer's life feels very complex. For this reason I used the repeating pattern. Repetition plays a part in The Wanderer's life too - almost to mental torment! The bass represents The Wanderer's deep feelings.

17. Lament für Existenz

Until I wrote chapter 12 this was the longest track here - and deliberately so. A long, drawn out, meditational, lament for The Wanderer's existence. This one was all about trying to get the emotion recorded in sound. So, the timbres used were vitally important as were the notes. I hope you think I used the right sounds and got the point across. Additionally, this track begins the second act and The Wanderer's down-going to his "dead tiredness". Thus, this piece is very important in setting the mood.

18. Die Störung

The Wanderer suffers a glitch or a breakdown after his lamenting. The tone here is subdued, mysterious. There is also a sense of holding back or wanting time to recover. Again, sounds used to indicate action around The Wanderer but not made by The Wanderer.

19. The Man in The Photograph

Tracks 19 and 20 are based on a photograph of himself that The Wanderer looks at. It was taken in a happier time. This track is the soundtrack to the man we see when looking at that photograph. So this is meant to be slightly more "up" musically speaking. I used 80s drum machine sounds (Drumtraks, DMX, LinnDrum) here as I was indirectly influenced by listening to some Jan Hammer and his music for "Miami Vice".

20. The Man Behind The Photograph

But then there is always the other side of the story. Whereas on the surface all looked happy, behind the scenes things were much more serious and difficult. The wavering lead sound that comes in towards the end of the track indicates crying inside. This is a sad, sad, track. I find this track very emotional to listen to as it essentially lays bare The Wanderer's pain.

21. Schmerz-Symphonie

The pain leads to a "pain symphony". Here is that thing again with wanting to write something of substance but thoroughly modern. I find that much of that is all about finding, and combining, the right sounds. Essentially, I wrote this as a self-contained piece.

22. Panzer Tanz

This track is somewhat absurd. It imagines The Wanderer dancing in his protective armour, effectively protected, perhaps, but also isolated from the world. A little piece of madness amongst the sad reflection.

23. Existenzkrise

Originally, one of the two tracks that would end Elektronische Existenz (at the second or third time of asking), this makes up one of the sections of the project that stand out the most. Here The Wanderer has an existential crisis. I don't know how you would put that into music except to say that here I have. I hear a lot of angst.

24. Todmüde

The original end of the two act version of the project and, in many ways, a perfect song indicating an end. It is so ambiguous that you might think The Wanderer dead by the end. I think this track perfectly captures the senses of pain, struggle and defeat that The Wanderer feels. He is "dead tired", he wants to just stop and give up. The sounds, therefore, are appropriately powerful and yet somehow limp, life ebbing away from them. It sounds portentous and ethereal. Is The Wanderer still there?

25. Aokigahara

The sounds of a creepy, impenetrable Japanese forest where people go to disappear and die.

26. Yurei

A ghost dance as the Yurei (Japanese spirits) move around the forest and in the vicinity of The Wanderer.

27. Das Bedauern

A track that is meant to capture a specific mood, a regretful, repenting sorrow. Perhaps this is a little self-indulgence too and so the music, which is not the best in this project, suggests that. Slightly bland but in the service of a purpose.

28. Conundrum

The music here suggests that one is trapped in a circle or a maze. There is no way out. The pattern just repeats. It even gets more complex as the track runs its course. Again, this piece was at one time the end of the project and so this is another marker.

29. Im Schatten

The music here was to suggest a person in the shadows. A certain darkness is necessary for this and so a haunting melody gets introduced. The sound palette is once again creepy, strange and unexpected. And yet is there still a glimpse of some beauty?

30. Apocalypsis

Here a deep psychological event is signified, an apocalypse. Thus, I used sounds to suggest confusion or complexity yet also deep tones to suggest things of great import.

31. Interrupted

Another song about breakdown. This time I decided to use a confused beat and sounds that, perhaps, don't really go together. Such is the language of breakdown.

32. Fantasia 1

The Wanderer falls into fantasy in an attempt to escape the consequences of his broken state. Here I reused and re-purposed some recent music I had done as it was both of a quality and a tone that fitted in well with the idea of a fantasy. Note the scissors snipping sound!

