I, Pixel

In the course of a day several artistic enterprises will scroll down my various timelines and, at random, I will choose to partake of them. Most often these are music but, like most other people, if I know something of what I might expect from the people concerned, I usually let it pass on by unless what I am expecting in some way might satisfy my current mood. This, of course, is a terrible thing and an example of something I hate: knowing too much. I hate the fact that we think we know things, that things have been put in a box in our minds and, forever after, stay in that box and affect our judgment about them. Of course, one answer to this would be if creative people were so varied and imaginative that they could be surprising rather than creatures of habit that turn out more of the same thing again and again. That is an artistic fight I try to take on. But I cannot speak for others and their motives. More fool them, I say, if they are happy to be in the box.

However, it is best of all when something comes along that has no box, that is, in some sense, contextless and therefore innocent of our knowing. Then we can enjoy the pure thrill of appreciating something that comes with no baggage and about which we do not know too much. Such a thing came into my timeline yesterday. It was a 7 minute video called "Pixelate" and you can watch it HERE! 

                                     A still from "Pixelate"

A basic description of the video is to say that it is simply 7 minutes of ever-changing pixels. But that would be like describing the film "Jaws" as a film about hunting a shark. It is but its much more than that. From the moment I first watched "Pixelate" until now, after several watches, I've found the video to be both therapeutic and intellectually challenging. The surprising thing to me on first watch, as I enjoyed that virgin experience of the first time, something that can never be repeated, was that I started to ask questions about what I was seeing. First of all I asked myself "What does this mean?". This wasn't really a question of intention either. I wasn't asking myself what the author of the piece, Ian Haygreen, thought it meant. I wasn't asking after his purpose in making it. Indeed, I don't know the answers to these questions nor do I think I need to. Instead, I was asking myself if there was any meaning to be found in the shifting landscapes of pixels as they moved around in various chaotic patterns. In a way I suppose I was an observer observing myself observing as I did this too. I was asking myself about what I was asking of the video. And so it became natural to ask why I was asking myself what the pixels might mean.

The patterns of pixels on the screen were very chaotic and most of the time they shifted and changed at quite a speed. It became a hypnotic experience. The rather quiet and atmospheric ambient soundtrack played a part in this too, I'm sure. The effect was a kind of unobtrusiveness which could work its way into your consciousness unannounced. As the pixels shifted and changed I continued to ask myself the meaning question. I asked myself about the relationships of one pixel to another, whether it mattered what colour each pixel was. I imagined the pixels were people. Now, with these pixels representing people, it was a question of asking what meaning there was in all these people running around in their immediate relationships one to another like the ever-shifting pixels on the screen. I wasn't sure it mattered what colour the pixels were. But does it matter what colour the people are? There was a sense of ambiguity. What if all these pixels were just symbols for people? The pixel fields just changed. No one had more priority than any other one. Make them people and does anything change?

The hypnotic effect of the pixels changing, without commentary, guidance or context, became quite nihilistic. It seemed to be saying "Things just happen. Stuff goes on as it will. You can attach whatever meaning you like to these events but its not fixed or binding. Or even necessary."  It occurred to me that within the changing pixel landscapes I could look at them as if they were moving left to right across the screen. But then, with a change of concentration, I could make it seem as if they were going the other way too. And, thus, I had power over history and events. I could say in which direction they were going and I could look at things as if they were indeed doing that. The pixels were powerless to stop me. The pixels were just material for my interpretive apparatus to get to work on. And I considered once more that other things, things that might be taken to be more serious, were just the same as these pixels. The example of Brexit came to mind. To one group of people this is freedom and taking back control. The direction of travel is a new and glorious future. But to some other observers it is disaster and xenophobia and leads directly to the dark ages. Who is right? Both and neither of course because you can see the pixels moving however you want.

I started to ask myself if the meaning question I was asking was the right question to be asking at all. It occurred to me that asking the question "What does this mean?" is a question we often ask of many things, if not everything, but that, maybe, a lot of the time we should just step back and not ask it. I am aware that notable psychologists, such as the inventor of Logotherapy, Viktor Frankl, are of the view that people have a need of meaning in order to exist. Frankl's academic and therapeutic work in the area of psychology strongly suggests that people are simple meaning-making factories who generate meaning as a means of survival. Frankl himself personally survived Nazi concentration camps (including Auschwitz) while most others in his family did not so we can understand how he reached his conclusion. But, nevertheless, it still begs the question of whether we need to be asking questions of meaning at all. These pixels I was staring at could easily have been regarded as simple meaningless and ever-changing configurations. There were, it might be said, no consequences from regarding them as meaningless. But when it comes to other things we find it much harder to believe this. Yet why? Aren't the events that go on around us, the relationships we make and build to other things, equally as meaningless in the end? Why not let go of our attachments, created always by us and for us, and just see everything as pixels?

I saw the pixels here as representatives for other things. I saw them in ever-changing relationships to the other pixels around them. This made me replace them with other things and wonder if anything had really changed. Life just goes on, I thought. Existence takes its path of least resistance always being in relation to other things yet never having any necessary binding relation to other things - unless we make it so. Nothing has to mean anything. Meaning doesn't work like that. It is plastic and some other, contrary, meaning can always be ascribed to the same events - just as I made the pixel stream change direction. (It's not even clear the pixels were in a stream actually so maybe I created the connections between the pixels and made them a stream too.) I slowly became a pixel myself and realized that that could mean both everything and nothing.

Pixelate was created by musician and, apparently, filmmaker, Ian Haygreen who is on Twitter @IanHaygreen

Music, Meaning and Harsh Noise

I am back blogging again and, as usual, it is thoughts on things I've observed that is animating me. If you are an electronic musician the first quarter of the year is an interesting time because it is the time when all the manufacturers show their new products for the year. There is much wonderment and awe at what boffins in sheds or industrial scale manufacturers in corporate headquarters have produced. There is then the febrile atmosphere of the Internet to deal with as any number of informed and uninformed people (the Internet does not discriminate) comment on what has been revealed and say where they would have done things differently, what they want and what they hope to get. Or, like me, they just stare and wish because they are poor. Of course, this is not to suggest that making electronic music is about a big, fancy studio full of thousands of pounds worth of gear. This is to fall prey to the commercialist myth that if you don't have something expensive then you don't have anything worth having. This is snobbish rubbish and I utterly reject it. The simplest piece of battery-operated electronic crap is enough to make electronic music with if you can find something to record it with.

