Evaluating Music

It comes to the last quarter of the year. So it goes the Earth, round and round. Its easy to feel that we are going in circles. We are. But its ever spiraling ones. Maybe those of us who make music are doing that too. Ever on and on we go, pushed by some urge we cannot offset. We must make more. We get frustrated because its just more of the same. We want to create but we don't know what. We make something and then hate it. Then we love it. Then we hate it again. Circles, circles, spirals.

I suffer from various maladies many of which come into their full effect as the days draw in, as they do at this time of year for us Northern Hemisphere folk round about now. So its never a time I look forward to. I've probably had at least 2 major breakdowns in the month of October. (Why am I telling you this? Not sure. Its not really relevant.) For this reason I thought I would scale back the music (which, on past history, is always the worst I produce from October to December) anticipating some sort of personal crisis and concentrate on what I had done in the first nine months of the year. (Its not working out that way. I keep feeling a Dionysian ecstasy come over me and I head into... The Void to make more!)

And so I looked back at the over 20 volumes of stuff I had done in those nine months. I officially started making music this year on January the 12th. At the time I was reading about Nazi concentration camps and wanting to watch sci fi films. One such film I watched was Under The Skin, starring Scarlett Johansson, a tale of an alien who disguises herself as a tasty temptress to lure unsuspecting Scotsmen to their untimely deaths. Now the soundtrack to that film was already outstanding (and must by now be surely award winning) but as I started to make music I conceived of what I was doing as an alternate soundtrack for that film - all mixed in with a soundtrack to concentration camps too. Harsh and serious stuff. What came out was soundtrack, music for film, something dramatic.

So that was the beginning. But I wanted to do more than just re-trace my steps over. I wanted to rank or grade or judge the music I had made. What was better and what was worse? I don't really have any quality control on the music I make. What happens at the time is what you get. I don't start off with any idea and try to realize it. The idea forms in the Dionysian ecstasy and that is what remains when the switches are flicked to the off position. I'm relieved to find that that approach works, more often than not. Actually, MUCH more often than not. So the idea of then judging it (implicitly by some kind of standard that I don't actually have when I make it) is a very strange one. Its been made more strange by my reading of John Cage (about which much more at the start of my blog if you go searching). Cage thinks music should not be about subjective judgments at all. And that is not how 99% of the world thinks. Most people value subjective judgment and deliberation. But Cage does not. He thinks it is a problem to be got over and not a solution to anything. And like a good contrarian I'm happy to go along with the guy who takes the lesser trod path.

But how do you judge music? You might be staring at this now and thinking I am mad. It's easy, after all. We just all do it instinctively. Judging, that is. This is good. This is bad. This sounds great. That is terrible. I have a problem with all this. Its true of course and it can't be avoided. But its not at all..... rational! Of course, its not even true that we are consistent in our judgments. And this is because we don't use hard and fast rules to do it. We may hate all Country music. I would say that I do. But I like Johnny Cash singing about the Tennessee Stud! I don't like Thrash Metal but if I listen to enough of it there'd be one I got into. Our judgments are there to make fools of us it seems.

It doesn't change when you judge your own work. Now some music people are very fastidious (read: slow) in going about their work. Fine, its their business. But this lends them a certain quality control that I don't have the luxury of. I work on instinct and inspiration so there is not months of time in which I tell myself to stop and not do something and go in a different direction like those other people. For me its all about NOW. And now is only ever a moment grasped... that slips away. And what you are left with is the memory. And hopefully a recording of what happened during it. This means that so much decision time and thinking time is just not there. And so I have to look back on a retrospective collection of moments I had throughout my year when I listen back to my music.

In judging I was very conscious of what I was doing. Its totally subjective and arbitrary, of course. All matters of taste are these things. There is no rational way of saying A is better than B. You are only ever giving a subjective, gut view on things. Often you might not even know why. You just know you FEEL this way. And feelings can't always be explained.

I determined to pick out the best track of each project I had done, in my very subjective view, and then collect these together. From these I would make a top 20 tracks of the year. Then I would whittle it down to 10, 5, 3 and, finally, my best song of the year. I want to count down the top 10 below and say why. It explains my process and my views on music - which is what this blog is about!



10. Eschatology (from Human/Being X) This is from the last album of my Human/Being project which lasted ten albums and a number of blog articles in the first half of the year. The style of much of the music in these albums, and in this track, was mostly Berlin School style evolving synth patterns with some synth pad wash on the side. Eschatology is a perfect example of this style of music which I have been studying closely for about a year now. Its thoughtful, progressive and analog sounding.

9. String Theory (from The Existenz Equation) Another Berlin School style track. I've only moved away from the style in the last couple of months as it inevitably broke down under its own creative weight and turned into something else (another consequence of a high turnover of music). Here the sequences overlap and repeat and there's a kick drum setting tempo which gets some percussive help later on. This track is showing how I progress using the Berlin School style.

8. Infinity (from Zeitlos) More Berlin School but this time slower and atmospheric, a song of textures. I'm so very glad when songs like this come out because I like to think they are in there somewhere.

7. Dionysos (from Trickster) A Berlin School tour de force. Slow, evolving, a repeating bass squelch all over it. But with great chord pads and spacey sound FX to go with it. Its not a matter of progress though (this track is much more recent). It just happens in the moment.

6. Eight (from The Void is an Oszillator!) A song from only the last couple of weeks. The Berlin School model has been taken and played with. What we have here is still a long, evolving track but the sounds are much more dynamic and generally more has been done with it. Note also the rhythms. And those sounds! Very lush. Luxury music in my eyes.

5. Weak Nuclear Force (from Forces of Nature) This one is more electronic instrumental than recognizably Berlin School. Of course, the first is a development of the latter which basically wrote the book on long, evolving electronic music. Incidentally, only one of these top 10 tracks is under 10 minutes long. The longest is almost 18 minutes.  Music this year has been about building a mood or riding a wave. The challenge is not to fall off. This track is one where I play a bit more than just arranging sequences to play off each other.

4. Refugee (from Intoxication) Another recent track and I have no idea how to describe it. The main "riff", if that's what it is, was just there in some synthesizer when I played it a certain way and I started to build around that using the techniques I'd employed for 8 months before. It sounds kind of glorious and hopeful to me. Its not a sad song about refugees. Its about their struggle for life!

3. Zeit (from Existenz²) This is peak Berlin School for me - but my adapted version of it. I love this song primarily for the sounds which seem raw and real. Its 17 minutes long but I never want it to stop. The metallic base and the way it churns and grinds leaves me always wanting more. Its kind of appropriate its called "Zeit" (German for "time") because I see both the idea and the song as all-encompassing things. If songs are there to express and communicate moods or ideas then this does to me.

2. Crisis Moment (from Doktor Existenz) The stand out track from my super hero spoof album. This is the shortest track here at 8 minutes. Its like a mini, condensed popular version of the longer songs. Again, its about the sounds - which stand out. And how all the elements just work together. Again, there is keyboard playing here - such as I am capable of. It feels good to know I can make a song like this and it is within my capabilities. I especially love the beat which has been hip-hopped up (including my characteristic deliberate mis-timings and missteps). It makes this song more modern.

1. Fünf (from Within The Void) And so this is the track I judge my best of the year. And it only happened a few days ago. But I'm sure it will stand the test of time. It marries that Berlin School sensibility I had all year with more great sound choices and an electro beat. I'd claim credit for it but, you know, shit just happened!


But then that's music. Its not rational. Its just moments. Enjoy the ones you can.

