MORE EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC FOR "MUSIC FOR LIMINAL TIMES"

Quality downloads of my music from Bandcamp

Having branched out, I now realise how each medium lends itself to quite specific ways of expression, and they truly are not interchangeable. I decided to continue experimenting with found sounds and the subject matter that came to me was times of change and transition. It has been quite fascinating to see how feel different about this medium - I feel that I can express psychological realities in a way that I can't quite do with other media. Sound has always been quite an emotional affair to me and I have been curious about alternative music all my adult life, so it comes as no surprise that I seem to be more emotionally expressive this way. Perhaps that's just my personal impression based on novelty value, however it has still been quite satisfying to me. 

I have realised that I really want to champion a greater attention to emotional intelligence, as I feel it has gotten somewhat lost in this mechanical age. It is easy to forget just how multidimensional we are when we go about our day in a typically mindless way. I know many people find this kind of music very difficult and maybe even pointless, but it does require some attention and mindfulness. It's not supposed to be easy, yet I would hope that when given the appropriate attention it would trigger some sense of recognition and connection with the psyche. It's not meant to be "just entertainment", nor is it meant to be so difficult no one can stand listening to it. Why this music is at the intersection of music and sound art is in my opinion because it has a specific concept and attempts to express ideas in a reasonably complex way. One can argue this line but it's fairly clear to me. This music requires reflection, not just mindless consumption. My mom was quite taken by it, and said it sounded just like me, and that it gave her imagery that she remembers from my visual artwork since time immemorial. This musical pursuit really reflects my life long interest in the deeper layers of our psyche - in fact one of the strands of comparative religion that I was focusing on at University was the psychology of religion. It's all making sense to me now...

I have created two new pieces and decided to pursue this project until I have a complete album. I call this endeavour "Music for Liminal Times". The word liminal is to me an intriguing and beautiful word. I realise not everyone has come across it but hey, then it's about time, eh? Liminal is originally an anthropological term that denotes times of transition and change. It's a time that is out of the ordinary. It can be a rite of passage, it can be times of war, it can be crazy carnival time, it can be times of relocation, or times of inner change. These times are archetypal thresholds, usually marked by disorder and chaos until a new order ensues. All of these situations are interesting from a psychological point of view because they help us evolve, on a personal level as well as on the level of collective consciousness. I find that I am really quite fascinated with the way collective consciousness interacts with the individual consciousness, often in a compelling and quite distressing way. To withstand this influence and retain personal integrity is difficult. However, I believe that awareness of this and how we transit from one stage or level to another is quite important to a more fluid experience of life.

In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold", is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete. During a ritual's liminal stage, participants "stand at the threshold" between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which the ritual establishes. /.../ The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid, malleable situation that enables new institutions and customs to become established. (From Wikipedia)

The two new pieces are...

Please note!! If SoundCloud isn't working, go to Bandcamp instead.

The theme for the first one was suggested by old recordings done on an Edison Sound Cylinder back in 1904. The music sounded quite odd and was fun to work with. The quality of the singing was so terrible at times that it made me think of how desperate people enter singing competitions in order to be famous. Fame is another very futile and transient experience that is surely quite nice while it lasts, but as we all know is also of very relative value and a very exclusive one at that. It has little to do with real (ordinary) life, yet even I secretly dream of it..!

The theme for the other piece was one I already had in mind while I was looking for material, as I mean to make a film with my abstract photography ("Traces"). I have already discussed the possibility of showing this film during a themed exhibition at a nearby gallery ("Maesmawr") next year - the owner is planning to show several films on the theme "Journey".  Being in transit - transitioning from a to b - is of course a liminal experience. This time, I was inspired by my own efforts to meditate and thus try and rebalance my self. As most people know, when you do you become mindful of many inner events and psychological issues, and that's what this piece is mainly about. I did find it difficult to make it long enough, without it becoming cliched and boring meditation music. It took me quite a while to figure out how to create harmonious depth to the latter part. 

