All Vibrating
Terrifying beauty and music that breathes
Hello and welcome to all!
And so I begin sharing one tune per week. I must admit, I’m half-regretting the commitment of once a week (surely I’ll miss one sooner rather than later) but am also half-stimulated by it. Thinking about various pieces I’ve composed over the years, I’ve realised I do actually have things to say about at least some of them. And deadlines can be very useful.
The first few things I’m going to share are all from an EP of impressionist electronica I made in April 2021. We’d just come out of the dark pandemic winter – much of which was lived under an 8 p.m. curfew – and spring was in the air. I remember listening to the finished EP while stretching in my kitchen with the doors open, the sunset reflecting off a neighboring church, and the breeze blowing in over the balcony. I felt pretty good about it.
Of course, since then, I’ve remixed and tweaked it a dozen times. But I’ll have more to say about neuroticism another time.
This first tune is called All Vibrating, and it encapsulates a couple of thematic and sonic gestures that I turn to somewhat frequently: terrifying beauty, and music that breathes.
Terrifying beauty. I mentioned it to my friend Jake once, and he asked, “like the sublime?” Exactly! The sublime is associated with a sense of scale, particularly the grandeur of nature – think Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog or Coleridge’s poems about the Lake District – but what interests me here are its psychological effects.
Despite its ostensible focus on ‘the world out there’ – grand mountains and such – the sublime is fundamentally a human experience. There’s at once humility and narcissism to this: we are but drops in nature, but by god doesn’t that just make you feel alive?! (Perhaps there’s a similar narcissism to spiritual experience, but that’s for another time.)
Walter Pater said, “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music.” I think he meant that the beauty of instrumental music is its pure abstraction: it affects the listener in “a direct, unmediated fashion, without needing to describe the world or offer narratives or morals.” (In my view, abstraction does not mean universal: there are inherited cultural elements to any art form. To most Western ears, certain common chord progressions alone will likely evoke a familiar emotion, but gamelan music might just sound like tuneless noise.)
The point is nothing is being directly represented. Painters can paint the big mountains, writers can describe them. Musicians have to work with experience alone1 .
And the sublime always points back to experience: no matter how grand the mountain, when you’re dead it won’t feel like anything at all. The terror of the sublime is our complete vulnerability in the face of forces we will never fully understand.
Terrifying beauty. (Perhaps the sublime teaches in the same way death does.)
Digital audio is a lot like sculpture. You generate some raw material, and then you twist it, mold it, and pull it apart. One of my favourite parts of the creative process is when I have all the material I need laid out in a basic arrangement and then lock myself away for a few hours to sculpt it into form. Pure flow.
Counterintuitively, for something based around 1s and 0s, electronic production techniques allow for some incredibly fluid and organic arrangements. Tunes can decay and breathe. Sounds can be disfigured beyond recognition, or made to react to one another in ways that would be very difficult or impossible to achieve outside a computer.
These are possibilities I’d like to explore further in future work. In fact, just writing this and going back through these tunes has reminded me of how much I want to explore in this realm. There are totally ways to make a sound open up like a sunrise in the desert! But it’ll probably be a while before you hear any of that 😉. Argh there’s so much to do.
Until then, here’s All Vibrating.
(No refund if you find it comfortingly ugly, though I’d love to hear from you if so.)
Please feel free to forward this along to anyone you like. :-)
That’s not to say painters cannot try to do the same thing and work through experience alone. In fact, I think that’s exactly what they have done over the past century or two. But abstract expressionist paintings (for example) are incredibly musical, don’t you think?