New Musical Directions: Facing The Boundaries of Reality

It is the case for most people that life is fairly static and stable. Many human beings like this fact and I am certainly one of them. Too much change and changing circumstances can be disorientating and it seems as if there is nothing solid and secure to hold on to. This is also the case musically from the point of view of musical creation. For the last few years I have basically had the same resources to hand. For a time before that I had much more available but reduced circumstances and life choices have now taken me down to a bare minimum which is what the music of the last 2 years from me has been made with. I'm somewhat shy these days of speaking too much about musical setups because I have found, in this world of egotistical opinions spewed out for general consumption on blogs, forums and social media sites, that knowing too much about an artist's "how" colours people's views on the product. Check any music forum for plenty of examples of this, often from people who should know better. So the view I hold these days is that you don't need to know how I did what I did. I also hope this will push your need to hold an opinion onto what I actually made and what you think of it. Because, after all, having something at the end of the process is the point, right?

In the much reduced circumstances I now find myself in, however, there are still two hardware synths that I have managed to somehow retain. They have been tucked away in the shed since last time I used them over a year ago. Before that I hadn't used them for maybe 3 years before that. They are the Korg Electribe EMX-1 and the Korg Electribe ESX-1. (The first is a virtual analog synth and the second a sampling synth with reduced synthesis capabilities in comparison with the first.) These are the original 2003 models with the Smartmedia card slots, Smartmedia being a format that no one ever really bothered with. I'm not sure if you can even buy these cards anymore. 

I mention these machines because for the last 2 or 3 weeks I have been thinking, very casually, about how I change things up. This, for good or ill, is a part of the make up of my personality. I'm unable, and unwilling, to go on repeating myself and doing things for a long period of time. I get bored and want a new direction, reason or goal. This is the history of my life story. There is really hardly anything I've ever done or any situation I have kept which got much past 2 or 3 years. The music I have made in the last 2 years using my old process is great, the best I've ever done. If I look back on my music-making history I see an upward curve in terms of ability, the musical interest it creates and the roundedness of the final product. But this isn't enough and, crucially, I think its only true because I don't sit in the rut happy to make the same thing but with a different tune.

Now the Electribe EMX-1 is an instrument I know well. Of all the things I've ever owned, and this includes expensive keyboard synths, samplers, DJ equipment, Elektron grooveboxes and software, it is probably the instrument I took most time to use and know best. Seven years ago I would habitually get up in the morning, switch it on and in 20 minutes jam out a tune which I recorded to video and stuck up on You Tube. These videos got a bit of a following and not simply for the music (although I hope some of it was for that) but also because, having just got out of bed, often my fat gut was on display in the video as the EMX-1 was resting on my knees. A man needs to be comfortable as he works! By the way, in case you're wondering, that You Tube account is long deleted and none of the videos survive. Sad, I know. You get deprived of those performances and I consigned some good tunes to the void. But that must be. I find it better to be defined by the next thing than by the last thing. So occasionally a total wipe of the past is necessary. Its all about reinvention. I couldn't be sure, but David Bowie's career seems to suggest he has something of a similar mentality.

So in thinking how I move forward from my old way to a new way these devices came to the forefront  of my mind. Sitting and jamming with them, though, is out. Its been done before and, these days, every 13 year old has a You Tube account with 50 videos showcasing the 10 beatboxes and ipads his parents bought him. They can do that and they can do it better than me. An old man and his gut isn't music news going into 2016. But a project I have recently completed does suggest a different approach to that. Recently I made the album "A Noise Archive of Science Fiction" and to make that I scoured the internet for free sound libraries of analog and other synths that I could download and manipulate in ways I found interesting. I managed to make 81 tracks doing that in a feverish 8 days of activity in which I barely did anything but make music. 

So what about if I took the EMX-1 (and maybe the ESX-1 too) and used it to generate the sounds myself this time? Its a progression from my last idea but this time everything is mine from creating the sounds themselves by messing with the synth until something I like pops out to putting the sound in a manipulative environment and changing it into something else that combines and works with other sounds to make something bigger. Not very revolutionary you may be thinking. This is true but for me its different and that might be enough. To understand why this is new and exciting to me you need to understand my musical mentality though.