I hope it's not too hard to detect my sense of irony and subtle humour in these pieces. After all, if we take life too seriously we will only become depressed and even suicidal. 

The first piece took me only two days to create, but after that I had a lot of flawed waveforms to fix (that's a whole new ball game, phew!). The preparations for the second piece took a couple of days (that is, collecting the sounds of the public domain as my rule of thumb is that it must be free, as difficult as it is to find such sounds), then the actual creation took about three - four days. It means I now have more method and experience than when I did the first pieces, but I'm working with very basic and quite cumbersome free software (Audacity). 

The making of this music is a process of complete deconstruction and reconstruction, during which I reimagine classical music of the past - one may in fact question whether classical music exists at all today. To this mix, I various other elements of my own liking.

You might like to see how Max Richter has reimagined Vivaldi, and also a project in which he refers to the past through the spoken word, Memory House.

IS CONCEPTUAL ART JUST BAD PHILOSOPHY?

Eija-Liisa Ahtila: "ME/WE, OKAY, GRAY" (still from video, 1993)

When I was a student of philosophy, which ended up as one of my minor subjects, I was looking for answers about life's deeper questions but didn't find very many. My feeling at the time was that most philosophers sit in their armchair conjuring up contrived problems that have very little to do with what is really going on in the human psyche. The only modern philosopher that I could instantly relate to (and this was when I was 19 years old, without any previous formal education in these matters) was Nietsche. His philosophy is one that encompasses questions about spirituality and the human place in the grand scheme of things. It has an element of psychology to it. Years later, after my failed years in art college in France, I ended up studying the one subject that did provide me with the answers I was looking for, i.e. the psychology of comparative religion. I enjoyed every minute of it - until I finished my Master's degree which dealt with creativity and found that my health problems were making it increasingly difficult for me to read anything at all. 

I have to say, however, that I did nonetheless respect the serious philosopher who is that one deviant human being who is able to question the way we look at reality. Regardless whether these strange turns of logic and the challenge to our conditioned perception is of any deeper significance to the human race or not, it's still admirable. Some of these theories, for instance those dealing with our construction of language, are actually even relevant to human development.

I have often thought, however, that conceptual artists are very much like this - philosophers. They often throw ideas into the air for the audience to catch and look at, and it's very much about challenging our programmed brains. The problem is that the issues they like to dwell on very often end up being excuses for bad art, and in fact it's not very good philosophy either. These people would normally be incapable of writing a convincing, intellectual thesis on the subject of their challenging questions. And if they did, they wouldn't be artists but philosophers... I really feel that this is a great problem and I can't think of a single example of a truly successful artist who can do both with panache. Modern and contemporary art deals to a great extent with social commentary, and that's all fine and dandy. Trouble is, very little else goes down very well with the authorities of art, unless it's technically intriguing. What looks interesting and glitzy on the surface, with a promise of greater depths beneath, is very often just gimmicky art in the end. 

I get updates from the Saatchi Facebook page and it's amazing how often they promote art that is just "clever", i.e. it's a construct (often a face) of little bits of something, and it is technically very well advanced. This is usually not conceptual art, it's just art that looks good on the web. But what does it say? Not much, as far as I can see. On the other hand - and this is a bit of a paradox - there's the idea that individual artists are only eligible for grants and other funding if they provide a challenging view of reality and society in particular, and this is generally speaking the realm of performance art, installations and videos. These pieces don't render themselves well in photos nor are they easy to understand and relate to, so they have to be accompanied with a thousand words. It's the well articulated, but not necessarily very comprehensive, philosophical statements that convince the jury, as far as I can see. How often than not do we end up with art that is not of the heart but of the mind? How often is this just bad philosophy and not art at all?