Now I have lots of time to look at the Internet. Probably too much. And so, naturally, I see a lot of these discussions as well as product demonstration videos, people jamming with their gear and round table discussions such as the plethora of electronic music podcasts which have sprung up lately. If you were to take too much notice of all of this stuff, stuff which is growing exponentially, then you would certainly never have time to do anything else. You become a person who talks about doing rather than one who simply does and music is about doing not talking. But these things, should you pay heed to them, are indicative of a kind of community sense of ideas that are at large amongst your average common or garden electronic music maker. Its some of these notions that have animated me this week enough to want to blog about it. Specifically, I have found over and over people commenting about what they regard as "music" or "musical" uses of things. Worst of all is that phrase "musically meaningful" which I find sprayed about from time to time. Its worrying.

A typical scenario of the type I'm talking about here (for example, a demo) is some person noodling on a modular synth or with some small electronic device. Often there will be some simple arpeggio or sequence playing at these times and if the person concerned hasn't prepared in advance it might not be the sweetest melody you've ever heard. At some point someone might well say, embarrassed by the sound they are making, "Let's try and make something more musically meaningful". Its at this point that, should I be drinking one, I will splutter out my cup of tea across the computer keyboard. What, I wonder in my provocative way, is "musically meaningful" when its at home? Now in the sense these people usually mean it this is saying something about what they perceive music to be at all. In short, they are revealing their prejudices. These prejudices are often on display when, for example, modular synth music is discussed. Its bleeps and bloops and that is "not musically meaningful" is what they mean. But when did this rule come out? Who decided that bleeps were devoid of meaning? Who says static isn't beautiful? Who, indeed, got themselves elected to the Chair of Musical Meaning with the right to decide what sounds mean something and what sounds don't? Wouldn't an arbiter of meaning be a god?

With such nuclear prejudices on display one can start to wipe out whole areas of culture. One form of electronic music today is known as Harsh Noise. This is exactly what that description makes you think it is. And I am sure that to people who talk about things being "musically meaningful" it is the exact antithesis of that kind of music that they would find meaning in. It has no tune, it is not sweet or subtle and it is extremely challenging to even listen to. I have dabbled in this form myself recently but not with any conviction because I seem more constitutionally drawn to the abstract nature of sound rather than its harshness. Harshness for me is part of a palette of sounds rather than the palette itself. Harsh things can be brutal and brutalising and that is not where I am. But I can appreciate that others are and I have been listening to some lately. I get it but at the same time I know that if I was doing it myself it would not seem authentically me. But this world of ours is about more than just you. There are a multitude of voices out there and trust me when I tell you that you are not unique in wanting to be heard. Its a basic human need. This a good thing for I find, in my idealistic and optimistic way, that the multitude of human voices comes together somehow in a choir of all human possibilities, hopes and fears.

We are many people with many voices. You get the point. And none is valid and none is invalid. Or, if you prefer, all are valid and all are invalid. For they just are, extant in our world wherever someone feels the need to make a sound and say it means something. And that is really all it takes for something to be meaningful. A sound is made and someone finds meaning in it. There are no overarching arbiters here. We do not live in a situation where we can ascribe meaning to something and then someone else can come along and rule it out of bounds. Well, we live in a situation where people will try to do that all the time. But so long as someone gives something meaning then, for them at least, it has it. That might be bleeps and bloops, abstract, wandering sounds or 10 minutes of harsh, full volume static. Who are you or I to decide when or if something is meaningful for anyone but ourselves? What arrogance would such a leap take? What bogus notions are involved in coming to such a preposterous conclusion?

Harsh Noise I find to be an instructive category in this respect. I do sometimes wonder at the motivations of people for doing what they do. It is very easy (all too easy) for each of us to imagine that everyone else is like us and this is a common human failing. Having recently been put in contact with some Harsh Noise makers who had joined together to make an album I ventured to ask them what it meant. It turned out that what they thought about their music was much like me about mine. They seemed to be people with ideas who wanted to interpret those ideas in sound. I suspect that it is important to them that this is "sound" or "noise" and not a melody because, as with the Kosmische musicians from the late 60s and early 70s in Germany, they want a sound which marks them out as different from other people and which leaves them free to bring self-expression to the fore. They want themselves or the improvisational situation they find themselves in to be the boundary and not some imposed social notion of what "music" is or of what is acceptable. They want something which they can regard as theirs. 

To make music in someone else's recognizable style is to associate yourself with it and what it means, either consciously or unconsciously. Nothing exists in a vacuum of meaning for us and so there will always be links to something else, a network of relationships. So where you insert yourself in this network matters. It has meaning. Harsh Noise has a history in socio-cultural and political contexts. It is a form of music about thought, ideas and social action. For example, I have recently added a track to an album of noise makers protesting at the UK government's social policies called "These Are Those That Kill With Cuts". In addition, one person from the Harsh Noise Movement told me that the records he releases through his Bandcamp page are about "free thinking" and I think that describes it very succinctly. Harsh Noise music is not about other people's conventions. It does not bow down to someone else's idea of meaning. It makes its own.

So here we have very deliberate harsh noise and we have people who find it meaningful to listen to and to make. Are they wrong? Are any of my readers prepared to say, definitively, that these people are mistaken and that's actually not the case? I suspect not because I expect that my readers are self-aware enough to realize that meaning comes from within and not from without. We human beings are the meaning-makers. We make meaning. If we are electronic musicians like me then we make it with electronic devices. There is no such thing as a sound that has no meaning just as much as there is no such thing as a sound that is inherently meaningful (although we have been trained to regard certain sounds in certain places as having certain meaning such as a door bell, for example). Sounds are tools we use to inscribe meanings into performances and recordings. It may be the maker is the only one who understands or even hears the meaning that they put into it. But this doesn't matter. Each of us has our own network of meanings and each of us can slot any sound we hear into that network. Indeed, we don't even have a choice in this because it is going on autonomically without our express permission. We are meaning-makers and we seek meaning. We can't stop so long as we are still breathing.