The one thing that I have never employed in making my music is time. Taking time to me always equated to making hard work of music and music should not be work. It also shouldn't be an industry but it is often called one. To me music is fun and its about having fun with the plus that at the end of the fun maybe you have recorded something of worth. I know for many, and perhaps as an "industry" standard, music is supposed to be deliberately arranged, recorded and produced with a pre-determined idea of what you want at the end. But it has never been this for me as, intuitively, it seemed to me as if the moment, the inspiration, the muse, was much more important than making a job of work of it. So I never, ever took time. What I did was think of the next big idea and then record the moment of its execution. 

So that is where I come from musically (and philosophically but thats another story) and I want to preserve that into my next work. I think I can do that in using the electribes to find snippets of sound, make loops and record one shots. These can then be thrown somewhere else to be changed, effected, combined and chained to form greater works. The electribes are somewhat perfect for this kind of thing as they have no voice memories at all. This means that if you want to preserve a sound you make you must record it as it can't be saved on the machine. It forces creativity and makes it certain that no sound will ever be the same twice. Indeed, reading back some reviews from when these original 2003 models came out I'm reminded just what great machines these were with their motion sequencing (which records knob tweaks on the fly) and, at least on the EMX-1, quite comprehensive synthesis controls. The analog vacuum tubes also give it an analog saturation that goes from warmth to total distortion. Perfect for making noises. Or just noise.

So for the next 2 months I want to take time. I want to take time to make sounds. I want to take time to manipulate those sounds. I want to take time to combine those sounds. Rather than putting out the next set of tracks I made as if on a conveyor belt I want to be more choosy. I doubt I will be any less prolific but what gets put up in public will be the cream that rose to the top rather than simply the next set of moments I recorded. I don't know if I will like this way of working or if I will abandon it after an hour. I don't like the idea that the past can bind the future so I'm not laying down any rules here only intentions as I write as a musician who needs to keep things fresh. If I stick to my plan expect to hear a new album from me on my birthday which is in January 2016.

You can hear the best of this year's work right now at https://elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com/ 

EDIT! 14 days later and this album is published. It is now available at https://elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com/album/industrial-sounds-for-the-working-class 

Electronica: The Time Machine

Two weeks ago French electronic pioneer, Jean-Michel Jarre, released his first album in 7 years. If you follow electronic music, synthesizer websites or the music press you may have noticed this fact as Jarre has undertaken extensive PR to promote the album. The album is unique in his catalogue of work in at least one respect: every song is a collaboration with someone else in electronic music who he regards as having influenced him or as an influence in general. And so he has worked with people such as Tangerine Dream (including Edgar Froese shortly before he sadly died at the start of this year), Vince Clarke, John Carpenter, Moby, Pete Townshend, Air and many others. In fact, he has worked with so many people there will be a second album of collaboration coming in spring next year to complete the project in which people like Gary Numan and Hans Zimmer will feature.

But this blog today is NOT about that album. Rather, its about an idea that this album inspires. I have been listening to Jarre's album - which has been impressively made in a custom studio using a vast swathe of instruments from the beginning right up to the present day of electronic music - with interest and it makes me ask myself a question: What would be my selection of artists who "have influenced me or who I regard as influences?" This is one of those pub type questions then where you argue with friends over who is better or which is the more important artist. Of course, its necessarily a personal list because each of our musical journeys is different. So I feel no urge to agree with people. Each journey has its own validity. What follows is my list of electronic musicians who have been important way markers in electronic music and with a few words as to why. I've also put the songs I chose into a You Tube playlist which is linked at the end.


