Trance Music, Philosophy and Politics. The official homepage of philosopher artist: Illusive Mind.
What a piece of work is a word,
Without shape or form or faculty,
And yet to apprehend the thing,
To understand so as to be understood.
To be searching and left wanting,
To be careless or too cautious,
To utter such a thing and in the doing,
Expose my soul.
A Purple Monkey Dishwasher by Scott Gowell
I don’t speak German but I love German loan words. It is in this spirit that I am coining these two neologisms, speicherschmerz & speicherfreude. They translate literally as ‘memory pain’ and ‘memory joy’ respectively.
I hope that they can capture that awful pain of searching through one’s brain for the particular Simpsons’ episode that someone has quoted and conversely the joy of getting the reference, the more obscure the better.
eg.
“Damn this speicherschmerz, where the hell have I heard ‘Purple Monkey Dishwasher’ before?”
“Ah, such sweet speicherfreude, that’s from The Simpsons episode where Bart gets the teachers to go on strike.”
This track is hot off the press, a simple but perhaps beguiling progressive trance number that I put together in about two hours. This was at around 4am this morning when most sane people are asleep but for the artists amongst us, it is so frequently when the muse strikes.
Pellucidus is Latin, meaning, “shining, transparent,” from pellucere, “to shine through,” from per-, “through” + lucere, “to shine.” It refers to transmitting light; able to be seen through with clarity or of language: transparently clear; easily understandable.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
One of the beautiul things about Creative Commons and online collaboration in general is how some piece of a jigsaw you tried your hand at creating can be taken remixed, reused and re-contextualised into some other piece, complete and inspiring in its own right.
Milieu is an old song of mine from 2005. Octavian was browsing through some of my songs at MakeTunes and happened upon it. He sampled it, looped it and proceeded to create the truly haunting song: Laughing Shadows.
Be sure to check out more of his tracks on his MySpace pages Assfault14 & Sumerian7. There are chilling soundscapes with detailed and ponderous emotions as well as raging vehement metal with some serious guitar shredding. Don’t miss Nuclear Tomorrow.
I’m looking forward to future collaborations with Octavian, I think it is safe to expect great things.
Other Links
Octavian - Laughing Shadows@MakeTunes
Octavian’s songs@MakeTunes
www.myspace.com/assfault14
www.myspace.com/sumerian7
I mixed Kaer Trouz’s piano sample with Forensic’s masterful vocals and added a dash of Trouz’s A Capella and alchemy happened. I sourced the spoken word sample from the Internet Archive.
Download @ CCMixter.org
Download @ MakeTunes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Song art for Deep In Ya Self
Photo by Matt Cinque
Polaroid by Hugoslv
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Picture by Jason
After expounding on the secret wish of all people for a little recognition in my post about a photo of mine being used as inspiration for Bless’s wonderful artwork, I’ve been rewarded with another gift: Ipod Recognition! Cyberpunk fan Jason posted the above picture on my MySpace page.
Ipod Recognition is the curious joy a musician experiences when he sees one of his tracks being played on someone’s Ipod. In this particular case, the song is Sense of Reverence. Moments like these make the digital ether a warm place indeed.
Introspection
©2008
I, of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open, because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly.
- The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
In one sense art is a selfish endeavour. I’ve spent hours alone at night honing my craft on some piece. Be it finding the right chord progression, the right pixels or the right word. I rarely conceive of having an ‘audience’ it is an activity for its own sake , for self gratification.
Secretly you dream of being recognized, having that album pressed, that photograph printed, the novel published. Until such time, you pour yourself into this activity and send it freely into the digital ether hoping it bumps into someone and each time it does your heart swells with hope. All that we search for is a little recognition! If it were not for the feedback I get on my music at MakeTunes, my heart may have been broken by the vast silence and self-doubt some time ago.
So it was with delight that I recently discovered a blog dedicated to Black & White photography (www.ablogwithblackandwhitepics.com) had featured a portrait of mine, Serious. I discovered Bless’s work after she left a comment on the Random Ambient Collaboration, which itself is someone else’s project that I’m helping to promote.
I was immediately struck by the delicacy of the details in her sketches. The human face is inherently interesting. The software loaded into our brains to map out the nearly inscrutable and subtle details of faces in order to distinguish them from one another is immense. Then to my utter surprise I received a comment informing me that Bless has created a sketch based on my serious photograph:
Please check it out, as well as her other works.
To receive some recognition or even praise is heartening, but to be a source of inspiration is very flattering and it made my day.
A simple truth that is so easily overlooked by people who are self-consumed, or consumed by the problems of their ’self’ is the power each of us holds within ourselves. The power to brighten a person’s very spirit with a few kind words, a well placed smile, a comment on a blog somewhere wishing a struggling artist some encouragement. The digital ether of the internet can be a vast and lonesome landscape and yet people from different sides of the earth can bump into one another like primeval atoms and then, magic happens.
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