So what of those who find no meaning in the bleeps and bloops, the static and the distortion? Being polite, they haven't thought it through. They are, at best, merely dressing up a preference as a fact and this is another common human trait. Its one that jars with me because I see a broader canvas for musical meaning than a trite tune that relies on melody and harmony. I remember reading recently that in the late 90s Thom Yorke of Radiohead felt a similar way. A quote I remember is that he said the very idea of writing a melody at that time simultaneously depressed him and filled him with dread. He wanted freedom from the artificial socio-cultural boundary that said "music" was a melody and that anything else was somehow not ok or out of order. He wanted to flee into abstraction and I can well understand that because I have myself fled there too. I don't want to write a tune. A tune would say nothing I want to say. A tune would just be playing someone else's game by someone else's rules. For some people their music is therapy and a means to their survival and so, in this scenario, self-expression becomes very important and if other people conventions must be confounded to do that then so be it. I feel myself in a very abstract world and so it is a matter of some importance to me that I can express myself abstractly. I imagine that the harsh noise makers haven't chosen their form of musical expression by chance either.

But is it musically meaningful? You better believe it is. Its often a matter of life and death, or so it seems.

In writing this blog I referred to some harsh noise makers. I feel it only respectful to name check their album since they kindly replied to my questions so helping me formulate the blog today. 

The album is THE DANGER OF BEING SUBJECTIVE and is by @waynerex80, @Ghost_Jazz_ and @NoizeMuzik (to use their Twitter names). The album can be listened to at https://harshnoisemovement.bandcamp.com/album/the-danger-of-being-subjective 

The other album I referred to is These Are Those That Kill With Cuts  on Sonic Entrails Records which can be found on Twitter, Facebook, Soundcloud and Bandcamp. It is soon to be released as a cassette.

Musical Conundrums and Annoyances

I recently returned to Facebook after about 5 years not using it. Before you rush to add me though please don't bother. I'm not using it as the friend adding exercise that many do. The fact is there are a number of interest groups on there which are useful to be a member of and its where other people have decided to congregate. Sometimes Mohammed has to go to the mountain. However, the problem with the mountain is that it draws all and sundry to it. The breaking news is that there are other people in the world and they don't think the same as you. Now I am, as you may have discerned from reading previous blogs here, a person who appreciates a certain measure of independent thought. However, if anywhere is going to demonstrate that there are lots of people happy to go along with "what everyone else thinks" then that place is Facebook. Nowhere is this more true than with the subject of music.

Everyone, I imagine, thinks they know what music is. Music is all around us and probably most of us hear some of it every single day. But let me ask you a question: can you define as precisely as possible exactly what music is? Have a go now. I will wait.......

Got a definition that you think works and applies to every single thing that could be called music? OK, on we go.

More than once this past week in casually reading posts in synthesizer groups on Facebook I have come across people who say "music" when what they actually mean is "melody". They speak as if "melody" and "music" are interchangeable synonyms and the issue here is that they just aren't! "Melody" is something that may or may not be present within music you are listening to. It is not equivalent with music. So when someone makes a synthesizer poll asking what people do with their modular synth and the first option is "use it musically" I start to wonder what they mean by "musically". It turns out that what they mean is "does not use it abstractly or to make random noises". Because for the poll writer this seems in his mind to be a non-musical use. For him music is equated with being a matter of melody and something all about pitch. Music, for him, is what you do when you take pitches and put them together in a deliberate and pleasing way. Is it just me that finds this both a huge misstep and an incredibly narrow definition of music? 

John Cage defined music as "the arrangement of sounds and silence" (I paraphrase) and this seems to me a much better and much fuller definition of what music is. I have taken it as my own and I hope the now dead Cage will not mind if I do so. Even that very brief definition I find to be staggeringly deep and profound. This is not just because Cage includes absence of sound in his mind-blowingly simple definition of what music is. Its also because he doesn't necessarily infer that this arrangement be deliberate and the result of the actions of a person. Music is not necessarily, within that definition, something someone writes. It could be something someone sets up the conditions for, like building an experiment and seeing what happens when you do, or the arbitrary juxtaposing of sounds, the making of a collage. (Cage did both and I have unashamedly copied him in doing so.) Imagine someone who takes a paint brush, dips it in some paint and then flicks the paint on the canvas. Now imagine a musician doing the same thing with sounds. For Cage, that is music (just as for Jackson Pollock with paint it was art.) For Cage the disinterested, fart noise making noodling of the modular synthesist unconcerned with pitch and the blowing of the wind are "music". For they are both an arrangement of sounds and silences.

This very simple and, for me, profound point seems lost on most people. I'm amazed how many people don't get it even when it is explained to them. They are stuck in a world where "music" is a tune. But its not, not simply so. Some music is tunes. Other music is textures, atmospheres, noises, noise, sounds. Cage himself once stood inside a chamber at a university which was designed to block out all sound. It was meant to be a completely silent place devoid of any noise at all. He discovered that even here he could hear the sound of his own bodily processes, his nervous system, his heart beat. Nowhere on Earth is completely silent. Sound is always with us, a symphony that never leaves us while we are awake. Cage had what I would describe as a fascination with sound and it is one of the things that I hope I have learned from him. Sound is fascinating. I am drawn to musicians who seem similarly fascinated with sound and not just, narrowly, with pitch and tunes. Another great musical area, one often overlooked, is timbre, the kind of sound that is being made. Pieces of music that focus on timbre as opposed to pitch are very interesting to me as are instruments which focus on an ability to change the timbre of a sound. This is why I like synthesizers which are in many respects made to be able to do this by design. Its why in the 40's, 50's and 60's there were people fascinated with magnetic tape. They found they could take one sound and make other, new sounds by manipulating it. Such a focus on timbre strikes me as both thoughtful and intimate. It speaks to me in ways that a tune could never do.

Whatever music is about I think that one major thing about music is its ability to convey two things: meaning and emotion. Each of us dislikes a lot of music. I think that we do that primarily because the music we dislike does not speak to us either in a way that makes any sense to us or in a way that communicates to us. We would say that it does not speak our language. Each of us approaches music differently of course. Some of us do it cerebrally and with much thought. Some of us will have technical insights into the making of music or have specific knowledge about things used to make it. But most of us are just listeners. We don't care who made it or how or with what. We just know if we like what we hear. We are all in the same position there, equals with tastes and preferences.