PLEASE NOTE THAT SINCE THIS BLOG WAS WRITTEN MY BANDCAMP ACCOUNT HAS BEEN REORDERED. THE WHOLE LIST OF TOP 20 TRACKS IS NOW AVAILABLE IN ONE COLLECTION AT BERLIN GESCHICHTE TEIL I.

A Musical Journey

I thought it was time that I wrote another blog about music but I was stuck as to what to write about. All these blogs of mine, pretty much like everything else I either say or write, are moments of inspiration blurted out - often without filter. But the one necessary factor in this case is to have the inspiration in the first place. But I was struggling to find something to write about as I had lots of little ideas which didn't seem to flesh out into a full blog. And so I've had to try and find a way to bring in whatever is floating around in my headspace and make a coherent whole from it. People always take you more seriously if you seem to know what you are talking about. If you can bluff that you will go far!

So my device for the shaping of my thoughts today is the subject of a musical journey. Specifically here I'm thinking of my own which starts with the records my mum had in her 1970s Radiogram, a contraption which was a combination of a radio, a record player and a sideboard. In it were, amongst other things, Pat Boone's single "Speedy Gonzales", The Greatest Hits of Englebert Humperdinck, "You're My World" by Cilla Black, numerous Jim Reeves albums and The Greatest Hits of Abba. Not the hippest catalogue of records you are ever likely to find. But that was my introduction to music along with the radio of the 1970s with its Alvin Stardusts, Bay City Rollers and Bee Gees. I bought my own first record in 1980. It was "Baggy Trousers" by Madness. The first music I had expressly liked for myself was the late 1970s Ska revival bands in England. Primarily this was Madness, The Specials, Bad Manners, The Selecter and The Beat.

The early 1980s changed things though. It was a time of new sounds. Specifically, it was a time of synthesizers emerging into popular music. Of course, in more arty or progressive circles synths had been employed soon after their invention throughout the 1970s. But as a boy I was not aware of Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream or Jean-Michel Jarre. However, when I heard The Human League or OMD or Depeche Mode on the radio I was introduced to synthesizers. Two acts especially prominent for me at the time were The Thompson Twins and Howard Jones. I cringe slightly about this now. Just regard this blog as my confessional for past sins. I was not a child of rich parents but I did somehow manage to go to two concerts in the 80s. One was the aforementioned Thompson Twins. The other was Midge Ure vintage Ultravox.

More important than the bands which caught my ear though was the febrile state of music in the 80s which wrestles in my consciousness for the title of best music decade in my memory. It would only be in later life that I had the wisdom and maturity to see that nothing stands alone or comes from nothing. Everything has a precursor and is inspired by something that came before it. And so the 80s cannot stand musically without the 70s. This is especially true of perhaps one of the major creative forces of the 80s - new forms of dance music - whether that be House, Techno, Electro or Rap. All of these had roots in 70s Disco as well as Soul and Funk but they somehow got paired with a German electronic sensibility. Often this is accredited - lazily so - to just Kraftwerk. But you have to see the environment Kraftwerk were working in to see that they weren't the only ones doing what they did. Or even the first. Listen to the album "Zuckerzeit" by Kluster, for example. It came out before "Autobahn" even existed.

The late 80s in the UK was when the "Acid House" scene began to arrive. Besides the musical forbears that gave birth to this music there was also a necessary technological component - new musical instruments. The 80s was a time when the big, lumbering, analogue synth beasts of the 70s were finally miniaturized or, in many cases, digitized to produce smaller and more affordable boxes which kids with the appropriate aptitude could start using to make beats. And you didn't need to be a player to use them either. It was the start of music that was programmed rather than played, a controversial shift of emphasis in some quarters. Earlier in the 80s the turntable had been turned into an instrument by the likes of Grandmaster Flash. But later the drum machine, primarily in the guise of the TR-808, the synth, often the TB-303, or the sampler, paradigmatically the SP1200, were used to make dance music. It was around the mid 80s that I first played a synth. Actually it was two synths, the SH-101 and the Juno 106. They weren't mine. I never could have afforded one of either. They were my friend's and I made sure I went there as often as I could to have another chance to play around with them.

At this point my historical tale takes a detour. I want to ask in what way our journeys influence us. Or even if they do in ways we can describe. Of course, we can all make up stories of how we think things have influenced us. For some people those stories are very important if not foundational to what they do. But if you read of the things I listened to and liked in my first 20 years then none of them are really important to any music I have subsequently made. In fact, its very much about face as far as I'm concerned. Its the things I missed that I only found out about out years or even decades later that have come to influence me. There are reasons for this. Primarily these are reasons of opportunity. At that time I had no means to make any music of my own and it was also a traumatic time for me personally. I would really only come to grips with things a decade later for the first time when those memories had long faded. If things had been different it could have been Aphex Twin, Autechre and me. But it wasn't.

And its Autechre I want to talk about now. Groups like this, along with Boards of Canada and a whole swathe of experimental German acts such as Can, Popol Vuh, Amon Düül II and Faust are music I only heard FOR THE FIRST TIME in the last 5 years. Some readers might find that statement quite hard to believe but I must say that its true. And this is one thing about musical journeys: they are very personal. There is so much music in the world. You cannot listen to all of it and so you make choices. I firmly believe, however, that there is, as one book of the bible says, "a time for everything". And everything in its time. You may have got the vibe above that my mum did not like very cool music. Maybe the genes have been passed down. But then again I have a very individualist character. I'm happy to walk the road I walk even if it be alone and with few companions or passersby.  The point, I think, as both a listener and maker of music, is to learn something from the journey. And these last 5 years have been a very intensive learning period for me. I see, for example, how so much electronic music of today (the good and the very, very bad) could not be without much of the German electronic music of the 70s. It just was a necessary precursor. 

And so to Autechre, a northern English electronic duo and purveyors of what is sometimes called IDM or "Intelligent" dance music. The music has come to be known for its erraticism, its irregular beats and freneticism made possible by use of computers and software (although they are officially machine agnostic and use a range of equipment). Indeed, Sean Booth, one member of the band, once answered the question "What instrument would you keep if you could only keep one?" with "The computer because of its flexibility". Here we don't have instrumental purists who value a beloved keyboard. Post 80s makers of electronic music, people who don't play and never could, value the new tools of the trade, digital tools which some might say aren't even instruments at all. They are production devices. It is easy to say why many kids who are musically interested today regard the computer as natural, normal and uncontroversial in a musical context and why they take acts like Autechre, programmers and coders working with machines, as their musical heroes. It was not always so! But the Autechre guys grew up making mixes on tape machines and so to them a computer is probably just a digital version of the same thing. It shows that the journey plays a part in the path ahead as well.

Sean Booth, in a very interesting and quite long set of answers to fan questions online, seems to agree with this kind of thinking. He doesn't think of Autechre as having the very singular sound that many people think they do. He talks of "a web of connections and us linked to a few of them" which acknowledges that he sees links to others. This is both true and false for I think they have developed an identity all their own. But Booth, in answering questions, is happy to acknowledge that factors such as sense of place, "the water" and even "all that grey" (of the sky in the north of England) go into making the sound that Autechre have. As I'm from a similar area close by to their roots I can very well understand that. However, even from their first album, Incunabula, it seems to me that there has always been an added twist to the Electro influences they often reference and pay homage too. This accounts for the beats whereas the factors Booth mentions account for the solemnity in the melodies. What in them turns them to the frenetic almost noise abstraction their tracks sometimes become - who knows?! The thing is, when you listen to early Kluster from 1970s Germany you hear a very similar mentality. But no explanatory link is known.