1. Depeche Mode (New Life)

Depeche Mode is where it really all starts for me. They emerged just as I did from boyhood and, as I think about it, they really are the one electronic band that was there at the start and is still there now in relation to my own musical interests. At the beginning it was Vince Clarke (latterly of Yazoo and Erasure) who was the main song writer as in the song I choose here, their first proper hit, New Life. Of course, this sounds nothing like what Depeche Mode would become. But more about that later.

2. The Human League (The Things That Dreams Are Made of)

The Human League came just after Depeche Mode in my fledgling awareness. This is the revamped League and not the dour three man setup the trendies will prefer that made Travelogue and Reproduction. The album that made me aware of The Human League was Dare. Dare has a very distinct sound, one of the first records to ever use the Linn Drum, one of the first proper electronic drum machines. Indeed, I understand the machine had only just made it into the country when the album's producer, Martin Rushent, got hold of it and rapidly began programming it for the album. This was a momentous decision as to think of that instrument now is to think of Dare as an album. Dare and its lead single, Don't You Want Me, went down well in America too.

3. Cluster (James)

Cluster (formerly Kluster) were an electronic duo of Germans, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius (RIP). They started out as abstract sound artists as can be heard on their first two albums from 1971 and 1972. If you want to know where ambient came from then listen to those records. If you think that Brian Eno invented ambient then note that Eno worked with these two guys throughout the Seventies and in the "supergroup" Harmonia with Michael Rother of Neu! But not only did Cluster invent ambient noise they also invented synthpop on their pioneering 1973 album, Zuckerzeit (Sugartime). A listen to this album reveals that someone got there before Kraftwerk. The only thing lacking was that Cluster didn't sing. The song James from this album is like a crazy ambient remix version of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" seventeen years before it existed. If you like electronic music then your education isn't complete without listening to Cluster.

4. Kraftwerk (Tour de France)

As with most things, I came to Kraftwerk late. Prior to the song I chose here, which to my mind is their best, I was only aware of "The Model". I had liked that but this one was much more 80s (which is what it was at the time). The Model had famously been tacked on to a single release from the 1981 album Computer Love as a B side but British DJs preferred to play The Model and so it went to number 1. Tour de France wasn't as popular but it showcased perfectly Kraftwerk's love of rhythmic patterns as well as their electronic sound, a sound that helped create Techno in Europe and America. No one will challenge my choice of Kraftwerk as an influence because anyone and everyone acknowledges that they are.

5. Jean-Michel Jarre (Fourth Rendez-Vous)

I became aware of Jean-Michel Jarre openly in 1986. This was the time of his world record breaking concert to 1.3 million people in Houston, Texas, in which the city was used as a gigantic backdrop for his music. There was a report about it on British TV and how the concert was being set up and organised and this caught my attention. I remember asking myself what kind of music could possibly be the soundtrack for a whole city? The concept seemed quite ambitious to me and the answer was his album Rendez-Vous. Subsequently, of course, I became aware of his previous work, particularly the sublime and enduring Oxygene which is one of the most atmospheric electronic records ever made. I recommend the "new master recording" from 2007 whole heartedly. If anyone has made electronic music widely known to masses of people then it is Jarre. Who else has repeatedly performed to crowds of over 1 million people with playing synthesizers as the attraction?

6. Man Parrish (Hip Hop Be Bop)

This is an artist I don't actually know that much about. But I know this tune and I know that he pioneered the electro sound of the 80s, a sound that took up the electronic dance music torch but was subsequently outshone by Techno and House. We can hear in records like Hip Hop Be Bop that even by 1983 Kraftwerk were being surpassed and left behind by those they had influenced and newer, younger, more American kids had got to grips with new, mass marketed, programmable instruments to make a sound that had never been heard before. Hip Hop Be Bop packs as much of a punch today as it did in '83. Its a seminal track.

7. Autechre (Basscadet)

Many people have never heard of Autechre, now a couple of middle-aged blokes from near Manchester, England. To describe the kind of music they make is complicated. They were, and still are, fans of electro music such as that from Man Parrish I just showcased. But they are also some of those who grew up just as home computing got off the ground and this love for computers has become integral to their music-making process. Its easiest to say that they developed into people who make music that no one could ever play in conventional, human ways and they have fully embraced the possibilities of making a music that only machines could ever make. As such, they are pioneers and standard-bearers for all the kids who ever got a computer and made music with it.