But have you ever thought what determines why you like what you hear? You like this piece of music but not that. Why? Doesn't it all seem a bit unexplainable and arbitrary? Isn't it the case that in the end even if you can say why you like something its not really an explanation for why you liked it in the first place? Its a retrospective justification for a decision you made somewhat instinctively. I find this both strange and fascinating. To me it seems something to do with things deep within us that sense emotion and ascribe meaning to things. For example, I like the dance track "Hideaway" by Delacy. You may know it. I don't know why I like it though. I can describe its pulsing beat and its lush pad sounds that swell but is that really an explanation? It doesn't tell you how it makes me feel. And that's the really powerful thing about it. It hits some pleasure center somewhere inside me I can't put my finger on. What I'm saying is liking music is not necessarily a rational decision. And it doesn't need to be. We humans are not rationality machines. We are bio-chemical organisms fed as much by emotion as reason. We are fed and informed as much by environment as logic. This is just one reason why it is monumentally stupid to think that you can logically depict good and bad music. Music does not admit of logical description or categorization. How you feel isn't logical and may not even be reasonable.

Thanks to the Internet I am fortunate to have some interesting conversation partners along the pathways of life. Often within passing conversations something is said which starts off a chain of thought. As someone interested in music, noise and sound I know of a few other people similarly interested and its interesting for me to observe their views on what they are doing. Recently in one conversation someone said to me that they thought most dance music was shallow, for example. Now I agree with this and I think that, for the most part, its meant to be. That is the point of dance music. (Surely the banality of what is now called "EDM" is its reason to be?) But then I went past the initial thought (something that's not always done!) and thought again. Surely the best dance music tracks actually break through that barrier? Surely the best dance music tracks are those which encompass and enshrine the meaning of a whole special moment that happened? Every time you hear this kind of dance track it in some way re-enacts that special moment and reincarnates it again for as long as it plays. The best dance music tracks, I thought, are those with that ability to bring some moment, feeling, emotion, sentiment, to life and fill it with meaning - just as the ambient, pioneering 70s electronic music it came from did. But that, to me, seems to encompass a number of things and not merely just a sugary pleasant repeating line of pitches. What makes a dance song great might well be who you heard it with and where you were as well.

In the same conversation the person concerned did not want to produce "shallow" music. Shallow, I guess, was regarded as a negative in this context but it need not be. Good musicians, musicians who think, will have purposes to what they do and will be trying to inscribe feelings and meanings into their work. Perhaps what the musician meant was that they want to feel like what they made means something. This is certainly what I have ineptly tried to do. I imagine that my music only really means what it means for me to me though. What it means for others will be up to them, who they are and where they are, literally and figuratively speaking.  The strangest songs mean the strangest things to the strangest people exactly because its a nexus of things that provide that spark of meaning in the first place. But, coming back to Cage, this is why sound itself is so interesting to me. As I write now I hear the tapping of my finger on the keys but also the faint whirr of the fan inside my computer. Outside somewhere in the distance I hear the sound of something I imagine to be a cement mixer. A car is now coming towards me and will go away again producing the Doppler Effect which is the effect produced by the change in the frequency of a sound wave relative to your own position. This is the background music to this blog. I hear it as a background symphony because I have that framework of understanding. But you may just hear it as noises or not even notice the sounds at all. What sounds are there with you now that you hadn't noticed until you actually listened?

In the last 3 months I have inadvertently made two separate projects of music. One was 4 albums long and one was 3 albums long. One concentrated on the sound of a particular synthesizer and was aiming to showcase a kind of grungy, metallic, distorted synth sound. The other was willfully and deliberately abstract, an exercise in a bricolage of textures. Both of them were focused on timbres. Pitches were irrelevant to me and I barely even paid attention to them. (Cage's statement that "disharmony is only a kind of harmony that you haven't got used to yet" ends the conversation regarding talk of "dissonance" in music as far as I'm concerned.) There are a few melodies and some tunefulness but if you listen for that you will largely be disappointed. It is my feeling that the timbre of a sound can communicate something that the pitch of a sound cannot. Does an F sharp make you feel happy whereas a B flat does not? Perhaps not. But sounds themselves, their timbres, can. You hear the sound of running water, it means something to you. People talking in a bar? It conveys a message. One of my recent tracks is a whole load of recordings of trains and the sounds they make put together as a track. This isn't an original idea but it is, I think, a powerful one. The end result sounds to me like music. It feels like an experience of sound and a journey. This, to me, is what music is. This is why I am so interested in it and why my only criterion as a musician myself is to make something that is interesting to me. Music should be interesting.

I have this crazy idea. The idea is that music should not be something that you graze, something that is entirely bent to the user's will and taste. I have the crazy idea that music should challenge, educate and inform the listener. This idea holds the hope that listeners are not just cows who want to unthinkingly chew grass for their whole lives. This idea has the hope that listeners are people who want to learn, be informed, and maybe even change. This idea is the hope that people can still be curious, can still be open to new experiences, can still be so vulnerable as to allow themselves to be challenged. It is the hope that music can be a means to communicating things, maybe even things that you don't want to be communicated. Its a crazy idea, I know. But its why the music I make is what it is. That music is my communication.

Is anybody listening? Can anybody hear?

My music is at https://elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com/ 

Eureka!

The human mind is an enigma. You can think about an issue for years, decades, and make little progress forward. But then, one day, seemingly for no reason, something clicks. At that point the mental thorn in your side, the niggle that wouldn't go away, the itch you couldn't scratch, becomes resolved. 

Such, for me, has been the issue of the apparent meaninglessness and purposelessness of the universe. Throughout the course of my life I've tried out various solutions to this question but none satisfied. There was still, appropriately enough, a hole at the center of my thinking about this. This hole is a meaningful symbol for what, more generally, might be described as The Void. The Void is where our existence is located and where we have our being. Its best expression is space itself, vast and inscrutable, a vast nothingness which reduces everything within it to just some more inconsequential detritus. It is impossible to place yourself in the context of the mass of space and imagine you are anything important or necessary at all. You just are. Remember that next time you imagine your views matter so much or that things around you must take notice of you. You are literally nothing special.