So my own musical journey stopped, in a mainstream sense, sometime in the late 90s. Ever since then, bar one or two Keane and Scissor Sisters shaped detours, I have gone back to music made 20 or 30 or even 40 years before, the music that all the cool people of the time probably liked from day one. But I must admit that I cannot claim to have been there at the time, in at the start of the phenomenon. Mostly I had never heard of these people! This is stuff I missed. I can now see why mums and dads never have any idea about what's in the charts. You reach a point where you stop caring and you get settled with "what you like". In the 90s I had liked guitar bands. Now that's all so much "meh" to me - although I retain an abiding admiration for Iron Maiden. This doesn't square with avant garde electronics you are thinking. But it does square with a sensibility for liking things that are not cool. Because Iron Maiden never were and never tried to be. Another link is that I like music that carves out its own niche - that can only be one act. Iron Maiden fulfill that criterion - as do Autechre.

And this is the lesson of my story - such as it is. I like music that is confident in its own skin, not overly concerned with the whims of fashion or the vacuum of popularity. I like acts that carve out their own sonic terrain and that is why now I listen to German Kosmische Musik or Berlin School. The people who made that made something different guided by their own values and choices. Their heirs were people like Autechre (via Americans who turned the German music into Electro and Techno) who had a sonic interest rather than an interest in a 3 minute song for a chart. As Sean Booth relates it, they wanted to "just plug the gear in and see what comes out rather than playing a song, we thought it would be more fun to store a ton of patterns and then manipulate the gear to create the arrangement on the spot". Put that in the mouth of the Germans at the start of the 70s and it would ring equally true. And its a mentality that I have come to have in my own, much more humble, musical offerings. It took me over 40 years to work it out.

Welcome to the "Mind Games"

 Just over a month ago I decided that I wanted to create some more. But I didn't just want what I created to be like everything else I had created so far this year. It wasn't that I wasn't happy with the body of work I had so far assembled. On the contrary, the work I currently have up on my Bandcamp site, most of it a collection of this year's writing to date, was and remains the music I am most proud of. But the issue here is that that can't carry on. At least, it can't if you are me. To create something and be pleased with what you have created is a gift. To be able to repeat it and see it as another good addition to your body of work is a good thing too. But no one really likes "Something New, Part 10". Its part 10, for goodness sake. Try something else already.

So I wanted to try and find a way to extend or develop the rich musical vein I have been in after my epiphanies at the end of last year and the beginning of this with the double-barreled shotgun of Kosmische music and the synthesizer sound of The Berlin School. But I also wanted my project to be about more than just churning out another 10 songs or something like that. It bothers me that music can become a production line, a site where more of the same old same old is churned out. I say this not from a listener's perspective. For all I know, someone hearing my new album will think it sounds exactly the same as the last one. And the one before that. No, I speak from my writerly perspective. For me, as a writer, I have to feel like I am trying something a bit different, developing the direction I was heading in or trying some side road from the main road I have been heading along.

Needless to say, in the 10 songs I have finally produced I think I have done that. The production of the music took longer than normal this time and it was more of a struggle. I juggled with a number of ideas and some songs were at one time included that have now been excluded. Whenever I make an album I always make a music journey that is intended to be listened to as a whole. I make music by instinct not by design and so the criterion I use is "Does it feel right?". "Feeling right" means being differently interesting. Good or bad I am not concerned with. I have released songs I didn't like before but I don't do it often. We all have an aesthetic sensor in our brains somewhere, connected to our ears, that tells us what we can live with and what we can't. Sometimes it is good to release something bad - if it makes a point and has some meaning behind it. For example, on my big "Elektronische Existenz" musical project from last year I released a track I don't often like when I hear it called "Vergessen". "Vergessen" is German for "to forget". The point of the track is that not everything has to be memorable or the best thing ever. And, if it isn't, just forget it. So the song wasn't to my mind that good. But that's ok.

The little story behind "Vergessen" is instructive for me. It tells me that there is more to my music and my creation than just being differently interesting with sounds. There is some meaning in it. There is meaning that I want to try and communicate. There is a philosophy about the music and words that I write. This insight informed my creation of the second half of Mind Games - a booklet that comes with the download of the album which contains 27 separate articles covering things from "the meaning of life" to experimental music to a close reading of the lyrics of Eleanor Rigby. This document, also called Mind Games, is as vital to the creative project that became Mind Games as is the music you will hear if you go to my Bandcamp page. I have always thought of my music as a philosophical thing that was speaking with sounds to try and communicate philosophical meanings. Of course, for this purpose words are often much more useful because, as tools, they are much more focused and specialized. With Mind Games I have tried to bring the two together. So you can listen to the music whilst reading the book and, in doing both, you will start to learn about the philosophy of life that I have and interact with it for yourself.

The running order of Mind Games goes like this:

Music

1. Subjectivity Groove
2. Meaning
3. 157
4. Null and Void
5. Intricate Workings of The Mind
6. The Concentration City
7. Damaged Neurons
8. Mental landscape
9. Brain Radio
10. Danke Moebius

Text

1. Thoughts on "The Meaning of Life"
2. Such Lovely Lines
3. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
4. Walking
5. The Sex Business
6. Kierkegaard vs Cage
7. Existentialism
8. William James and his Pluralistic Universe
9. On John Cage's "Experimental Music"
10. Stanley Fish's "Rhetoric"
11. (A)Morality: An Amoralist's Point of View
12. Postmodern Nihilism: A Dispute about Terms, A Plurality of Narratives
13. How Can It Not Know What It Is? Deckard and the I(rony) of Existence
14. The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges
15. The Concentration City by J.G. Ballard
16. The Memorial Address from Martin Heidegger's "Discourse on Thinking"
17. If the universe had a motto….
18. Straight Lines
19. This is Not Anna Kournikova
20. Pragmatism, Relativism and Irrationality by Richard Rorty
21. Forerunners of Modern Music by John Cage
22. A Close Reading of Eleanor Rigby
23. Pretentiousness, Philistinism and Gullibility
24. Ideology
25. Who Wants To Live Forever?
26. Random Access Humanity: Inhuman After All
27. Will to Meaning: An Autobiographical Tale via Viktor Frankl and The Historical Jesus

It will be seen that neither of these parts of the project are superficial. Both are substantial. The music runs to just short of 2 hours (so a double album, in effect) and the text is 75 A4 sized pages long. For me, making something substantial is part of the meaning making. It is easy in today's world to gloss things with a tweet or trite comment. I give listeners or readers the respect of doing things at more length. I also think there is meaning itself in making things something that you have to immerse yourself in and experience. Sure, you can dip into my music or my words. But if you do you will probably quickly leave again. And this is probably best for both of us. My stuff is there for those who want something more than 3 minutes or 140 characters.

A quick word on the title. I see most of life as about game playing in one way or another. It seems a basic way life has of keeping things interesting for us, of making sure that there are always stakes to play for. This is not to say that we always win though. Sometimes we can lose and lose hard. A basic focus of the project, accordingly, is about minds, brains and human subjectivity - interior life if you will. I don't know about you, but I like to think about how we think sometimes. Life is like a voyage of self-discovery. Of course, there are particular conditions attached to my own life which make this a more pressing issue and we each have our own existential concerns.

So I recommend my new project to you. I should add that in support of my text "Mind Games" I have included all the relevant source documents that I discuss to the download as well. This is just for those who want to explore for themselves and for sake of completeness. If you didn't want all these texts you could easily just hit "delete". So if you do download and find a number of documents that is why.

