I'm not really into noise music. I get it and I've heard some work that I was fairly impressed by, but it's not my cup of tea, if only because it really exacerbates my tinnitus and messes with my otherwise impaired hearing. So, I was surprised when I found myself really digging the noise that came out of an experiment I did with Audacity's image-to-audio conversion function.
It started with following a link an online friend pointed me to called pixelsynth, in which one can create or import an image and the browser-based synth will convert the brightness values per-pixel into pitches. Although I thought the app was cool and potentially useful, the synth output clipped badly and I couldn't find how to adjust it and so ended up abandoning it. But I really liked the concept of image-to-audio, which I had been aware of for some time, and my search for help with pixelsynth led me to an Audacity-based solution. In the end, I found myself with 16 hours of audio created from one of my favorite images of the Pleiades. As I said, it felt unexpectedly musical and, after much finagling and negotiations with the sound and with myself, I produced the following piece:
The first few minutes of the piece are unaltered from the original sound file. Although the sound is never the same -- it maintains this wonderful balance between pattern and variation -- it didn't really have a perceivable sense of direction, an aspect I consider critical to what makes something musical. To remedy that, I slowly added some basic effects: panning, delay with feedback, LPF sweeps, and some reverb. Notably, the reverb-like sound you hear at the beginning is not an added effect, but native to the converted image audio. There was some light equalizing to balance out the spectrum, but that's it. I'm pleased with the results -- although not enough to pursue the genre per se!
Friday, January 31, 2020
Sunday, December 15, 2019
Deep Listening
The way Pauline Oliveros told the story, she and two of her colleagues and friends took an opportunity, more or less on a whim, to experiment with improvising in an immense underground cistern in northwest Washington state. When the group listened back to the recording of it, made also essentially on a whim, they realized they had an album. They settled on "Deep Listening" as a title for it because they liked the pun; their 1985 performance is now legendary.
That was the origin of the name Deep Listening, but the work it has come to be associated with represents the entire oeuvre of Maestra Oliveros. From her teen years, PO, as she is known among her friends and followers, was committed to "listening to everything all the time" and this imperative led her to a richly holistic approach to life and art, one that was eventually developed into a series of trainings in her approach. I was privileged this fall to participate in one of those trainings and it had a profound effect on me. I want to talk here about some of the insights I had, not only by way of sharing but also as an enthusiastic endorsement of the work and invitation to readers to explore it.
Deep Listening as a practice encompasses three broad domains or modalities: listening, in the sense of both an auditory and attentional function, movement, in the sense of somatic and kinesthetic awareness, and dreaming, as a receptive experience, a lucid engagement, and a domain for practice. Each of these modalities leads naturally into the next; indeed, in retrospect, the path seems obvious, as such trails do once they are clearly blazed.
PO's approach to listening appears to have a great deal of overlap with meditation; indeed, she often discusses it in such terms. Distinguishing it as a perceptual process, as opposed to the sensory process of hearing, she breaks it into several subprocesses: inclusive, exclusive, external-distal, external-proximal, internal-somatic, and internal-intrapsychic (some of these are my terms, as I've heard different labels used for these various concepts). Inclusive and exclusive map closely to attentional processes in mindful and concentrative meditation, respectively. External and internal listening are straightforward, essentially the public vs private soundscapes, while the subcomponents of those break down thusly: proximal external sounds might be the soft sounds of your breath through your nose or the tapping of fingers on a keyboard, while distal external sounds are those from the room you're in, other people, the world outside, etc.; somatic internal sounds might be the creaking of joints or saliva bubbles moving about in one's mouth, while intrapsychic sounds are entirely auralized -- music, self-talk, memory, etc. In Deep Listening, then, listening is global perception across several dimensions, demanding and producing a level of mindful awareness richer than what had ever occurred to me in a life of exploring mindfulness.