People, for as long as they could think, have wanted to ascribe some meaning to this vastness. Often they have wanted to ascribe some overarching purpose to it or give some reasoning which explains why everything is and how its all of a piece, a oneness, and to give it some reasonable basis for being. But people have always failed in this and this is why other thinkers have explored its emptiness and what that means for us as thinking people. But this is a clue to where we should be looking for answers. The Void is often conceived as everything out there and, in a spatial sense, it is. But this void of meaning, this void of understanding, is not out there. This particular void is inside each one of us. My "Eureka!" moment is realizing that, actually, we are the void. We have an absence of presence, a presence and substance we try to give things with our descriptive schemes in our role as engineers of a meaningless universe.

For what is it that creates this void of meaning and sets up the questions to which we can find no satisfying long-term answers? What is it that means that all we can ever do is relate things one to another, both giving them context and allowing them to fit into a map of our understandings and beliefs? It is us, us as the universe has given us life. This form of life of ours which must make meaning, must understand, must hold beliefs, it is this which creates the void that we cannot fill. It condemns us to relate things one to another in some great mental act of dexterity so that we can even survive. We must believe things. We must hold what we regard as understandings. Things must mean. Without these operations we would die. They animate us and give us purpose. And so its not some void out there that needs to speak to us and explain itself (and that's good because it never will). The void is in us. The Void is us. We are the ones who create the problem we then cannot solve. Just by being the beings we are. With this form of life we condemn ourselves to explanations but never to an explanation much less the explanation.

And so I ask myself "What is our form of Being?" and I reply "Chaos giving expression to itself." And then I ask "What is my existence?" and the reply comes back "A partaking in my form of Being." All our questions find an answer not out there, not from some God figure, whether personal or metaphorical, but in us, in our form of life, who we are. This form of life offers us up meanings but never the meaning. It gives us beliefs but never the truth. It proffers knowledge but never that thing beyond knowledge in which all talking and thinking would cease because, finally, we have found something that could speak for itself. If there was something (and it would be divine in the truest sense) that could speak for itself then we would have found what human beings have always searched for: something beyond their creative self-understandings with which they could get in touch and about which there would finally be no words, the thing that was not just another thing to relate to something else. But we don't have that. We never will. There are no divinities and, much as we would like it, no God substitutes either. All we have is a void we cannot fill but must, nevertheless, keep trying to.

Given this background, my mind wanders. I think about the Transhumanist agenda I've been interacting with for a year now. Transhumanists want to "improve" the human form of life and they think of this primarily in physicalist terms. So this means they want to stop bad physical outcomes like disease and illness and, eventually, even death itself. Obviously, overcoming death, that decay until life becomes impossible for an organism, is no small task. After all, the laws of the physical universe seem to be that all things decay and die on a long enough timeline. So Transhumanists are happy to go with extending life significantly as a starting point. But I have a huge problem with this and its there in a play by a French existentialist called Jean-Paul Sartre. The play is called No Exit. In this play there are but three characters and they have died. They are in a room and they, so the play seems to suggest, must spend their eternity together. The play focuses on their relationships (which in life were complicated) in this scenario and ends with the comment "Hell is other people".

This comment needs unpacking. Sartre is not saying there, at the climax of his play examining the idea that you would be in the public gaze for all eternity, that everyone else is a shit. That may or may not be the case from your point of view. Sartre's point is more that a life in the gaze of others that does not end is not a life in which people can be themselves. Its like this: imagine you yourself in your public life. You are constantly aware of other people in these types of situations and your behavior is molded to this scenario. You wouldn't do some things in public that you would do when you are home alone in your own place and you imagine no one is watching you. The point there is that the gaze of others changes your behavior and your consciousness of yourself. You often hear a related complaint made about social media where some people act like asses and are then told that they wouldn't act like that if we knew who they were. Exactly! The gaze of other people affects your behavior. Public CCTV cameras (of which the UK has amongst the most in the world) work on the same basis. You are being watched and its affects you. And so you become a socialized version of you and not the you you are by yourself. So why is Hell "other people"? Because it would be to act out that socialized, bad faith version of yourself that is a performance for public consumption forever.

And so how does this relate to Transhumanist dreams of radically extending life and to my "Eureka!" moment? I think its because the Transhumanist understanding of the human being, by which I mean the human form of being, is not adequate to the task. Primarily thinking of us as biological organisms in need of a pep up is not, I think, good enough. Its like thinking of us as a car and saying that if we had a more powerful engine we'd be a better car. Well, we might be. Or you might just ruin the car you had in the first place. Crucially, to my mind, such understandings do not take into account who we are and how we live in terms of our life and existence. And it needs to. Instead, it focuses quite narrowly on the perceived downsides of being physical, that we can be hurt, that we die, and says that if we could solve these things then, somehow (and this point is largely assumed and not explained) things would be better. One thousand years of you is better than eighty years of you, right? Really? Is that what being you is about? Are you just meat that needs to avoid hurt? I think that Transhumanists, either wittingly or unwittingly (and some seem more tuned into this consequence of their thinking than others, to be fair) want to actually supercede a human form of being for a post-human form of being. They want, I think, to head off into the "we are become gods" direction. They want the end of human being.

And this is the problem when, as I see it, we are The Void. Wanting to live forever and cure all diseases is just another way of trying to escape what fate has given us. (And being fated beings is yet another aspect of our being.) This is not to say that we shouldn't try to escape. Its not to say that we shouldn't do any of the things that Futurists or Transhumanists want to do. Its merely to contextualize it. It is, as Richard Rorty said, just one more way to try and escape "time and chance". Its another effort in the on-going plan to escape being human with all its flaws and failures, its pains and struggles. It doesn't, I think, understand or even examine what human being and human existence is at all. I don't think it is to glory in the physical flaws like some masochist to say this. But I see this as the real essence of humanity (in a descriptive and not an actual sense). The human being is the suffering animal, the animal that is aware but never sure of what it is aware. It is the animal that always lacks something. And knows it. It is the finite animal who can see death from almost the beginning of its days. It is the animal that wants and needs and desires. And knows it. Behold, it is become The Void.