33. Fantasia 2

This fantasy is in two parts. I concentrated on strong synth sounds here. Again, I wasn't afraid to take my time with this piece and it ended up being the longest in the project. A real fantasy ending with the lush pad sound!

34. Fantasia 3

This piece rounds out the fantasy and concludes the complicated third act. Consequently, it is itself a little unsure of itself and here I used dissonance for effect. The sounds don't necessarily go together and the pitches are, perhaps, at odds too. Not all fantasy is good or pleasing. And fantasies often don't make sense.

35. In Place of An Ending

The epilogue begins with ambience and bell melodies. It can only mean that the end is nigh.

36. In Place of A Parting

Crows, familiars of death, caw at the start of this piece. And then the piece changes completely into a ramshackle, absurdist groove. The sounds are all wrong. It makes no sense. Exactly.

37. In Place of A Dying

We might expect a dirge at the end. But this isn't a dying. Its in place of one. Instead, there is a repeating confused melody which keeps its cards close to its chest. Its all very ambiguous. And then more absurdist grooves. What has happened to The Wanderer? What does this mean for him? And what is the significance of that final blast of white noise? Like Tony Soprano cut to black, no one really knows........


And, finally, here is The Myth of The Wanderer, the story told in music.

The Myth of The Wanderer

1-4 (EE1)

The Wanderer lay in his bed. It was midday. He didn't get up anymore and hadn't for years. No point. Beside him lay his shadow. His burden. It was all the times he'd been let down, all the times his mum had insulted or ignored him when she should have praised or encouraged him. It was every time he'd been judged for his lack of looks, every time his abilities had been overlooked because he didn't know the right people, every time he was just a stranger. It was all the times he'd been rejected in life - and there were many. It was every bad decision he had ever made - and, these days, he didn't make any other kind. It was all these things and more besides hardened and ossified over decades so that they had become his very environment, his experience of life, all he knew. Everything he pondered about life and the world was in this context.

And yet despite all this pain and ugliness he still wanted to see beauty, he still wanted to risk imagining something pretty. It was his only hope. He oscillated between hope and despair.

5-8 (EE2)

And yet to do this it felt at times as if he needed to be made of stone. Feelings are risks that some people cannot take. Its not that the pain can get too much, although of course it can, its that sometimes you would just do anything to have some respite from it. If only you could be made of Adamantium, unbreakable, impenetrable. Life is bleak and there is the ever present question of what it is for. This was a real, genuine, constant problem for The Wanderer. He was really alone in the world and couldn't make out why he was there or what the point of it was. Why not just end it? There is nothing to lose and you are only bringing the schedule forward anyway rather than changing the script. We all die. And yet the beauty of place stays the hand again. A special place, Das Feld, brings a feeling of safety.

9-12 (EE3)

But what to do when life is a constant struggle, when every activity comes with a "what for?" attached? The feeling of melancholy permeates all existence, you struggle to find a survival strategy. Little things assume meaning out of all proportion to their importance both in good and bad ways. You are frightened.

13-16 (EE4)

Things occasionally fall apart. You become random, up and down. One minute this, the next that. The randomness becomes a defence and you seek out the new just so that you don't have to bear the same day after day. It all becomes about how you experience the now. There is no tomorrow, no yesterday. Just let now be bearable you think to yourself. I want to forget. There is only this moment. You stop thinking of life as an on-going narrative because that will only remind you how terrible it has been and how hopeless it is yet to be.

17-18 (EE5)

"Oh what have I become?" thinks The Wanderer. He laments his existence. There is an upset, a breakdown, a glitch, in his existence. Its one of many choke points he has had in life. He knows there will be more. Oh terrible burden that he has been given.

19-20 (EE6)

He considers himself in a photograph. He is sitting at a table outside in the woods of the Spreewald, an area south east of Berlin, all lakes and rivers and trees. He is eating ice cream from a bowl. An enigmatic smile plays on his face, not overt but discernible nevertheless. One imagines the smile is for the photographer but we do not see who that is. And then he considers the feelings that he felt inside as the picture was took and that tells a different story. We never know the things that people carry with them daily. Only The Wanderer sees his shadow. Only The Wanderer cannot be without it.