I'll give you an example. I was checking out a short article on a Finnish female artist who is considered one of the most innovative and is therefore internationally acclaimed. She is Eija-Liisa Ahtila, born in 1959. She also likes to have characters perform in ways that people wouldn't normally behave. In "Okay", a woman paces up and down the floor speaking loudly about violent relationships, and during the course of this performance her voice and thus her personality changes. What does it mean? Her work is supposed to be reminiscent of Finnish cult director Aki Kaurismäki's films - we just watched "The Man With No Name" and found the explicit contrivances about people who can only express themselves through their sentimental music very unconvincing. No - not all Scandinavians have Asperger's syndrome or mild autism like the heroines in many criminal stories of today. In another piece, some women go down in a lift to a place beneath the surface of water, they float around discussing atomic catastrophes; apparently this is meant to be some kind of parallel to their personal crises. I'm not sure I don't find this analogy a bit far fetched, and worse still - I don't really care. I'm not sure this is good psychology either, and so it leaves me indifferent. On this note, I have to admit I haven't seen any of this in real life and may have a better opinion if I did (but I doubt it). You may recognize the imagery of floating women and people in awkward, dreamlike situations from my review of Pia Borg's work.

On her website, Ahtila explains "ME/WE OKAY from 1993": "A short film with three fictional episodes and narration consisting of rhythmic monologues. The subject of these three humane dramas is the transformation of one´s identity. ME/WE is about balancing individual identity and about control. OKAY uses a single on-screen persona and various voices to consider the shifts, desires, and inhibitions of the ego within a sexual relationship. The subject of GRAY is the change in reality caused by a catastrophe, and the blurring of the boundary between ego and other."

You may like to check out JAR, an online magazine that attempts at a synergy between art and serious research. I signed up for it but couldn't figure out how to upload my stuff. I hope they have made it easier.

Modern/contemporary art is supposedly all about the fragmentation of the human being. It seems to me, that only those who admit to being existentially lost are considered serious artists. As far as I can see, it leaves us with a body of work that is mostly nonsensical and chaotic. I don't find it helpful to human evolution. I don't believe life has to be that way at all, and my own art does not express a fragmented world view. I'm not saying I am not interested in conceptual art... I will continue to be curious, and probably more so the older I get. I will continue to try and read what people mean even though I struggle to do so. However... We were watching a documentary about the Turner Prize and whether the art that has been awarded or nominated really is any good. I would say that sadly, most of it is just gimmicky. I mean come on, someone gets an award for turning the lights on and off in an exhibition space! This artist has nothing better to do than make art about his inability to make art - and that's quite a symptom of the "modern". And yet another is awarded for flattening silver plated objects and giving them a "new lease of life"... It's just sad.

What do you think? I would love some comments.

As I had just finished this article I came across this one, and here the author, Ben Lewis, states as he ponders the decadence of contemporary art (decadence has crossed my mind too) and especially that of Damien Hirst: "There is a pattern typical of these end-phase periods, when an artistic movement ossifies. At such times there is exaggeration and multiplication instead of development. A once new armoury of artistic concepts, processes, techniques and themes becomes an archive of formulae, quotations or paraphrasings, ultimately assuming the mode of self-parody./.../ I believe that this decline shares four aesthetic and ideological characteristics with the end-phases of previous grand styles: formulae for the creation of art; a narcissistic, self-reinforcing cult that elevates art and the artist over actual subjects and ideas; the return of sentiment; and the alibi of cynicism." Read more about "why modern art is so bad" here on www.prospectmagazine.co.uk! It's potent stuff. I don't agree that the use and repetition of certain style elements is all bad as they are signs of the times, but I do agree that style can easily become mannerism and a lack of originality.

Damien Hirst at Tate Modern, "For the love of God": This skull is covered with real diamonds. Perhaps this is meant to be
a cynical comment about modern day art collectors...  

"But what a small and conservative act of rebellion this glossiness is. Art has become small, superficial and self-indulgent in its emotional range: sentimental rather than truly intellectual or moving." I couldn't agree more, though my knowledge is quite limited due to years of ignoring the whole realm of conceptual art. I love the end: "To paraphrase Trotsky, let us turn to these artists, their billionaire patrons and toadying curators and say: 'You are pitiful, isolated individuals. You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on—into the dustbin of art history!'”