I don't think that we will ever become gods. Far too much in this chaotic universe is out of our control. It seems that Dr Stephen Hawking is convinced we will kill ourselves and that some man-made disaster is inevitable at some point. There are many foreseeable future scenarios for this but its just as likely that an unseeable one gets us too. We don't have eyes in the back of our heads. But even if this didn't happen there is too much going on out there for us to control it all. Even the most arrogant of people wouldn't think we could account for everything (another human failing, incidentally). So I do not think that a divine life will ever be something we can approach. Indeed, I think that the urge for divinity is internally generated and part of this form of life that we have now. It is a way to fill The Void with meaning, as we must, as we are impelled by our existence as an expression of our form of being. We are more than biological organisms. Even if you do not think we are in any sense "consciousness" you can at least admit that we have a consciousness. This, too, is part of our being, part of who we are. And its who we are that concerns me when I read philosophers telling me that to become who you are is to find the most meaning that we can in life. 

But when you look into the mirror what do you see? 

Music and Meaning

Today I am... empty. Worthless. Meaningless. Irrelevant. Invisible. I knew this would happen. Some weeks ago on this blog I even predicted it and spoke of "Fall" and how, for some, this season is literally that. But knowing something intellectually or as a fact is not to feel it or to experience it with emotion. I also said at that time that I expected my music to become... worse. And it has. Its not anything I'm doing. I'm not trying to be worse. Or to not be worse. Its like an internal collapse that renders me irritable. The pathways that once poured forth of their bounty have run dry and only a viscous poison now leaks out. Putridly. And so now to make music is to sow poison or to administer my own death by a thousand infected cuts.

I was on a walk one day this week, one of my semi-regular attempts to give my mind time, space and fresh air. Suddenly, it occurred to me, quite by itself, that all my music is as nothing. Rubbish, empty, meaningless waste. This was a shocking but somewhat unsurprising thought. It was unsurprising because, as you will know if you have read some of my previous blogs, I am not one of those people who sees meaning in the universe, at least not the kind which is fixed, inscribed in the heavens and stable. Temporary, contingent, here-today-gone-tomorrow meaning I will grant you. But what use is that? In that moment, none at all. I felt adrift, in the void.

My music, I came to realize as I continued on my walk, the thoughts racing and the connections being made with every step, had become a place where I located meaning. Everything I release has some kind of personal meaning and some kind of internal sense and reason for its existence in my mind. It is the only way I can make anything at all. If I listen back to something I can tell you what it means and, often, what I was feeling at the time and why. But so what? My own personal monologue in sounds is neither profound, worthy nor meaningful in the end, right?

This week I have also started reading a book by Jacques Attali. The book is called Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Within the book, Attali attempts to set music and its uses within a historical and political context, showing first where it came from (ritual murder) and in its various places throughout history from the ecstatic cult of Dionysus as something wild, inspirational and dangerous, through its use by Jongleurs to the privilege and patronage of courts and kings, the liturgy of churches, the means of asserting wealth and power and to the present day as a marketable commodity. My description there is not quite complete but, if you're interested in music, you should get hold of the book and read it in any case. 

I have to date only read the first chapter of the book but Attali uses this first chapter to set out his total thesis in any case and then uses the remaining chapters to flesh out the fuller details which give his final points the substance to go with their sharpness. Now the book itself is not without its difficulties and its vocabulary, one which you need to tune yourself into. The book was first published in 1985 and was written originally in French by a French academic of the economy. I am finding it to be a fertile land for my own thoughts to grow into - without necessarily having to swallow the whole of what Attali says. But he is certainly suggestive. Incidentally, I became aware of this book earlier in the year when there was a BBC report about music and its current crisis as something becoming increasingly worthless in monetary terms. Attali, in this very book, had, it was said, predicted this crisis in 1985, a crisis of proliferation. Basically, he had said we'd get to a point at which there would be so much music it would become a worthless commodity.

And, indeed, even in his first chapter, Attali is talking about music "as commodity". This quote stands out from the first chapter:

Fetishized as a commodity, music is illustrative of the evolution of our entire society: deritualize a social form, repress an activity of the body, specialize its practice, sell it as a spectacle, generalize its consumption, then see to it that it is stockpiled until it loses its meaning.

Now you need to know his full thesis to get all the sense of that quote for it is a miniature history of music in his argument. But the final phrase is the key one here. Music stockpiled until it is literally meaningless. And is that not the case today? Is there not so much music that it literally becomes as nothing? Maybe you will reply that there is lots of music that means a lot to you. I wouldn't dream of denying it. But the music you personally are aware of is but a drop in a very large ocean. And think of all the music that means literally nothing to you. If you think about it I think you will find yourself agreeing with me and with Attali. Music, says Attali elsewhere in chapter 1, "goes anonymous in the commodity". Get a social media account and become friends with lots of other musical people, as seems to happen quite a lot for reasons I'm not quite sure of, and you will soon find yourself thrust onto the horns of a dilemma as each one of them produces music you are invited to listen to. Some you will like, some you won't. Some you will hate. But the overall picture will be one of music constantly being churned out, factory-like on a continuous conveyor belt of production. It is neither an appealing nor an appetizing image. 

The "industry" metaphor is picked up on by Attali as well. Of course, many people hate the title "The Music Industry". It bespeaks of commerce and business and factories and production. But are these negative or positive connotations? Well when music is a reflection of the society that makes it and an instrument of power for those who publish it (both themes Attali takes up) it is something that cannot be ignored either way. Attali talks of music as "a play of mirrors in which every activity is reflected, defined, recorded, and distorted". For him listening to music "is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political." Of course, Attali wouldn't be the first person to think that all music is political. Music has been political at least since the first jesters and jongleurs wrote ballads mocking the powerful. Today we have the notion of the protest song. But music's political nature is much more insidious than that. What music you listen to, purchase or give your support to says something about your society and your place in it, about what sort of society you want there to be. Do you want it to be edgy, questioning, democratic or do you want it to be conservative, supportive of the status quo, stable, secure? Do you want music to be the tool of those who control it on a business model or a medium for vitality, revolution and freedom from authority?