8. Boards of Canada (Amo Bishop Roden)

Boards of Canada are not so much a musical act or a style as they are a huge dose of nostalgia injected straight into the main vein. They do things with electronic music that no one else, I think, has ever done before and no one has yet surpassed. To listen to their tracks is to be taken away into a past, safe world of childhood where the sun always shines and familiar things are always to hand. Their music is like being wrapped in a soft blanket and snuggled. This is a group about which you don't care how they do it. You just enjoy the fact that they do.

9. Nine Inch Nails (Corona Radiata)

Trent Reznor is another guy I became aware of a long time after everyone else probably did. Almost 20 years after probably. But that's because, to me, Reznor has got more interesting the longer he has been active. By around 2010 he had become a film score composer and was also dabbling in working in different ways. The loud, depressed, alternative rock guy who had passed me by had become the mature, reflective thinker whose words on things musical I always like to think about myself. We need more people like Reznor who view sound itself as a communicative language. The Nine Inch Nails of Ghosts or The Slip or Hesitation Marks are, to me, infinitely more interesting than the one of The Downward Spiral, an album I can never listen through to the end of. But the latter came from the former and Reznor's musical journey keeps on getting more and more interesting. And influential.

10. Gary Numan (Are Friends Electric?)

One of those who influenced Reznor (because, as in everything, its all about networks of relations here) was Gary Numan, the London punk who popped up in 1979 and stole the electronic thunder from all the arty college boys who thought that they were the vanguard of British electronic music. The story goes that Numan one day found a Minimoog Model D in the studio he was in and, never having heard of it before, played it and liked it. The rest is history. Numan is an influence because so many 90s and and 00s electronic musicians say he is. He got in there first with a slightly punky, slightly alternative take on synths and had a few big hits. And people tend to remember stuff like that. His music was ripe to be mined and built upon by alternative rockers in the 90s and beyond. And it was. (Check out the video to this that I linked to. Its a live performance that features Billie Currie of Ultravox on an Arp Odyssey.)

11. Throbbing Gristle (Hot On The Heels of Love)

Not really a record very representative of Throbbing Gristle's output in the main, this track is, nevertheless, a standout one and representative of the fact that when Throbbing Gristle weren't making art to make a point (and they always were) they were actually musically very interesting. I've seen this track described elsewhere as one that deconstructs Moroder's "I Feel Love" riff and then smacks him back in the face with a stripped down version of it. But that's just pretentious music press bollocks and you won't find any of that here. The Gristles have an enduring appeal not just for their sound experiments (and everything they did was often an experiment, indeed, that was kind of the point of anything they did) but also for their attitude. Why make music if you have nothing to say?

12. Howard Jones (Hide and Seek)

It would have been easy for me to try and sublimate this choice and hide it away. There are trendier acts I could have chosen. But that would be to falsify the past. I was indeed a Howard Jones fan in the early 80s. Yes, time has not been kind to him and history doesn't make him one of the great names of the electronic past. But he was there and a few of his songs informed my teenage mind. So that counts as an influence on me. Jones was thoroughly conventional in pretty much every way but he did play synths - the Jupiter 8 being his signature instrument. When you're 13 or 14 just seeing someone playing a Jupiter 8 and wondering how it works and what it does is enough.

13. Daft Punk (Prime Time of Your Life)

Yes, they smacked it out of the park now with Random Access Memories. But I was there before that. Of course, I'd noted Da Funk. But the album of theirs that's really in my heart is the one everyone else passes over - Human After All. This is electronic music with a message. This music IS the message. The track I've chosen is an example in point. Listen to it and think. Because that's what they want you to do.