By listening at this level, one's awareness of self as an embodied being naturally expands and intensifies, leading one to the next modality, movement. Again, the theme of open perception pervades this aspect of the work and the training focuses on embodiment as an experience. Practices take the above subprocesses of listening and bring them to bear on attending to inner experiences of movement, e.g., through solitary practice of T'ai Chi, yogic, and Taoist exercises, and to experiencing moving with others, e.g., group practices of improvisatory dance, vocalization, or other collective performative activities. Participants observe their own reactions and others' and practice bringing acceptance to the creative kinesthetic process.
The imperative to listen to everything all the time led PO to consider one form of consciousness not usually considered when listening: dreaming. What are the sounds of dreams? What are our embodied and other experiences while dreaming? What if we could practice listening intentionally in our dreams? Deep Listening explores our dreams from contexts that were new to me, taking a dream at face value, an experience valid in its own right, rather than as a section of consciousness that only has meaning in relationship to waking. I've spent my entire adult life exploring dreams, their interpretation, their neurological substrate, and practicing active and lucid dreaming, and never before had I thought to just be in my dreams, the way I might just be on a mountain or in my studio. In Deep Listening, dreams are explored as valid realities, both receptively, i.e., practicing being open to the experience and to creative ideas, and proactively, i.e., lucidly, but lucidity not to produce virtual reality- or videogame-like experiences, but rather to make use of the dream space to practice mindfulness, yoga, or other consciousness-raising activities.
Two themes run through all of the Deep Listening training, and, indeed, through PO's work: community and acceptance. Although almost all of my fellow trainees were professional artists in one domain or another, the practices are designed for lay persons; there is no expectation or requirement of special skill or background. This is not to say that building skill is not encouraged -- far from it -- but the skills most encouraged are those associated with this kind of global listening and unconditional acceptance. PO's commitment to community as a core of her work has its roots in the social upheavals she lived through and synergizes with the practice of acceptance to create art activities that are the-thing-in-itself, performances that are experiences that are art.
Although I had been introduced to PO's work in the early 80s as part of my coursework in music school, she remained mostly in the background of my musical interests until the last several years, when I began to take a more healing, inward-facing orientation to music and music making. It was two years ago that I discovered the first Deep Listening Band recording described in the first paragraph above and made my first foray into what Deep Listening might mean to me as a musician and composer. In my initial reading of PO's book "Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice" I found it hard to get the gist of her, but something called me back to it and each time I read it, I gleaned something more and eventually realized that she was talking about music as a kind of mindfulness -- and this rung my heart like a temple bell. PO had brought a quasi-Buddhist, present-focused awareness to music in a way that I had felt was possible but had failed to get my hands around on my own. I had to pursue formal training in Deep Listening.
Having completed the first round of training at the end of November, I have since been consolidating what I learned and building Deep Listening practices into my life. I am endeavoring to make time daily to practice formally listening, moving, and dreaming. Deep Listening clicked immediately into my efforts to take a more meditative approach to viola playing and renewed my interest in singing; too, it folds into my practice as a clinical psychologist in meaningful ways, helping me to be more thoughtful and grounded with patients. My physical wellness has been a particular focus recently, as I approach my 60s, and bringing lessons from Deep Listening movement has supported several positive behavior changes as well as added to my general sense of groundedness. The new perspective on dreaming has broadly rekindled my interest in and experience of dreaming, but, more importantly, shown me new possibilities I had not seen or had forgotten: dreams -- along with hypnogogia and hypnopompia -- are incredibly creative spaces and practicing being open to that has already changed my creative process significantly. It has also led me to make a critical connection with a concept I rely on clinically, the constructed nature of reality: given the nature of our perception as entirely limited to physical sensory systems and the epiphenomena arising from their processing, waking and dreaming experiences have more in common with each other than they don't. By purposefully blurring the boundaries between these realities, it is possible to bring the best of each to the other, awareness and agency to dreams and creativity and numinosity to waking.