Attali attacks this latter point when he speaks of sound generally. We have only been able to record sound at all for about 100 years. Before this point music as a commodity was a physical impossibility so the idea that it could be is equally new. But with this new technical ability comes the ability to eavesdrop, to record, to censor - and to use these things as weapons of power. But equally recorded sound and recorded music could also be used by these same powers to enforce their message (in sound) upon the people. The Nazis, for example, had a favourite type of music, folksy songs called Schlager which, incidentally, still exists as a style of music in Germany today. It was thought by the Nazis that this kind of music inculcated the ideas, values and beliefs that they wanted to propagate, wholesome, family music. After the Second World war, at the end of the 60s, it was this kind of music, as well as American rock and blues, that German musicians such as Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream wanted to get away from. Thus, they produced a new electronic music that sounded nothing like any of those kinds of music which, for them, spoke from and to another kind of people and a different set of ideas. But the thinking is clear: music contains a message. In its very sound and style it can act very clearly as a megaphone for a set of values, attitudes and beliefs.

So when you listen to your Saturday night TV show such as The X Factor do not think this is a meaningless act. By doing so you are taking part in a political game. You are giving legitimation to a form of music and to its message. Most obviously you are supporting commercialism as an idea and the idea that music is about "stardom". This is, as Attali notes, an agenda in which "Music now seems hardly more than a somewhat clumsy excuse for the self-glorification of musicians and the growth of a new industrial sector." But is that what music is - just one more thing to be packaged and sold, a device to make a few thousand people much richer than you? That's certainly what Simon Cowell would like you to think. By listening to such music and such shows you are literally rubber stamping the idea that Cowell deserves to be where he is socio-politically and you where you are in turn. Needless to say, I've never watched the show and never would. This is because I neither stand for nor want to promote the kind of society that this music promotes and evangelizes for. "Art bears the mark of its time" is another quote from Attali. We should have the insight to see what the music we listen to, the music our society promotes, says about us individually and as a group.

But there's one more point there before I wrap this blog up. And that is that there is only so much time in the world. To listen to one thing is not to listen to another. To accept the commercialized, packaged music that those at the top of the socio-political order want to spoon-feed you, the kind which is unthreatening, is to reject other kinds. If its true that music is political then its true that your choices are political too. You can support or not support society as it is right now in the music you listen to and promote, in the form of society you legitimate by your listening choices. Attali points out that political power has always had to ban subversive noise "because it betokens demands for cultural autonomy, support for differences or marginality". This is a musical as well as a political argument. What kind of music do you make? What kind do you listen to? It is a very straight three minute pop song? Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, repeat to fade? Does it have words? Is it unchallenging? Primarily about melody? Maybe its in a strange time signature, non-chromatic, abnormal? You will never hear the latter on TV or in film either. And whilst there is the odd radio station that plays non-standard music it is a minuscule proportion of the overall total and to a tiny audience. As Attali puts this "They are direct translations of the political importance of cultural repression and noise control."

And so, as Attali sees it, "What is called music today is all too often only a disguise for the monologue of power". And he is right. People want to be stars. They see music as a way to make money and take their proper place in the pantheon of capitalist commercialists, winners in a society of "richest is best". As such, music is but a reflection of the society it finds itself in where even the losers can only dream of being richer. For that is how you win. Am I the only one who sees this as a trap and a great big empty void?

In the last few months I've been searching Bandcamp for modular synth music. Now, besides the gripe that a number of people seem to list their music on Bandcamp as "modular synth" when it is anything but (false tagging is a bugbear of mine), I have noticed that maybe 80% of the people who do have modular synth music on Bandcamp have charged money for their albums. One direct repercussion of this choice of theirs is that I will never hear it. I can't buy things online since I don't have a bank account and so I don't even bother to listen. But I do wonder why so many people, none of whom I, or the world as far as I'm aware, have ever heard of, feel the need to charge money for their music. And its here that we see the insidiousness of the politics. All of these people live in a commercial world. They have been taught, with their mother's milk, that work comes at a price. It would be betraying their modern, commercialist society to "give stuff away". Perhaps it also makes them "feel like a pro" to charge money too? I think so. Isn't that just self-deceptive ego?

Now don't get me wrong here. I fully agree that anyone can charge anything they like for their music. One album I saw was $999. I wonder how many takers they had? All I'm saying, in line with some thoughts that Attali helped foster in my mind, is that giving your music a price is a political act. It endorses and encourages a capitalist society and all the necessary thinking that goes with that. "A worker is worth their pay", right? Maybe. But first of all you have to take the step of thinking that work is something you should be doing and that music is work at all. These are two steps that I don't accept at all but they are steps that a capitalist, commercialist society would love to encourage, not least those who think that music is a product you sell, a most modern thought.

Given all this context maybe its not so surprising that I felt empty, worthless, meaningless, irrelevant, invisible, after all. For I make music that is free and in a way that I hope no one would ever mistake it as a "product" that you pay for. My music is not just an expression of my own personality but also of a different politics and a different set of values from those of the society I find myself in. It encourages its listeners to think differently and not merely be dragged along with the stream of history, a stream always directed by others for their benefit. It asks its listeners to think for themselves and act in their interests.

But maybe its just easier and more convenient to listen to The X Factor. But what of the question I asked back near the beginning of this blog? "My own personal monologue in sounds is neither profound, worthy or meaningful in the end, right?" Well, maybe it is. Maybe all those "personal monologues in sound" are. Maybe the strength of music is not its popularity, its sales figures or how rich its makers are. Maybe its in its diversity, difference and relationship with other musics and its makers. Maybe we here alone on this rock in space only have each other for company to make sense of the void. But what will you value? Commerce, which homogenizes due to market forces in support of "the way things are", or diversity and difference which brings the chance for an encounter and a chance to open your mind to new and other ways of being and understanding?

This is the final article written in support of my latest music, Industrial Sounds For The Working Class, which is available now at elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com

What is the Meaning of This?

Today's blog is about the subject of meaning and its a fairly "stream of consciousness" type of a blog. As I write I am just back from my daily exercise which is my chance to blow some cobwebs out of my mind and loosen up my gradually aging body. It happens quite often in these times that thoughts come to mind and coalesce in ways that are fruitful and many of the blogs you see here are a result of such times. This is going to be another one like that.

So if you have been reading this blog at any time during this year you will know that my grand subject has been human being. I have been asking myself what it means to be human, where humans might be going and what the difference might be between a human being and the possible technological beings that we might become in the future. There has also been a strand of that which concentrated on consciousness. I have found it all greatly stimulating and it has brought me forward in my own thinking and inspired much new music from me that led me down new paths.