You can listen to Mind Games and download the whole project right HERE!

Elektronische Existenz: Art imitating Life

"We wait. We are bored. No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let’s get to work! In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness." - Vladimir, Waiting for Godot.

 Good music doesn't exist. Bad music doesn't exist. You think they do exist though, right? And you think I do too. So what do I mean by making these statements? I mean that in matters of taste there can be no final arbiter and there can be no authoritative voice that speaks for all. No, in matters of taste everyone can be king (or queen). Maybe you do not like the fact and you try to resist it in practice - even though we all know that this is true. We wish there was a binding judgment of quality or innate worth to things. But there isn't. Questions of value can be agreed with more or less. Or not at all. And music falls squarely into the area of "things of value".

This is an issue that I have needed to wrestle with as I make my own music. I don't know about you, but as one who creates music semi-permanently the question of what it is worth always comes up. Another disguise this question wears is what we might call the art/crap distinction. Imagine a continuum. At one end everything is art. At the other, its useless crap. Somewhere along that line we place the music we hear or make. But the continuum is imaginary and it doesn't really exist. It's just a judgment others are free to completely ignore. It disappears like so many imaginary friends.

You will know, if you have read previous blogs I've written about music, that the philosophy of music is something I take very seriously. Maybe I even take it too seriously. I think that to make worthwhile music it needs to be based on a good idea. I think that it needs to have something behind it to express. It needs to be substance not surface. I think that if you do things this way it can even make your music into art. I don't think that this applies to all music though or that music, to be music, is mandated to follow the philosophy I set out. I am happy to live with the fact that music is made for lots of disparate reasons and for no reason at all. I cannot determinate why or how someone else makes their own music. Occasionally, if I hear something I dislike or despise, I may regret that fact. But the payoff is that people cannot tell me how to make mine or what reasons can motivate me to do so. As deals go, I can think of worse ones.

But what of the music I make? What is there to say about it? The first thing to say, in the context I have started this blog off in, is that it is not for everyone. Indeed, no music is for everyone. The consequence of having tastes at all is that not everyone will like the same thing. There are, at best, lesser and greater circles of people interested in any given music. Mine, I imagine, is quite a small circle. That's ok. I don't conceive of my music as throwaway (for reasons that will become clear below) or mass market. In general, I would hate to be popular. I want what I have called in the past "active listeners", people who are engaged in the music I make and what it is about. I want listeners who feel themselves emotionally entangled by the music I make. If you don't "get it" that is ok. It wasn't for you.

But there are further aspects to the music I make that need to be explored. There are a number of characteristics to it that are not immediately obvious and require thought - even for me, the one who made it! For example, my music is not obvious. By "obvious" I mean that I am trying not to fall into populist patterns. I'm not trying to do what is expected, pleasant or nice. Dissonance consequently plays a part in what I do and that is off-putting. This is a direct reflection of my own character. As a person, I am very wary of others. I would admit that I have a certain spiky personality and people have to persevere and probably overcome lots of irritating things about me if they want to pursue or forge any kind of friendship. Its the same here with my music. I'm not going to make it completely easy to like it. You must struggle with it and see, if you will, the beauty inside. This echoes my belief that music is not candy floss. It should be something with the power to effect change in you.

And so what is my music in this context? Before I would have said that it was me, a clear and definitive personal statement and autobiographical text in musical form. But I think that summary needs some work. There really is no "me" to find. I am an inconsistent stream of events, thoughts, intentions and attitudes and in my music what I create is a series of snapshots of that stream. And there is never a whole "me" to express anyway. What I give birth to musically is an expression of my own musical imperfection, tied to me and my earth-bound, limited ways of being in many ways. It is an individual thing and one reason we value personal creativity is because, in a real sense, no one else could do what we do. So, in that sense, the music I make is my own imperfect shots at making some kind of musical meaning.

Let's put it another way. Things are always changing, from one moment to the next. But what point or purpose is there in the fact that change just happens anyway, ironically unchanging? None. It just is. The action of time is just ceaseless, constant, meaningless change. You can't escape from this. All you can do is wait for it to end. And in the waiting you experience the ceaseless, constant, meaningless change over and over again. But you can never grasp it for there is nothing to grasp. As with a real stream, the stream of experience just evades all attempts to capture it. All you can hope to capture is a memory, a feeling. A timeline, then, is not a real timeline. Its a fiction made from any number of contingent snapshots forced to tell a story, whatever the story is that you want to tell. In one set of musical pieces I wanted to try and capture an attempt at my life story seen through my own melancholic eyes. And so I called it "Elektronische Existenz" (electronic existence). This went on to become the name for the whole project of what I do.

And yet we musical poststructuralists, we postmodernists and pragmatists of musical thought, know that there is a problem with a project built on meaning. And, indeed, with "meaning" itself. We consider the absurdity that life is both terrifying and wondrous, often in the same moment. And that is absurd. I have meditated on this fact of life long and hard in relation to my own self-expression. I've come to the view that I make an absurd music that is "out of harmony" and "devoid of purpose". It is a waiting and a passing of time just as life really is. This music, which is often deeply meaningful to me and takes on new meanings as I begin to listen to it over and over, ultimately ends up being useless and partakes in the ultimate meaninglessness of existence. In some pieces I think this is quite explicit. Some of it tries to bring this dark world to life, to make it present. So my music comes from nowhere in my imagination or arises in the randomness of what I did at a certain place and time - and goes back to it. It can be random, insensible or deliberately unheimlich (eerie, sinister). It is an experience of the aesthetics of (my) life.

This year I have evolved to a new form of music and, if anything, become more prolific. I have settled into a longer format of around 15 minutes per track based, initially at least, in German influences from the so-called Berlin School and also the more esoteric edge of Kosmische Musik. This wasn't deliberate. I just found that what I was doing fitted into that when I heard some of it. This longer format really takes the form of cycles, all slightly different and yet all the same. The same pattern over and over again. This is life. The point is to endure, to live that life and experience the whole journey. This is not because there is an end. There isn't. For the next cycle then begins… The point is to experience yourself as a being-through-time, a being who lives through the experience of this music. I have a friend who also seems to make longer tracks. I appreciate his music, which is itself highly individual, because it is a different journey. The experience is king.

We can compare John Cage's 4 minutes 33 seconds here. This is, in the common mind, silence. But it was never silence for Cage. It was 4 minutes and 33 seconds of experienced sound, the sounds of the environment, the sounds of life. I share with Cage this focus on sound and experience and the interplay thereof. I share with Cage the idea that you should listen to life and hear it as music. At the end nothing is resolved. Everything is just the same as at the start. But you have experienced. And in that you have experienced change and taken part in the flux and the becoming of life itself. So when you listen to one of my tracks this is what you are doing: listening to a snapshot of life, listening to another's experience. If you listen enough and to a selection of tracks you may start to pick out the distinctive sounds and emotions that are woven together there. There is an identifiable kind of song I do because we all fall into habits no matter how hard we try not to. But better to fall into your own habits than copy others. That is inauthentic. To truly fulfill your musical purpose, for me, is to fully presence yourself and add what is uniquely you to the world of sound and experience.