14. Underworld (Cowgirl)

Somehow Underworld seem to have emerged from the 90s dance craze and matured into electronic musicians par excellence. They largely got under my radar although Born Slippy was a track no one could ignore in 1996. Yet by 2012 they were working on projects like doing the music for the Olympics opening ceremony. They have a definitely British sound and are largely guys who get their heads down and just make music. A listen to their back catalogue is more than rewarding.

15. Leftfield (Open Up)

Leftfield's album Leftism is maybe the best album of the 1990s, a decade I often think of as a black hole in musical terms. For me the 70s and 80s is where all the invention comes from and everyone else after is just footnotes to what these people did. But some things from later still stand out and Leftism is one such thing. Its a masterpiece album of morphing electronic genres, always with a danceability that can't be shaken off. Open Up, which features the vocals of butter-selling ex punk, John Lydon, (ex The Sex Pistols) tears into your soul with its pounding rhythms and Lydon's unmistakable vocal tone.

16. Goldfrapp (Train)

Goldfrapp are a British delight. Formed by a blonde singer and the ex-saxophonist from Tears for Fears, they embarked with this century on a career of creating sonic masterpieces. On their first three albums this was expressly electronic and synthesized (the two had made an agreement that guitars could not be used at that time). What we got was the delicate album, Felt Mountain, and two glamrock, dancehall stompers, Black Cherry and Supernature. The Goldfrapp of these albums is by far my favourite. Later they would mellow and diversify but throughout they remained dedicated and skillful artistes who work with sound.

17. Depeche Mode (Enjoy the Silence)

There are, of course, at least two (and probably three or four) Depeche Modes. The first was Vince Clarke Depeche Mode. Now I pay homage to Martin Gore Depeche Mode. Violator is their highpoint as a band. Its the album that made them artists of worldwide renown. Personal Jesus and Enjoy the Silence are probably tied equally as my favourite singles of all time. As electronic musicians I can't actually think of another band who have stayed as popular and as at the forefront of music as Depeche Mode have. Most of the rest (including all the pioneers) faded away and died or retreated to some sonic backwater. And Depeche Mode have sold more albums than pretty much any other electronic artist too. That alone would make them "influencers". And so it is highly appropriate that perhaps the pre-eminent electronic band of my musical lifetime should bookend my choices.


You can listen to the songs I chose for my "time machine" HERE!!!

A Change is As Good As A Rest

This week has been a reinvigorating and refreshing one for me in a creative sense. I predicted some weeks ago that my creativity would inevitably break down and that what I had been doing for 9 months would quite organically collapse. And so it has proved to be. A combination of being constitutionally unable to continue repeating myself and the dreaded month of October, in which my world always seems once more to descend into the depths, with the vanishing light and the increase of night, have made my premonition come true.

And so the Berlin School-influenced music has now vanished. This week, in its place, came experiments with noise and sound. In a strange way I'm still locked into the same German influences that I have been following all year though. Listen to the first album by Tangerine Dream from 1969 (Electronic Meditation) or to the first couple of albums by Cluster (who were then called Kluster) or Popol Vuh's first album (Affenstunde) and what you hear is musical experimentations with sound. Nothing more and nothing less. There is no song structure here. Its merely playing with sound until you decide to stop. Fast forward into the 80s, 90s and 00s and people like Coil, Autechre and Aphex Twin are found doing pretty much the same thing but with different tools.

                Kluster (later Cluster) - Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius

I have this notion in my head, thats been growing for some time now, that a fixation with making a tune is a great deceiver in making music. There is, of course, a mainstream bias towards it. No piece of noise art would get into a popular chart. Even the great names of noise genres were never popular in a mainstream sense. Tangerine Dream only did one album playing with sounds before developing into the makers of evolving electronic music that they came to be with their many TV and film soundtracks to keep them going. Industrial acts like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire or Test Dept, who similarly wanted to play with sound, are niche bands with artistic or political things to say. They are not mainstream acts. Even the aforementioned Aphex Twin, the hero these days of fanboys everywhere, is not a popular artist in a mainstream sense. Most people would not know who he is. But people do know who any number of artists are who will knock out the lamest of tunes. Its music you can hum. Arcade Fire and Coldplay are popular. IDM artists and old German noise experimenters are not.