21-22 (EE7)

The Wanderer writes a pain symphony, an ode to his sufferings. He dances with momentary and tragic joy, covered in the armour that allows him to go on living, that both protects and isolates him.

23-24 (EE8)

But it is not enough. You can make a noise to drown out something else but eventually you must stop. All the survival strategies come to nought and what you are is still there, plain and simple, in front of you. Acknowledging it, you come to the moment of existential crisis that such acknowledgment always brings. The Wanderer collapses under a tree. He has sought solace in mountains and woods far away from other people. He wants to be absorbed into the ground.

25-26 (EE9)

He finds himself surrounded by trees in a forest that blocks out the world. There is only him now, him and the ghosts that swirl around him, the ghosts of his past, of himself, of this place and the others who came here seeking peace from the dissonance with which they were plagued. This is a portal between worlds, one of life and one of death, a place of decision.

27-28 (EE10)

He is overcome by a regretful, repenting sorrow - for himself certainly. But also for his life - as an experience and as a thing that was thrust upon him. For years he would gladly have given it back and he wishes he could now. And he realises that, for all his years, he is left with the same problem, the same conundrum, he always had: how to make sense of all the things he is when they just don't make sense.

29-31 (EE11)

All The Wanderer's life now lies in shadow. He inhabits the dark places, shying away from light, contact, others. He does not want to be himself with his conundrum. There is an apocalypse as the unsolvable problem is a burden he cannot leave behind. For the one person you can never leave behind is yourself. Inevitably, whilst this can be coped with on a day to day level, there is always a build up that must break out at some point. He reaches this point and breaks down. He lies there, broken.

32-34 (EE12)

The Wanderer seeks escape in fantasy. He dreams of places he would like to be, things he would like to have, women he would like to fuck. All kinds of scenarios play through his mind, good, bad and outrageous. He avoids life and who he is by pretending to be someone, anyone else. He creates fantasy personalities and multiple online identities to live out the fantasy.

35-37 (EE13)

The circle repeats and life goes on. The Wanderer is trapped in a constant loop. This is his life, all he has known. Even as he has lived through it, it has shaped him and made the experience part of his character. Like many who suffer from mental issues, the very things which plague him now feel as if they are him. To let go of his pain and insecurities, his fears and stresses, would now seem to him as if it was to make him a completely new person, not him. His identity is now the person his life has made him. It was, perhaps, an inevitable consequence. This identity is now all he has.

And so The Wanderer retreats into less habited spaces. What happened to him in the end nobody knows....


PS Why were the covers all pylons that were distorted?

The pylon was The Wanderer and the distortions were a visual signifying the effects of things on his life.

Elektronische Existenz is now available for download again at elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com

I Need To Get Off The Internet

I need to get off the internet. Its driving me mad. A swirling, random cacophony of mindless and usually uninformed opinions, often masquerading as fact, is the last thing I need in my life. It is soul-crushingly depressing to go there every day and see people competing like trained mice in some great mouse aquarium for your attention - and knowing that you are supposed to be competing for the attention of others as well. This is where begging and promoted tweets come from and ice bucket challenges start. To play this game you need opinions on everything - even when 95% of the day's stories will probably never impact you in any meaningful way. Don't let that bother you though. Just wade in with your uniformed, off-the-top-of-your-head prejudices because its not knowing anything that counts, its taking part. Commercial media will help you in this by asking the public's opinion about anything and everything. They want your feels because, godammit, your feels count.

Social media is, of course, the worst culprit. Post something, anything, on You Tube and people you have never heard of will queue up to insult and ridicule you in as many ways as possible. Go on Twitter and see people competing to be the funniest person in the world, turning every possible subject under the sun into something as frivolous as possible. Go on Facebook to find posts by every nonentity in the world who think that YOU need to know what their opinion is about things. Really, when you think about it social media is a candy floss factory. (That's cotton candy for American viewers.) Social media turns EVERYTHING into a sickly sweet, tastes-good-in-your-mouth treat but later on, when you've eaten too much, you will just have a gut ache. I am now very much starting to see the wisdom of what British comedian Stewart Lee has said about the internet and why he maintains no social media accounts. No one needs this in their life. Not even the desperate and lonely who see it as a way to contact another human being. In fact, they probably need it least of all.