You may find it strange but the music I make is not the music I want to make. Its the music I can't help making. The music I want to make is always out of my grasp. And that is a reflection of life. For the life you live is never the life you want to live. Its always the life you can't help living. The life you want is always out of your grasp. So this music/art/life imitation thing seems to be going on. Indeed, how could the music or the art not be an outgrowth of the life, full of all the values, interests and moods that the life contains? Here a philosophical conclusion informs both my life and my music. Just as the only meaningful choice in life is whether to keep breathing or to stop, so in music the only meaningful choice is whether to make music that authentically expresses you or not. This is a life or death question. And the authenticity comes in living that out to the full. You must own the choice you make every time you make a sound.

And that is why, when you listen to music by me, you get the random, the chaos, the instinctual. This is because I have a distrust of the deliberate, the reasoned, the "purposeful". These things have lying mouths and promise what they cannot deliver. I have a sense that life is fleeting and without purpose and so I live in the shadow of the tomorrow that will never arrive and, consequently, need to find meaning in the circumstances of here and now. And yet the attempt to presence meaning here and now is ultimately not enough. All my music ends up being is sound marks that, in themselves, mean nothing. This is one reason why I write so few melodies. You, as listener, are challenged to find your own melody within the music or accept that there is nothing there. However, in the end, no matter how many works populate my Bandcamp, no matter how good or bad the music is subjectively judged to be, it amounts to a shout from the void into the void. My music accomplished nothing. But whilst I lived it was good to shout. Indeed, how could I not?


So what I provide you, the listener, is musical fantasies. And this, in itself, is instructive. For for a fantasy to be fully experienced is to enter it's world and partake of it fully. One cannot experience a story fully unless one reads the story and enters the world for a while. And so it is here too. You are cordially invited to listen to one man's experiences of, and reflections on, life. What is served up is a series of pieces that serve as my atonement for the sin of having been born. It may turn out to be that they do not mean much within themselves. But, should you listen for long enough, maybe they triangulate with something in your own experience and become part of something that I could never have imagined. That, after all, is what art is. Is has no inherent value but it can come to have some if you allow yourself the time to see something in it. But not to worry if it does not. There are many other examples left to try so long as human beings yet walk the Earth. I can but hope that my own Elektronische Existenz spoke to your own existenz in some way.

Should this tempt you to want to hear some of my work you can hear it here at Elektronische Existenz which is my Bandcamp site. Thoughtful listening!

The Thinking Person's Music

It was towards the end of January this year that I sat down and watched the science fiction film, Under The Skin. The film is told through alien eyes as Scarlett Johansson, the alien of the piece, hunts men in Glasgow. This set me thinking explicitly about what it is to be human and what an alien from another world might see. At the same time I had been researching the history of the Nazi death camps before and during World War 2, a prime example of the phrase "man's inhumanity to man". But what is "humanity" in that sense? What does it mean to be human? And so my "Human/Being" musical project was born.

As we now approach mid-April my project has grown to 12 albums and 10 parts (parts 1 and 4 were double albums). It now fully mirrors in scope, if not storyline, my first musical project, Elektronische Existenz. Of course, as the names might suggest, these are really the same or close relatives as projects. I see it as my task to write music that gives meaning to life itself. Primarily, of course, this is my own. But, in a wider sense, this is adding my voice to a greater conversation about what life is for any of us. I'm aware this might sound a bit pretentious. But I see this as an art project and the music I have made here is intended to be an aid to thought. Elektronische Existenz told the personal story of a character I called "The Wanderer". It was my story. Here with Human/Being I muse on wider, more general matters starting with that musing on what we are and what "humanity" is.

Throughout the project I have tried to focus on particular areas. These were meditated upon pretty much as they occurred to me. The music I make is overtly philosophical in origin if not always in tone. And this is the most philosophical music I have ever made. Human/Being 2 came at the time when Tangerine Dream founder, Edgar Froese, died and so it starts with a tribute piece for him, a massive influence upon exactly the kind of music I was seeking to make here. It continued on with meditation on sleep, the fear of madness and the human condition. Human/Being 3 focused on time and our nature as time-bound and time-determined beings, always conscious of the ticking of the clock. I was trying to use the music as an aid for those who might actually sit back and allow what I had made to assist them in thinking.

The fourth part of the project was a double album (the pink covers) and was really about the concept of human meaning at all. All meaning is inherently fictional. We literally make things up. In the notes to these albums I mused that "Whatever I say this is, it isn't that. Whatever you think this is, it isn't that. For this isn't at all. It is merely a process of becoming that never ends. It is a game with sounds, but a game where you decide the rules or even if there are any at all." I also invited listeners to "find meaning in the spaces between sounds". It was game-playing but it was with serious intent. What is human meaning? Why do things mean something to us or not? Again, the music was there to assist with thinking about this.

Meaning, or lack of it, leads to motivation and this is what I mused on in Human/Being 5. It was quite personal in its approach and expressed my borderline nihilism. But, again, that is not necessarily an opinion I force upon my listeners. It is more that I invite them to think about it and provide music to assist in the process. This lead me, with Human/Being 6,  to think about being "condemned to be free", as the existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre put it. Where does this quite radical freedom come from and what is it set against - the vastness of the universe? It seems to me at times that all that is is quite simply absurd - in the philosophical sense - without rhyme or reason. This section of the project came to a conclusion in Human/Being 7, subtitled "The Infinite Sea". The phrase was suggested to me by Nietzsche with the following quote:

"In the horizon of the infinite. - We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us - indeed, we have gone further and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of his cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom - and there is no longer any land."

This, I thought, was - is - our human condition.

I had intended to stop at part 7. (My process is a constant one of stopping and then being re-animated by some new thought or stimulus.) But then I watched the film Chappie about a robot given artificial intelligence and I was back asking myself if a robot could ever be human. That, of course, leads you to ask what being human is in order to in any way get a grip on the first question. (My current thinking is that the robot couldn't be human but maybe it could be a being of its own.) And so I wrote the album "Robot" which became part 8 of the project. Next came "Space", unique in this project for being a collaboration on the musical side with my Twitter friend, Iceman Bob. All the songs on this album were worked on by us together. Space, of course, I see as the big, all-consuming context for everything humans do. We are, as Carl Sagan said, all "star stuff" (the title of one of the songs on Space). You don't get much more profound than this thought, I think. Space is the reason we exist. We all came from it and we are all surely going back to it. It creates and destroys, ever changing. You want profundity? There is your profundity.

That leaves us, finally, with part 10, Human/Being X. Here I concentrated, anticipating another ending, on the concept of "the end" as an idea. "All good things must come to an end" is a saying we humans have. But, of course, it is truer to say simply that all things end. As George Harrison titled a triple album, All Things Must Pass. I titled the tracks accordingly around fields of study that have within them endings. The human race will end, the universe will end (or die) and this is a very part of having any existence at all itself. The riddle is that within all life there is always death. A fitting place to finish?


So that was the subject matter. But how to achieve expressing these ideas musically? The answer was "German music". This year I have been greatly influenced by two, related sources of German music of the 1970s, that music known as The Berlin School and that music known as Kosmische (or Krautrock). You will hear the influences of both styles throughout all 10 parts of the project, although in some more strongly than others. Some may even qualify as bona fide examples of the forms. I'm far to modest to make any such claim though. Listeners may feel free to be the judge of that. As I said above, I have aimed with this project to produce "thinking music". This is music that both comes from explicit philosophical thought and that leads to, or aids with, it. The Kosmische and Berlin School music that I have soaked myself in in the first few months of this year were natural and very potent forms of music to use in achieving this. Both are free-form and without boundary giving the necessary space and freedom to think. The fact that my music is made using synthesis was also a help in that you are not stuck with stock sounds but can make sounds as you will or go where the synthesis leads. That's another reason why the pieces in this project are purposefully long. The idea was not to rush anything.What I have made here are long form pieces that are about thinking, thinking about what it is to be human and what it is to be alive, to have being. It is "space music" in a very real and multivalent sense.