Aphex Twin

Autechre

And yet it quickly becomes clear to any musician with any sense of adventure whatsoever that the world is full of sounds both imaginable and unimaginable. And, as I've said over and over again, there are no rules in music. And you cannot "go wrong". "A mistake" only exists if you conceive of the idea that there is something you should have done instead of what you actually did do. But what if you forget the idea of having an antecedent plan for where you want to go and, instead, you just throw things together? What if you made up some arbitrary rules and just followed them? What if pitch and tune became completely irrelevant to the process? What if the only thing that matters in music is not that you can save it and repeat it (my current pet hate) but that you can manipulate it, twist it and mangle it into insensibility right now in this moment which is all that matters? No two performances of music (even when its meant to be the same piece) will ever be the same anyway. So why keep trying to replicate?

None of this is new of course. The musical avantgarde of the 40s, 50s and 60s were already embracing such ideas 60 or even 70 years ago. My favourite of these people is John Cage with his chance operations in which he would arbitrarily follow some rules or ideas he had made up or that the I Ching (an ancient Chinese divination text utilizing cleromancy) had ordained he must follow. This was music at random. Brian Eno is famous for his "oblique strategies" which are his own way of following a random rule or idea and just seeing where it takes you. David Bowie has always utilized random ways of writing lyrics for his songs, either with paper and scissors or in electronic ways. Throbbing Gristle often seemingly had no guide at all other than choosing an instrument and then playing it exactly the way you were not intended to. Cosey Fanni Tutti, the guitar player, would often play the electric guitar sitting down by hitting it with something or bowing it rather than strumming the strings or playing recognizable chords. (She still does this today together with fellow former TG member and her partner, Chris Carter, in their current musical endeavours.) She also had a cornet she couldn't play, not that it mattered. Autechre's increasing uses of software to make music has often resulted in outcomes that were not predictable to the musicians themselves and has given much of their work the flavour of sound abstraction.

                                             Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter

So why do this? In my own mind its because not doing things "properly", not being able (or wanting) "to play" or just saying "fuck the rules and expectations" is actually a very freeing thing to do. There is no bigger boundary to artistic freedom than being told there is a way that you should  do something or that there is an expectation it needs to have a certain structure, style or expected outcome. I don't think that people who play up to these standards are being particularly artistic nor are they really doing anything other than joining the dots. It is relatively easy to write "a song". Anyone, even if they don't know it, can write a simple repeating pattern of notes. Repeat it for three minutes and you have a song. Easy. But why do it? There are, of course, many who have long and enduring commercial careers based on their ability to bash out the same thing for years. But who said that commerce or getting rich were the goals of musical art? All things must pass, including your incredible wealth and lame, mainstream and very popular music. But what did you stand for?

Let's get to what I've been doing this week. I have this notion that ideas are the currency of artists. It is then for the artist to use whatever skill he or she has to bring the ideas they have to fruition. But the idea is key. My idea this week has been relatively simple: take a number of sounds or pieces of music or noises and just juxtapose them on a sequencer timeline. Do this unconsciously and in no way deliberately (that means often not even knowing what the music or sound or noise is) almost like throwing playing cards on to a table and letting them fall where they may. Then, once you have given each sound a track, play with them. Change their speed, reverse them, chop them up, add effects to some but not others (reverbs, distortion and delays are favourites here). None of this is new. Its all been done before. But its freeing because no one, especially not you, even knows what you will get at the end. Often I didn't even listen to what I had got at the end. I just made sure the sound level was tolerably OK and recorded what was there. Listening back to the album was the first time I heard the whole piece. Its amazing and interesting that often what you get is a strange kind of preternatural beauty as sounds combine and contrast in unexpected ways.

