New tracks from February/March:
A Harvest of Light
http://soundcloud.com/terjedb/aharvestoflight
This is the beginning of something which might become the backing track of a poetry reading, not very confident with my voice yet, it needs a lot of going through, I suspect I might have to pace myself somewhat. It is dischordant, it does not always keep on kilter and follow the straight route – this is the result of conscious decisions, perhaps I am fooling myself. The darkness at the other end of the spectrum (title:A Harvest of Light, music:descending notes, minors, dischords, rhythm structures falling apart, cutting mechanical noises, some beauty here but I do not know how) delineate not an attraction towards the sinister,dark,cold,material – but an acknowledgement of existence. We can visualize the light for centuries, you and I, but we will not catch a glimpse before we have learned to use our eyes in the dark and orient ourselves towards it; the same goes for following a vision, any vision. There is a lot of talk about hope and belief, the power it exercises over our minds, how this is what really runs the show and fuels the machine –
we can not believe ourselves out or into any situation,condition or fate, and the more we
invest into hope bonds the more we embellish and weigh down a dream. A lot of talking here, just to say that A Harvest of Light isn´t a piece of popular music but perhaps the sonic equivalent of an etching by William Blake.
Kalos
http://soundcloud.com/terjedb/kalos
Kalos means Beautiful in Greek. What you are listening to now are music made by musicians that have ingested…. no, I am just kidding. Kalos is strange. I am not sure it is anything else than its substance, there is a nerve somewhere inside it , and someone else than myself has also caught it. I doubt this is Hi-fidelity, and in another time and on another timeline, it would probably not have come into being and most definitely not been shared to so many poor, wretched listeners.
Purr
http://soundcloud.com/terjedb/purrThe title says it all, I thought it was convenient, for once. I would have loved to say that I spent a lot of time trying to capture the purr of a kitten, but I did not. Like the info says I
opportunistically availed myself of a sample instrument that I acquired from 8Dio this Christmas, called Catmosphere , which features pretty much everything the kitten Fellini did on his rounds during a most hilarious and hectic recording process, I bet. For my part, I
made quiet synthetic music out of the box, but I liked making it and I think it has promise.
Less than a week ago I shared the news that I had acquired 100 followers and that my 23 tracks on Soundcloud had reached 1000 plays. Today that has increased by approximately 25%. This is really incredible for me, a self-taught dabbler in electronic music who only joined that social network to broaden my musical and cultural frame of reference, registering as fan/listener and thinking that whatever output I have is better kept stowed away on a harddisk, to be dusted off much later in a funk of embarassed nostalgia. Then Christmas came along and I decided to share Eye and Mote and a few more compositions on the top of the pile, my preference for these were that they could be finished and make sense enough to be received, played through and possibly even repeated plays. Where I am today is a little different, because I have actually begun to create pieces that are not only different and original, but also consistent. Somewhere and sometime much farther and later it´s possible to even consider it a style, nevermind genres.
Genres is only useful, and only barely, today – in the indexing and catalogization of music, and music journalism perhaps. When I grew up quite a few of the most antagonistic of music genres caused people to regard other people less of a person for having such poor taste and choice in music. Now music is beginning to reveal itself, at least to me, as this huge ocean of possibilities, much like what we imagined Internet would become “back in the days” (early 1990´s, the last decade of the 20th century). I have tried Internet radio out, there was a brief flirt with Napster, with filesharing networks, with Spotify – which I pretty much landed on for reference, but that was just the thing, with a shortage of curiosity I ended up listening to the same type of music, the same artists, the same tracks, that I always had done -new impulses came chiefly through TV and Radio. In came the incessant posting of favourites, listenings and sharings from Youtube and all them other media networks on Facebook, it´s increased a whole lot and show how habitual creatures we are as human beings. I am not disresepecting that, but acknowledge that it´s usually unconscious, below-the-radar activity, which makes me feel like a voyeur when I give in to the temptation to click a link someone has posted on those social networks.
Soundcloud changed all of that, I confidently follow-through and discover the breadth and depth of our sympathies, antipathies, passions and disenchantments – us being anyone who connects to share or to discover music, radio, ambience, interviews,poetry,plays – Sound, and by discovering my bias, the way the bricks are stacked to form a wall of defence, and mapping my incessant struggle with having a wall that obscures everything not contained within its boundaries, my attempt to dig holes in it so I can look out.
Or even better, listen. In Philosophy class my teacher incessantly reminded me that in the really old days, call it antiquity, there were a cultural divide between the auditory and the visually oriented cultures. The auditory oriented cultures, I observed, tended to outlaw the creation of visual representations, the visually oriented cultures tended to neglect sound or even proscribe silence. In my culture today, we are audio-visual – we are fish swimming in a sea of stimuli, often we are not even connected to the same space because with headphones and portable screens we have gone another place even while out walking on the same street. I am still fascinated,though. Perhaps we can break holes in our walls and speak with each other, and the stay contained in our individual cells can become a little less isolated and forlorn than it used to be. Perhaps we can share the best or perhaps the worst that grows out of our creativity. Maybe we can learn a thing or two from each other.