It was a couple of weeks ago, however, that it finally dawned on me what this was all about though. It was then that I realized that the great question here, perhaps the greatest question of all, was the question of meaning. Read back through some of my earlier blogs if you like and confirm this for yourself. It further dawned on me at that time that the question of meaning had really been the question that has animated me from my earliest days as a thinker back when I was 8, 9 and 10 reading biblical stories or The Odyssey which I read aged 10 at school. There was always a sense of wonder with me (a naive sense of wonder, I might add) and that has probably not served me very well in the long run but it has meant that I wanted to try and get answers to the questions that have animated my life.

Fast forward to a middle-aged man with 35 years more reading and experience under his belt. Meaning, why things mean, how things mean, what things mean, have come to be the central questions of my existence. Perhaps they are, in various forms, for everyone. Not everyone confronts these questions of course. Some try to hide from them or run away from them, scared of the possible answers. But I take a more prosaic and present view of things. Life would be hell if I didn't try to work out some answers. My thinking and reading this year have brought some progress for me it seems. At least, it feels that way. And as those writing about consciousness know very well, how things feel is very important to we humans. This, too, is something else caught up in all the "meaning" questions.

So what of "meaning"? Why do things mean? This, it seems to me, is a problem of consciousness. Neuroscientist Christof Koch sees consciousness as a feature of complex enough systems, systems, for example, such as the human brain. Koch himself does not limit the possibility of such consciousness to the human brain alone. He conceives it is possible that machine networks, if complex enough, could also become conscious. He also suggests that other animals with brains not so different from ours could be conscious - if in not quite the same way or to the same extent. For my purposes here the relevance of this is that with a developed enough consciousness comes the problem of meaning.

For with a consciousness such as ours, one that is self-aware, aware of its surroundings, able to extrapolate and problem solve, able to refer back to previous events and project forward into future ones, meaning floods in. Why is this? It is because meaning-making is a matter of relating things one to another, a matter of contextualizing things with other things, a matter of giving things a situation, a matter of relating and relationships, of networks. It just so happens that the universe bequeathed to us consciousness, quite blindly, and, in so doing, meaning flooded into our lives and all the problems that go with it. Meaning is what happens when conscious minds start going about their business. It is what happens when you take one object or idea, something that means nothing at all in itself or in isolation, and then relate it to something else. Or anything else. It is in the interactions of things and ideas that meaning is produced. As beings with a developed consciousness this was something we just couldn't help doing - the making of meaning.

In recent centuries our great thinkers have had problems with meaning though. Some wanted to try and fix meaning, believing that in so doing they could get things "right". Time and time again that project has failed but there are still those who believe that there is "a way things are" that could fix meanings. I am not one of those. Others have seen a problem with "nihilism" which is the lack of meaning. This issue is tied to the first inasmuch as by their constant failure to fix meaning it seemed to some that there was no fixed meaning to be found. I don't think that there is but I also don't think this should be cause for despair. Coming from a different angle, there were others who said that the problem wasn't that there was no meaning but that, instead, there was too much! These "poststructuralists" argued that the issue wasn't a lack of meaning but that there was so much it could never be fixed. Meaning was a matter of the "play" of many different meanings.

It seems to me that if you follow my basic ideas above of how meaning arises at all then it is no surprise that meanings are not fixed. It seems to me that if I am anywhere close then it would be impossible to fix meaning in the first place. For if meaning is simply a matter of relating things to other things then there are as many meanings as there are things to be related and in as many ways as you can relate them. In that, context may sometimes guide but it can never be determinative. We would still end up with as many meanings as it would be possible for people to have in any given scenario. It would seem that the poststructuralists were on to something with their ideas of a superfluity of meaning.

This, of course, brings its own issues. How is such a superfluity to be controlled? After all, we all need meaning and meanings for things but we all also need to live. In this I find something that the recently departed neuroscientist Oliver Sachs said deeply relevant. He wrote that "Each of us … constructs and lives a ‘narrative’ and is defined by this narrative." I find this to be intuitively and reflectively true. Sachs is here saying that we all build a story of our lives as we grow up and develop, one that gets added to every day with each event, thought, idea, that happens. This comes to be the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, about our circumstances, our possibilities, our past, our future. This forms a major context for all the meaning-making that we will do in life. It becomes the borders of what things can mean and acts as a stabilizing, if also sometimes an imprisoning, force. It is the boundaries of our thought. But these are not to be thought of as hard and impervious boundaries. The boundary can sometimes move and new meanings become possible. It is a movable border but a border nevertheless.

One corollary of this is that things will not mean the same thing for everyone. Nor, if this is right, should they. Difference is in-built into this understanding of things and is something to be negotiated rather than denied or avoided. We will tell completely different stories about ourselves and live individual lives and this will add to the list of possible meanings that can be made. This in turn speaks to an amazing plurality of lives and of meaning-making that often scares those who want to fix things or find a "way things are". There is no "way things are". And this is why there can also be no gods. Gods are used to try and fix meaning. They are there as guarantors of "the way things are" and act as a kind of über-context for everything. But there is no über-context. The universe did not come with meanings attached. It merely blindly created beings for whom things must mean.

This is what is bequeathed to us: to make things mean something useful to us, something that we can understand and live with. That may be a struggle but we cannot avoid it unless we die or go mad. I hope to study meaning and its making further over the coming days and weeks. There are those, such as Nietzsche or Foucault, who studied how things mean in more detail, for example, by using "genealogical" or "archaeological" techniques - but upon knowledge and its meaning itself. Nietzsche did great studies into the history of morality, something he saw as a problem, whilst Foucault, amongst other things, studied the history of prisons, sexuality, the treatment of mental illness and even scientific knowledge itself. None of these things, or their meanings, are givens. The idea of the "given" is one that those who want to fix things one way (and its always their way!) would like us to have. But following the path I have that seems crazy and to be rejected. What intellectual studies such of those of Nietzsche and Foucault have shown us is that no knowledge and no meaning is a given, Rather, it is all created and with a very specific history that was necessary for its formation. We would do well to remember this.

So we are in a world of play, the play of meanings. We are free to make ours to the extent that our lives, and the stories we tell about them, allow us. Meanings do not come with things so the idea of an "in-itself" with a meaning attached is silly. The meaning comes in the relating of one thing to another, in the activity of our conscious minds.

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!