You, of course, may be sitting there thinking this is all noise with no redeeming features and that art is deliberation, a product of an artist using their talents to create something on purpose that conforms to rules. But consider this: no one made the countryside but I bet you find it beautiful to look at. The universe itself is random in the most radical way it could be. And isn't it full of wonder! What I've done this week is the same principle applied to sounds as I juxtaposed things without any real care for what they were or how I did it. And my attitude in making it was to allow the random sounds to reveal their inner beauty in the process of simply placing noises into a relationship with each other. And for that to happen you have to be open to it and not bounded in by notions of the "right" way to do things or what in the end are themselves completely arbitrary notions of right and wrong in any case. So what I did this week was part therapy, a break from the norm, part philosophy, an opening of my mind to possibilities, and part music, a creative playing with sound.

I've made 7 albums of this stuff so far because its relatively quick and easy to do. A couple of hours can easily produce 8 tracks and 30-40 minutes of music. In vinyl days that was a whole album. Of course, there will be a further bias at play here and that is the bias towards the thing that is difficult and takes effort over the thing that that is easy and quick and takes little effort. "It can't be worth much if it was so easy to do" will be the thought of some. And yet many of us humans are the result of a 2 minute fumble in the back of a car. Are we worth nothing either because of the easy circumstances of our creation?

In music and in life it might often be beneficial to think differently - just to see what could be rather than meekly accepting, in the most conservative way possible, what "is".

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.

Forces of Nature

Who wants to live forever? Well, not me, that's for sure. I have never been seduced by the idea of a life that never ends. A life that stops? Now that is much more attractive. Its true that there was a time, in my formative years, when I was seduced by the dark side, by Christian voices speaking of an "eternal life" in "heaven" where all the "believers" went to. But the problem with that was that the older I got, and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to be a childish fairy tale. It is now many years since I gave it any thought at all as a serious proposition. A current version of this belief, in new, technological guise, is held by some transhumanists who hope to build machines we can become and therefore expand our lives into the far future.

Another problem with this "eternal" talk (and there are problems with it, to be sure) is our growing knowledge of the universe. It would take only basic scientific knowledge (such as I have) to know that in the last five centuries or so our knowledge of what is out there beyond our planet has increased enormously (in relative, if not actual, terms). Five hundred years ago you could have pointed up into the sky and said that that is where God lives (whichever one you happened to believe in). Its a bit harder to do that these days and believers in gods have had to modify and make slightly more sophisticated what they say they believe in. For when we look beyond our planet's borders now, as we are increasingly able to do, we just see the endless soup of space, a billion planets in a solar system here, a billion more there. And that pattern seems to be repeated everywhere that we can see, minus an anomaly or too. 

It remains true, of course, that we humans have pathetically tiny perspectives on things. That same interest in our universe informs us that we live on an insignificant planet that orbits a nothing star. We have gone from being the centre of God's creation to being just another planet in only a few short centuries. What's more, rather than a feeling of permanence that we often have about our lives, we know that this star we orbit will not last forever. Our sun is burning itself up and one day (in about 5 billion years) the fuel will have run out. At that point the sun will have expanded to such size that life on Earth will have ended long ago and our planet itself will be destroyed. So we humans are here on an extended holiday and we can't stay because the planet itself is scheduled for destruction by the universe.

My new album is called Forces of Nature. In making it I was thinking about those things that seem somewhat more basic, more fundamental, more eternal, if you will, than all the others. Most things around us, our (lack of) insight into them notwithstanding, are very temporary. Indeed, in a world obsessed with things material (and not least scientists, who hold materialism as a tenet of their scientific faith) it is brought home to us very strongly that physical things are things that are not meant to last. To be sure, by our counting some things last a long time. But human eyes and human time spans are as nothing. A mountain range may last 50-100 million years before it is no more. That is age upon age to us. But in terms of the universe it isn't that much. The mountain seems permanent as we climb it but it is going away as surely, if more slowly, as we are. It shows us that how you see informs what you see. Leave anything on our planet lying around for long enough and it will crumble to dust.

