Thoughts of an Invisible Man

Another fuse blown. In my head. Another cull of Twitter "followers". I read somewhere yesterday that social media has warped our language. We have accounts with thousands of "friends". But are these "friends"? What then is a friend if you can have thousands of them you've never met? Its more hot air, empty and meaningless.

But I'm not here to discuss that. Borne in on me of late is that this moment, this one, right now, is special. It happens once, never to be repeated. Shouldn't you cherish something like that? It would be a shame to waste it like a Donald Trump of time who, with his braggadocio, wastes moments like dollars because he feels he has so many. Look at me! LOOK AT ME!

No. Time is precious. Short, even. I don't have much. I don't know when the clock stops. Forever. 

My music plays. New music. Music only I have heard. Three more albums. Unpublished. Maybe unpublishable. My music isn't for you. It really isn't. Its my therapy. My crutch. An empty "purpose". The only one I can find. Besides finding words to write. And yet I still feel like a cog in a machine. The things I always didn't want to feel. The reason I hate "employment" and cannot work for companies. The ultimate debasement of the human soul. To feel as if you are a cog. 

The music drones on. Vague. Featureless. Distorted. Alien. Is it a musical autobiography? A cry for help? Sadness that must leak out? The soundtrack to my internal monologue.

I told you it wasn't for you.

I'm reading Camus. He is trying to explain to me, TO ME, why the absurd mandates that I revolt. He is making a good fist of it but I'm not really buying. Sentences, phrases, get jotted down. I understand and agree with the premise ("life is absurd, living is absurdity") but the conclusion seems like just another evasion. He says that no one can follow logic to its conclusion because they only ever follow it until its takes them where they don't want to go. Well, Camus, hoist by your own petard old son! Look in the mirror. Behold the man invoking slippery logic! You're like Kierkegaard but without the Christianity!

On I go. Reading. Listening to the music. 

My life.

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!

Half Year Report

In two days time half of 2015 will already be gone and so it seems appropriate at this point to look back and see where I have been, musically and philosophically, so far this year. A glance at my blog record tells me I've written over 30 blogs so far this year, starting with my MUSIC MANIFESTO on the first day of the year. That particular blog was written still fresh from my entanglement in the writings of John Cage and one particular thing from it stands out. The sixth point of my "manifesto" is as follows:

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

I think that in the last 6 months I have come to believe that even more and it ever guides my creating and my listening. That manifesto carried in it a number of ideas about music being a form of story telling and I think I would hold to this belief (or be captured more firmly by this belief) than I was even 6 months ago. Since the beginning of 2014 and my albums BLUE and STATIC METAL which, in turn, gave rise to what would become the 13 part series ELEKTRONISCHE EXISTENZ (which then became the name for the whole creative project of my entire life, primarily in writing and music), I have been on a road in which my music became episodic and multiple. These days, if I was asked to write a single album, I would feel that it was a bit bare and exposed. Indeed, I have removed albums from my online store as they didn't seem to fit all by themselves anymore. My music this year has centred around three multiple part projects: Human/Being, that began with the album JEDEM DAS SEINE, the "Timeless" trio of albums initiated with the album ZEITLOS and the recent double album series of THE EXISTENZ EQUATION and THE EXISTENZ EQUATION II.

All three series this year have been high points for my music and I currently could not imagine the musical story of my life without them. And this, I think, is because I stuck to that sixth point of my music manifesto. The music can only be good and worthwhile if you have something to say. I think that I have always felt this creatively but it becomes ever more explicit. So much of what is created in this world seems either shallow, commercially motivated (often the same thing) or worthless. If I have any motivation at all in the music I have made it is to be about something and to express something. Now, of course, I can't make that the case for everyone. But I can make it the case for me. If it says something to someone else too that will have to be a bonus. And it seems as if maybe it does. I have had around 450 album downloads so far this year and well over 1,300 listens of my songs. My current catalog includes a couple of collaborations, SHIKANTAZA, a collaboration with a gorgeous vocalist from California named Valerie Polichar and a brilliant rock guitarist, Luke Clarke, who sadly died earlier in the year, and SPACE, part of my Human/Being project and a collaboration with Iceman Bob, someone who has also become an intellectual friend. As I'm not the most social of beasts these collaborations are to be noted since I am someone for whom the music is very, very personal. Fortunately, I'm happy with the outcome of both projects, neither of which simply sound like me, as they shouldn't.

In terms of the sound of my music there has been a pronounced change this year related to my listening habits. I have become explicitly influenced by two schools of German music from the 1970s, Berlin School and Kosmische. I've written about these before so I'll save you the duplication here save to say that currently I couldn't think of writing anything that wasn't encompassed by these descriptions. The longer format (I aim for songs around a  notional 15 minute length these days), developmental nature and sonic exploration of these forms seems tailor made for the philosophical and expressive types of music I want to make. 

And what of my themes? Philosophically, I have been fixated on human beings so far this year - and their particular form of being, human being. This is pointed up in the project, album and song titles and, as already explained, this is a journey for me. Things have always been very existential for me in life and they become more and more so. I feel very thrown into life, a life I often don't want or would give back. And so much of life for me is trying to understand what I was thrown into and trying to make some meaning out of it. My music and writing is my poorly articulated attempts at this. I can do no other and, if I was for some reason stopped from doing it, I would go mad. So its good for me when I make something that, listening back, I feel really hit some meaningful nail on the head. Such, for me, are albums such as THE INFINITE SEA and HUMAN/BEING X and ONTOLOGIE. In albums like these I can hear back very clearly the thoughts I was thinking and the understandings that I have come to in life. I read something earlier in the year that remarked that you would not write philosophy in anything but words because philosophy is an explicative practice that requires communicative perspicacity. Hearing albums such as these three I completely disagree. Music, something which communicates ideas, moods and emotions, can be philosophical, not least in the sense that, if allowed to, it can promote the activity of thought. At its best this is what my music does.

                 The 24 albums that currently represent my musical output online

And so as we stand at the beginning of the European summer and enter the second part of the year I wonder where things will go next. The truth about me is that I have always been very good at looking back - because I'm usually facing the wrong way in life, looking over my shoulder, observing where I have come from to try and understand where I am now. But I am absolutely terrible at looking forward. Indeed, I barely ever do it. Perhaps this is some kind of defence mechanism, afraid, as I am, to face the future. I occasionally get the urge to begin some grand project, perhaps a full length book or multi-media project encompassing artworks, music and text, but these fade because I am, firstly, very lazy and, secondly, guided always by a need for instant gratification. After getting on for 5 decades (Jesus! really?) it is very easy to fall back into the excuse that you cannot teach such an old dog new tricks.

But I am sure that I will continue to be a somewhat morose, melancholic, thoughtful man who finds the need to express himself in words and sounds. Indeed, increasingly, it seems clear that this is all I will ever be. It will have to be enough.

I would be delighted were you to sample any of my music, all of which is available for free. You can find it at https://elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com/.

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!