So what I think I have made here is music for the thinking person. Its not frivolous or trite. Its serious. Its art. Its philosophy. Its over 13 hours long. I am me. What else could it be?

You can hear the albums in this project at my bandcamp.

Insights from The German Music Progressives

I spent last night watching various documentaries on You Tube about the progressive German music of the early 1970s. This was the music detrimentally referred to as "Krautrock" by the British music press but also known as progressive, "space rock" or, my preferred term, Kosmische Musik. It encompasses bands such as Tangerine Dream, Can, Kraftwerk, Cluster, Neu!, Faust and Amon Düül II (plus many others).

A number of things struck me watching these documentaries and I thought I would write a few words about this.

The first was that the music, as a movement (and it wasn't a movement, its a purely heuristic move to put these and other bands under a label), comes in a historical context. All these bands were formed by people living after the Second World War in a defeated country that had been occupied by other forces. The capital city itself, Berlin, was partitioned. The music of this time in Germany was conservative and non-threatening (known, in German, as Schlager, a form of music once championed by Goebbels). It was also the time, in the late 60s, of student uprisings, not just in Germany but across the world. The time was ripe for striking out in a new way and differentiating yourself from the world of the past.

It had never occurred to me before that just in the act of making music you are actually being very political. In one of the films I watched, Dieter Moebius, one half of Cluster as well as a member of Harmonia and part of a double act on some work with legendary German producer, Conny Plank, stated that Schlager was not at all political - which made it political. In other places the music came from politics, such as the Munich commune which gave birth to both Amon Düül and Amon Düül II. Even Edgar Froese, who sadly died recently, can be seen in a documentary about the birth of this music saying that progressive German acts of the time didn't want to sound like American or British music. In places like the pioneering Zodiac Free Arts Lab in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin (a place I'm thrilled to have lived very near to in the recent past although the club is long since gone) like-minded people could get together and just jam and forge a new path.

So the question is, if you don't want to sound like the dominant musical tropes of your time (clearly a political move) then what do you do? Edgar Froese's reply was: be abstract. For many of the others it was: use synthesizers or electronics, new instruments just being born at that time. For some the guitars so reminiscent of American blues or British beat music just had to be ditched. This interests me greatly. I wonder how many people even set out with the idea to sound a certain way or give thought to the consequences of how they sound. I also wonder how many realise that "how they sound" could be being judged in this way. For myself, I've always wanted to sound like me and I've always been against purposely setting out to sound like someone else. For me, the worst thing I can find is that musicians or groups advertise themselves as sounding like someone else. Documentaries like the ones I watched last night reinforce this view in me and even extend it. To set out to fit into a trend or be like the mainstream is a deeply conservative act. I don't want to be conservative. And neither did they. So, a follow up question becomes "What does the music you make say about you?"

Many of the acts associated with Kosmische Musik were experimental. Often they were also electronic and abstract, although not always so. If we try and find links between them we see this wanting to forge a new path, to not be linked to the past but to chart a course for a different future, as something that binds them together. It is not the music of mass culture and indeed, in the early 70s, many of these bands were largely unknown in their own country and sometimes not even known to each other. People did later try to mass market some of the bands that came from this era but few were very successful. It also struck me how much so many of the people involved were deep thinkers and this thinking led on voyages of discovery. This could be the esoteric rambling of Can over a funky backbeat supplied by legendary drummer, Jaki Liebezeit, or the experiments in electronic abstraction of Cluster, Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream. Many of these acts were about messing around which electronic equipment of various kinds (as had been done by John Cage, Pierre Schaefer and Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, amongst others, in the 50s and 60s) and using sounds made from every day items. One film I watched had two members of Faust making a song by hitting and recording various parts of a cement mixer, for example, as well as playing it rhythmically as a rudimentary drum. To me, this unites a desire to be different with an "art of the possible" mentality.

Perhaps the two most widely known bands from this era now are Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. They are both, in their way, examples of something that Faust member, Jean-Hervé Péron, said in one of the films I watched: "Art is living. Living is art. Life is art." Tangerine Dream's output was massive with over 100 albums to their name in a career lasting around 45 years. Kraftwerk have been much less prolific but their music, as with so many of the other German progressives, is very much an expression of their beliefs and mentality. "There is no separation between humans and technology, for us they belong together", says Ralf Hütter, one of Kraftwerk's founders and the only surviving founder member of the band. So when they say "We are the robots" they actually mean it. Their music is a physical expression, an embodiment, of their actual beliefs. And if you go through the bands who were "kosmische" you find this repeated again and again. The music is an embodiment of the people making it. It turns thought into its physical expression putting flesh on the bones of who they are. It is, in a way, musical autobiography.

So why does this interest me? Because I have found myself in exactly the same place. For me, music is a deeply intellectual and philosophical enterprise. Its not merely having fun (though, of course, it always should be about fun). The music I make is deeply and unalterably about identity and it seems that for the German progressives of the early 70s it was too. Like them, I don't want to sound like anyone else either. Like them, I have thought about what I sound like from the outside looking in. Like them, I have tried to not do what is expected of me. Like them, for me these are important considerations. Music is not just some product you try to produce for money. You are not trying to find a place in the music supermarket for your particular brand of baked beans. Music is art. Life is art. Art is life. I may be 45 years too late (in truth, kosmische was being born about exactly at the same time as I physically was) but I do feel that in kosmische I have found a musical place I can call home.

Postscript

Here are 3 kosmische albums I've been playing non-stop for the last 4 or 5 months

1. Yeti by Amon Düül II
2. Zuckerzeit by Cluster
3. Affenstunde by Popol Vuh

I also made my own attempt at Kosmische Musik (actually its more "music influenced by listening to Kosmische Musik") with the help of two friends, Luke Clarke and Valerie Polichar. "Shikantaza" can be heard here---> SHIKANTAZA

Human/Being: Soundtrack for Thinkers and Thinking

If you know anything of me at all, you will know by now that I both make electronic music and also like to think (and talk) about things. I am one of those people burdened with thoughts. I have said before that when I make music I am not actually making music - I am doing philosophy with sound. This has very much proved to be true in my first major series of 2015, the Human/Being project. This project, which grew to 7 parts, started off as thinking about humanity after reading stories of the Nazi concentration camps in World War 2 and after watching the film "Under The Skin" starring Scarlett Johansson. This lead me to create 2 albums that felt like some kind of science fiction soundtrack (in my mind, at least) as I mused on these ideas. But, as has become common in the last 12 months, I did not end up stopping there. Human/Being expanded, spread its wings, both sonically and philosophically, and other ideas were explored besides those with which I began (which you can read about in the last blog I made on this site). I want to take a few paragraphs now to explain (to myself if nobody else) what I have been doing.

What is the idea behind Human/Being? Well, it began as me thinking about what it means to be human. I did this by setting us and our planet in some kind of cosmic context and also by thinking about examples of human behaviour and then asking myself what I learned about our species in the light of the example I had chosen. Very many, if not most, human beings are VERY anthropocentric. I tried to be neither anthropocentric nor misanthropic in thinking about our species but the thing is, when you do that, its quite easy to think of us as specks of dust on an insignificant planet that is placed nowhere special in the universe. That IS a useful insight. But it can't be the beginning and end of the discussion. I wanted to ask what it MEANS to be human, not just how significant or not we may be in universal terms (which remains "not very").