So what things did I think of as those basic forces of nature? I started very scientifically with the four actual primary forces (or interactions) of nature that scientists cannot, as yet, break down into any smaller or constituent processes. These forces are gravity, electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear. These four are the interactions in physical systems that don't appear to be reducible to more basic interactions. But then things became interesting for me. I wanted to add some things to the list, things not quite so.... material such as our materialist scientist friends might add. Could I think of four non-material things to add to the list, things which, as far as we might be able to conjecture, were equally as basic to the universe, equally as prevalent, equally as universal? What I came up with will surely be controversial but is none the worse for that. As a thought experiment alone my exercise was worthwhile. The four items I came up with were as follows:

Time
Life
Consciousness
Decay

We can quibble over many things regarding my four items and I hope you will think about them as "universals". The four are, at least, ideas. I will also concede that at least three of them are connected to physical things. "Decay", for example, is a process that happens to all physical things (even if it happens so slowly that we humans, here today and gone tomorrow, can't see it). "Time" is the name we give to the fact that we can order things as events, some before others and some after. "Life" is the name we give to certain processes that seem to indicate an organism. "Consciousness" is what we have called a sense of awareness. 

But these things, attached to a world of physicality such as we inhabit, are also somewhat more mysterious (as perhaps all things are). They also point us in a direction which says something about us too. For all these things are our universe as seen through human eyes. The universe knows nothing of time or consciousness (unless it is itself conscious - an intriguing thought!). The universe decays daily and knows nothing of it nor cares. Life, in the terms of the universe, is just another energy process, the universe being understood in its entirety as merely the history of certain forms of energy and their processes. There are no more or less important things in our universe. But there are to us and, in that sense, these things become ideas which are important to people and to the ways they understand things. And so they become constituent parts in the tales we tell us about ourselves, where we live and who we are. They become part of the myth-making we humans have needed to inform ourselves since we could first string words together. In other words, these fundamental forces of nature are part of a human story.

And so Forces of Nature, an electronic, instrumental album made with synthesizers and drum machines, turns out to be a story about the universe and our place in it. In that story there are fundamental, primeval forces at work, inscrutable forces, forces we can neither grasp nor understand. They could be seen from one angle as mechanical processes and from another as the properties of things. I conceive of them, in some ways, as fields of vision on our universe which unite scientific, physicalist points of view with ones more spiritual. In my story all things are mysterious. Human beings are tiny beings stretching out their puny hands to know more but lost in the void of all time and space, not realizing just how BIG and beyond them everything really is. 

My myth of the universe is of a universe unknown, barely grasped, sometimes intuited. It is a universe of physical conditions and as yet unknown possibilities. It is a universe that contains life and consciousness, both things we don't understand, things more than the merely physical. But it is also a myth of a universe with an end. Decay is a constant, on-going process and it occurs daily in the form of change. I have tried to add these ideas to my myth in the form of two bonus tracks to my album, The Void and Heat Death. The Void acts in my myth as the context of everything. The universe is described as a big, dark, meaningless place. There is no logic to this place, no order. There are no rules for how it works. It just is. Make of it what you will. Or can. But then there is Heat Death. Heat Death is our event horizon. It is the terminal limit of this universe of my myth. Scientists tell us that the universe is cooling and in some trillions of years it will effectively become completely dead as it goes cold.

So these forces of nature of mine are a part of my myth of the universe. It is the universe we live in and my way of trying to explain it to myself and situate myself within it. It is, unlike religious myths, not a story of how I may or may not please implacable gods. It is not a story of how they are ultimately in charge of things. It is a story of a universe shaped by forces and processes. To be sure, this seems a lot less secure than it might. But who said that the universe is a place of safety? And it surely does not care what happens to anything. In my universe things just happen. Sometimes in the change and decay beautiful moments occur and sometimes these things can be beautiful destruction. Imagine, for example, a star exploding. My myth does, I think, help us to recognise just something of our place in the order of things. We are not at all important. But we do get to play the tiniest part in the history of all things. 

And that should be enough.


Forces of Nature is available now at MY BANDCAMP.

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!

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.

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.