But I don't want to sound ungrateful to the internet before I attempt to leave it behind me and forget it ever existed. I must be fair and admit that it has changed my life really. I am at the age where my life splits neatly in two between an age without the internet and an age with it. So I've seen both sides. I would likely never have done many things I have done in the second half of my life if the internet had never been invented. For example, I would never have lived in another country for several years. Several relationships with women (and quite a bit of sex) would never have happened without the internet. I'm the kind of introverted person who finds the internet appealing too. This is because I am ugly but have charm and wit. So through a screen I get the chance to showcase what I have got without the horror of actually having to look at me, sitting there in front of you. Thank you internet.

Right now I am thinking of a log cabin in some woods. There are mountains nearby and a raging mountain torrent cascades down the hill. Its idyllic and, most importantly, not a fucking soul lives within 200 miles of me. Its just me and the wilderness. I've seen places like it on the internet and sites like the blog "Cabin Porn" do a very good job of luring me away into fantasy.

I need to get off the internet.

A Music Manifesto

A new year is traditionally a time for new thinking and new ideas. Some even go so far as to make resolutions, resolutions which usually don't make it past the first week or two of the year. Such is the inherent fallibility of human beings. It is not quite coincidental that at the start of this new year I come to write a manifesto for my music going forward.

I have always wanted to move forward in the music that I make. It has always held weight with me that you should just not stand still making and re-making essentially the same thing over and over again. Where is the fun or the purpose in that? And so I have always looked for the illusion of progress if not actual progress itself.

In this past year I have, maybe for the first time in depth, studied the music that I have made and where it has come from. I have moved to explicitly detailing the philosophy behind and in the making of what I do. I have explicitly done things a certain way for a reason. The place I made music became more like a cross between a philosophy class and a science lab than a music room. I have begun to do music experiments to try and demonstrate things or to stimulate thinking. I am not making something that is entertainment. It is arguable if I ever was. Such subjective things are far from my interest these days.

In addition, I have been reading - and attempting to understand - the writings of the 20th century's philosopher of music par excellence - John Cage. I guess it was my time to meet him. I have been stimulated into new thinking and new ways by doing so and that is never a bad thing. You need to move the goalposts. Or someone needs to move them for you. His book of lectures and writings "Silence" has been my primary source. I recommend it to everyone reading this for it is a book not just about music and its theory but about life and how all of life is music. For in all of life there is sound.

And so in the light of my now overtly philosophical and experimental approach to music I want to make a number of statements, my "manifesto" going forward - if that doesn't sound too pompously grand.

1. Recognise that art and music is fiction. You are telling a story or, at the very least, filling up a musical cup with your values.

2. Music is about the arrangement of sounds and silence.

3. The composer's first and maybe only duty is to be interesting.

4. Music should say something.

5. Music, whether you like it or not, is about ideas. You have no control over if it is but some over what they might be.

6. Music is not about being bad or good. It is about having something to say or not.

7. Experimental music is about making all sounds and silence musical to every ear.

8. The task of the engaged listener of music is to make new relationships between the sounds and silences that they hear. The goal is to make new and not to simply re-hash the old in every possible combination.

9. Music involves engaged composing and engaged listening.

10. The experimental musician will constantly think of ways to break down the conservative categories that societies impose upon music. The highest good is to make new.

11. Sound is a matter of pitch, timbre, loudness and duration. Experimental music will focus on all four rather than the usual focus which majors on pitch and thus concerns itself merely with melody and harmony. In this way the concept of what music is will itself broaden.

12. If you want to broaden your own musical horizons remove yourself from the equation as much as possible.

13. The music of the future will be interested in the contrasts of sounds.

14. Music is "a purposeful purposelessness" about life. It reflects it, shapes it, commentates upon it.

15. Experimental music concerns itself with "the co-existence of dissimilars" and with the fusion of things formerly thought not to go together. The task is to realise that harmony is merely the familiar and disharmony the unfamiliar in relation to things that go together.

16. If you want to explore, learn to love noise.

DISCUSS.