My project was not planned out intellectually from the start with a road map of the ideological territory I wanted to survey. As is normal for me when making music, I allowed myself to roam where I wanted to. This, of course, does not promote any unity of thought but it does have the benefit of being honest in that nothing is set up here. I thought as honestly and openly as I could about the subjects that came up and allowed the thoughts I had to inspire the music. The music is and remains a soundtrack to my thoughts. It always was that and I can't imagine it ever being anything else. I wrote and recorded the music to this series in a deliberate "Berlin School" style. This style, popularised in the 1970s, is based on multiple synthesizers playing sequences or drones and is often completely devoid of explicit rhythm instruments such as drums. The idea is to create a sound field (as I call them) and this fits in perfectly with the idea that the music here should be a soundtrack for thinking (and thinkers, I hope).

Human/Being ended up being divided into 7 unequal parts. They are:

Human/Being

A: Jedem Das Seine
B: Arbeit Macht Frei

Human/Being 2

Human/Being 3

Human/Being 4

A: This Doesn't Exist
B: in Absentia

Human/Being 5

Human/Being 6

Human/Being 7

Its worth pointing out here that I definitely do see these albums as a connected series. Ideally, they should be listened to as one giant narrative. But I appreciate that at 9 hours and 28 minutes long that is a major undertaking for anyone. They should at least, I hope, be listened to as self contained albums. I consider myself an album artist. I tell multi-part stories and the tracks are meant to be complimentary. I don't make single track or quick music. My work is to be taken time with and absorbed. I'm working with ideas as much as sounds and that needs TIME. This is one reason that here I have consciously tried to lengthen the pieces. Not only is this a harder musical challenge (musicians always need to be stretching their wings in my philosophy of music), but it forces the listener into either listening properly or ignoring it altogether. This aspect of making music that challenges listeners to take the music seriously is something that appeals to me. I'm not after just any old listener. Listeners have to prove themselves worthy of listening! And that means being open to being changed or influenced by the music.

I have written about part one and its concentration camp and science fiction film origins elsewhere on this blog and so I won't regurgitate what I said about that part here. In retrospect, though, those first two albums do have a very "science fiction soundtrack" feel to them and I'm glad about this. Aspects of that sound crop up again as you go through the series but other flavours crop up too, salting the meal with new tastes. This begins as early as Human/Being 2 which takes as its point of departure the death of Tangerine Dream creator, Edgar Froese. I wrote this album just as the news of his death came through. I was not a Tangerine Dream fan. This is, to be honest, because I have really only begun to dig into the history of German electronic music in the last 6 months. This is now a cause of shame and horror to me because there is so much there I never realised. This shows me, yet again, that we each have our own individual journeys through life to make. Things will happen to us in our time and not according to some pre-determined plan. What one person learns aged 20, another only learns aged 50. And so it was that in the latter part of 2014 I came to dig through the early 1970s of German electronic music and found... wonders untold!

Human/Being 2, in a musical sense, is perhaps the most thoughtful and dramatic album of the whole series. It starts with Froesen, my tribute to the prolific Berliner Froese, and winds its way through 3 further tracks that were written in the depths of one long night when I never went to sleep. Like every album in the series, but archetypally so here, this is an album fundamentally about SYNTHESIS. This is a SYNTHESIZER album and I used the controls of the synthesizers to manufacture sounds. You may wonder why I am emphasizing that. Its because I have this sense that that is not what a lot of people do. They smile and wonder at all these knobs, sliders and buttons but don't actually use them to see what they do. Here, I did. Thematically, its all a bit of a mess on this leg of the project. You have to understand that by 5 or 6am I was firmly in the throes of sleep deprivation and started to muse on if humanity as a whole was awake or asleep (and what the difference is) and how easy it would be to drive a human being mad. (Recent reports of American torture of their prisoners takes hold of my mind here.) I ended up musing on human beings as enslaved in so many different ways (and, of course, in varying degrees). It should enlighten us that it is very, very easy to be pessimistic about the human race.

Human/Being 3 exhibited more philosophical unity. Here I have one connected theme running through the music and inspiring a soundtrack. It is the twin ideas of "being" and "time" - and how those two ideas intersect. Originally, this was suggested to me by German philosopher Martin Heidegger's book but I thought about it in my own sweet ways rather than by reading that weighty and often incomprehensible tome. My thoughts concerned the nature of human beings as beings who exist within time, a concept which is so important in informing us about everything from our identity (identity is very time-bound, a timeline we tell ourselves and reflect upon constantly, informing and reconfiguring that same timeline in the process) to our place in the world. Without the concept of time we just would not be who we are as human beings. Time intimately and necessarily informs us who we are and what that means.

I also considered the concept of how we all come to be. Time is an eternity - infinitely before us and infinitely after us. We cannot comprehend or imagine it. Within that a billion billion random events occur and some of those random events result in us. I considered the idea that each of us is the outcome of a sexual act that might never have happened. And, if it didn't - at that precise time and place - then none of us would exist. Imagine your mother and father, instead of having sex that night, had just gone to sleep. You wouldn't exist. This is what I refer to as "Point Zero", the point at which your existence was decided. The last two tracks on this album coalesce around a common theme. That theme is that we exist constantly in the present. We never live either in the past or the future. One is always behind us, one always in front. But we are never in either. I reflect musically on what that means to always live NOW, watched over by two shadows and their influence. Human/Being 3 has a more stark and clinical sound than either parts 1 or 2.

Human/Being 4 is a second part of the project that comes in two halves after the opening part. Philosophically speaking, this part is the "post-structuralist" part. If you aren't sure what that means feel free to either look it up or skip over it. My hunch is that if you are in sympathy with such thought then you will already know what that line of thinking is about and, if not, then you likely won't be anyway. If you are aware of the post-structuralist conversation then the song titles used in part 4, things such as "Nothing Outside The Text", "Open Space Where An Author Should Be", "Non-Realist" and "The Insufficiency of Presence" should be poking you in all the right places.

What I am getting at with part 4 is the idea that our images of ourselves as human beings, as a race and as people, are always at least a fiction, always incomplete. They are not an "is the case". They are a becoming. We are constantly being created and recreated but we never reach the target. Our ideas about ourselves aren't solid immovable objects but warm plastic that is constantly malleable. We leave traces of what we are but the full, filled in outline never becomes visible. Human beings and humanity are things you try to grasp but, like air, you always end up grasping nothing. This whole idea lies behind the track "Keyser Soze", the character from Bryan Singer's 1995 film, "The Usual Suspects". As Kevin Spacey (who plays the character in the film) says "...and like that, he was gone". Thus, the two halves of part 4 are titled "This Doesn't Exist" and "in Absentia". Whatever you say is there is at least false.

Musically, I love part 4 very much. This is because we get some of that old "science fiction soundtrack" vibe back from earlier in the series but with other different ideas too. Its a part of the project that is different but fits together nevertheless. I've been thinking a lot about all the very many ways we humans find to divide ourselves today and, it seems to me, we often go out of our way to do so. We find pleasure in dividing ourselves in as many (often facile) ways as possible and emphasize what sets us apart and not what should bring us together. This leads me back to thinking about the opening part of the series and how people could essentially farm death in concentration camps. Empathy really is the beginning and end of it. If you see a person as less than you then it opens your mind up to treating them worse than you would expect in return. The model of this part of my project here, the idea that difference is complimentary and makes the whole stronger, may be thought of as naive but, to me at least, it is no less compelling for that.

Human/Being 5 is about motivation. Human beings seem capable of creating motives for anything they can think of. Often these may be deluded or simply ill-judged. Sometimes we would say the motives are right but the actions end up wrong. Its quite difficult to be a human being. There is also a whole industry (particularly, it seems, in the USA) devoted to motivating people. There is also the reverse side of the coin though: demotivation. There have never been as many people on this planet as there are now. And there have never been so many just doing nothing. In the age when there was more to do in or with life than ever before there is a plague of boredom. This should give us pause for thought. The music here is two parts slightly unsettling and one part poignant and thoughtful. I love it when I can zone in on the warm, fuzzy feeling from time to time. The track "Rather Keep Nothing" on Human/Being 5 is one such time. Just simple, pure, honest music that communicates a very naive feeling. I never know when it will happen but, when it does, I think I get more in touch with something beyond myself, something timeless that resonates through my being the way a sunset on a beach might do for some other people. We all need these moments, I think, when the noise of the world goes away and purer, deeper, more innocent things, things that really matter, come to the fore.

Human/Being 6 looks at "the human condition" in the round and in a way influenced by the reading of actual philosophers. In reading and thinking philosophically, I came across the statement of Sartre's that we are "condemned to be free". This was in reading Nietzsche's discussions in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science) about how human beings came to value truth and knowledge and reason. His argument there was based in human beings as at one time a definite social grouping, a herd, which found certain forms of life necessary. Expulsion from this herd, the freedom to think and act individually, something we now value and prize greatly, was at that time, in pre-modern societies, a terrible punishment, an exclusion from the comfort and well-being that the hive mind brought. Nietzsche called that being "condemned to be an individual". Later, Sartre talked in his existential context of being "condemned to be free", a sense in which you have no choice but to live and to choose and to act and to think if you want to live. You have no choice in this matter. It goes hand in hand with being alive. In that sense, the burden of living is all on you. In these modern times its a burden that takes a heavy mental toll on many.

On a parallel stream to this thought I had been thinking recently about logic and its development in the context of a universe some 13.8 billion years old and so vast and unexplored and unexplained that it literally overwhelms us. It is a source of constant bafflement to me that this universe created sentient life. If you accept that there is no sort of mind or intelligence behind all that then it really is quite a question to ask why we came to be, a product of random and complex actions and reactions in the vast emptiness of space that forms worlds and whole systems of worlds and then, just as easily, wipes them away and starts again. Indeed, there have already been several great extinction events, as they are called, on our own planet. And, in this context, I thought about humans, many of whom like to think of themselves as ordered and logical, whatever that last term might mean. I suspect it actually means something very fabricated and humanistic. But, I ask myself, if there is such a thing as logic, then surely it came from the illogic, the chaos, of the universe? Is it really logic? Is it not just human beings seeing the world in a certain way? I find it funny that beings on some tiny, insignificant planet, would pride themselves on a "logic" that chaos created. By chance.

The third track of this album ("Cause and Effect/Flux") leads us back to my reading of Nietzsche. One of his great points is that humans, not least scientific humans, falsify the universe to make it useful for themselves and for us. We are counters, measurers, quantifiers. None of this means anything for ultimate truth or for questions such as if we are right or wrong about anything. They are, in fact, strictly speaking not concerned with either thing at all. For human beings, it is what is of use that counts. (Nietzsche says elsewhere that humans don't so much care about being right or wrong as being harmed as a result of being right or wrong. Spot the difference.) One such error Nietzsche sees is in the doctrine of cause and effect. As Nietzsche sees things, the universe is in constant flux, a stream of events. Only by abstracting two points, and calling them a cause and an effect, does that doctrine even make sense. But Nietzsche sees that as unfaithful to the stream of events and says that calling something a cause and an effect is to arbitrarily focus on some points and arbitrarily ignore others. Its merely an arbitrary choice fitted to the purposes of people who want to explain things in a certain way. And so this says something about human beings, a species that take things from their constant experience and order them in ways that are of use to them.

A word now on the music here. I continue in the style I have adopted for this series which is adopted from the Berlin School of synthesizer music, popularised primarily in the 1970s. But I've upped the game - and the pace - particularly with the second track, "Logic from Unlogic", which is very rhythmically based. Rhythm is a natural impulse in any music I make (hence the "disco" in an old moniker of mine, Geeky Disco) and its been hard in this series to try and restrain it - although I think I've had some success with it. Here I wanted the sound to be noticeably synthesized again but not go over old ground. The challenge to create in a given style but add variation and make it different was very much to the fore in this part of the project. Here I have used some discordant tones to convey a sense of not quite being in control. My music often seeks to perform a mood or emotion and be related instinctively and intuitively to the track title. Hence, here you can expect some sense of being uncontrollably free, some unlogic and some flux.

And so we come to the finale, the 7th and final part. As I write, this is the only part of the project not yet published. This is because listeners to the first 6 parts used up the 200 free downloads that Bandcamp allocate to their users per month. Thereafter, the site forces you to charge for your music, something I do not want to do. A big "thank you" at this point to anyone who has downloaded one of those 200 albums in only 18 days. I certainly never expected that. But that also adds pressure on me to make part 7 worthy of the 6 previous parts people seem to have found so enjoyable. That is a good pressure and I welcome it. And I think I have done it. Human/Being 7 is to be subtitled "The Infinite Sea" and, although I have already completed it, it will be available when I get my 200 free downloads back on 24th February.  That subtitle is again taken from my reading of Nietzsche.

In paragraph 124 of Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science) Nietzsche writes:

"In the horizon of the infinite. - We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us - indeed, we have gone further and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of his cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom - and there is no longer any land."

What is there to say about this? Well, that I see it as a comment on the human condition, the human situation. The land behind us is gone. There is no turning back in life, no safe refuge behind us. The past is literally a place you can never go. As Nietzsche writes, "the land is gone". Every day of life ends with a burning of the bridge and a no way back. There is only one direction in life and that is forwards, forwards on an infinite sea. And the sea is not something you can master although it may be sometimes something you can navigate. Tides will take you this way and that, storms will send you off course to either disaster or to as yet unknown wonder. But this sea is infinite. It is your lot, your form of life, your place. It is both your infinite playground and your infinite prison. And that is the metaphor that I want to give as the lasting thought of this somewhat eccentric series of albums on Human/Being. I don't claim that is has been a philosophically coherent series. Indeed, it has, frankly, been fragmentary. But it has been honest.

Musically, I have enjoyed my wanderings with "The Berlin School". Of course, I did it in my own way. That is what every musician should do. They should leave THEIR stamp on things. In part 7 you are to imagine yourself the captain of your very own schooner on the high seas. The music will lead you on a journey out across the ocean, an ocean that never ends. You must sail. You must navigate. You can do no other, wherever the ocean leads. Life is often pictured as a journey - and for good reason. The metaphor of the journey is, in the end, the most powerful one I have for this musical voyage I have taken through Human/Being. And for life itself.....

You can hear the first 6 parts of Human/Being exclusively at Elektronische Existenz right now.

Part 7, The Infinite Sea, will be added there on 24th February 2015.

The music is currently priced at 50 cents per album but should anyone make any payment you may rest assured that I will never collect it and it will return to you after 21 days or so automatically. It is important to me that my music is, and always remains, free of charge.

PS Longer term followers of my music might notice that the pylons have made a comeback in the artwork that accompanies my music. I find them an enduring metaphor for myself in so many ways.