As a fundamentally communally-oriented person, PO did not create or develop her work alone. Her wife and partner of decades, IONE, and Heloise Gold, both artists in their own rights, collaborated with her on the initial ideas underlaying Deep Listening and continue to teach in the wake of PO's death in late 2016. Having taught Deep Listening workshops, retreats, certification programs, and even academic courses related to Deep Listening since the late 80s, PO and her collaborators have built an international community of artists and teachers dedicated to exploring, expanding, and sharing its insights and processes. Participating in the first part of the certification training tapped me into a robust, active, and creative network of fellow travelers; I hope and intend to continue to engage with and learn from them.
I am deeply grateful to have found this body of work and its community of practitioners. My own work as a musician and a psychologist have been and will continue to be informed by Maestra Oliveros' insights and I feel great personal resonance with her ideas and goals. I look forward to my ongoing exploration of the worlds she discovered, attempting to listen to everything, all the time.
That was the origin of the name Deep Listening, but the work it has come to be associated with represents the entire oeuvre of Maestra Oliveros. From her teen years, PO, as she is known among her friends and followers, was committed to "listening to everything all the time" and this imperative led her to a richly holistic approach to life and art, one that was eventually developed into a series of trainings in her approach. I was privileged this fall to participate in one of those trainings and it had a profound effect on me. I want to talk here about some of the insights I had, not only by way of sharing but also as an enthusiastic endorsement of the work and invitation to readers to explore it.
Deep Listening as a practice encompasses three broad domains or modalities: listening, in the sense of both an auditory and attentional function, movement, in the sense of somatic and kinesthetic awareness, and dreaming, as a receptive experience, a lucid engagement, and a domain for practice. Each of these modalities leads naturally into the next; indeed, in retrospect, the path seems obvious, as such trails do once they are clearly blazed.
PO's approach to listening appears to have a great deal of overlap with meditation; indeed, she often discusses it in such terms. Distinguishing it as a perceptual process, as opposed to the sensory process of hearing, she breaks it into several subprocesses: inclusive, exclusive, external-distal, external-proximal, internal-somatic, and internal-intrapsychic (some of these are my terms, as I've heard different labels used for these various concepts). Inclusive and exclusive map closely to attentional processes in mindful and concentrative meditation, respectively. External and internal listening are straightforward, essentially the public vs private soundscapes, while the subcomponents of those break down thusly: proximal external sounds might be the soft sounds of your breath through your nose or the tapping of fingers on a keyboard, while distal external sounds are those from the room you're in, other people, the world outside, etc.; somatic internal sounds might be the creaking of joints or saliva bubbles moving about in one's mouth, while intrapsychic sounds are entirely auralized -- music, self-talk, memory, etc. In Deep Listening, then, listening is global perception across several dimensions, demanding and producing a level of mindful awareness richer than what had ever occurred to me in a life of exploring mindfulness.
By listening at this level, one's awareness of self as an embodied being naturally expands and intensifies, leading one to the next modality, movement. Again, the theme of open perception pervades this aspect of the work and the training focuses on embodiment as an experience. Practices take the above subprocesses of listening and bring them to bear on attending to inner experiences of movement, e.g., through solitary practice of T'ai Chi, yogic, and Taoist exercises, and to experiencing moving with others, e.g., group practices of improvisatory dance, vocalization, or other collective performative activities. Participants observe their own reactions and others' and practice bringing acceptance to the creative kinesthetic process.
The imperative to listen to everything all the time led PO to consider one form of consciousness not usually considered when listening: dreaming. What are the sounds of dreams? What are our embodied and other experiences while dreaming? What if we could practice listening intentionally in our dreams? Deep Listening explores our dreams from contexts that were new to me, taking a dream at face value, an experience valid in its own right, rather than as a section of consciousness that only has meaning in relationship to waking. I've spent my entire adult life exploring dreams, their interpretation, their neurological substrate, and practicing active and lucid dreaming, and never before had I thought to just be in my dreams, the way I might just be on a mountain or in my studio. In Deep Listening, dreams are explored as valid realities, both receptively, i.e., practicing being open to the experience and to creative ideas, and proactively, i.e., lucidly, but lucidity not to produce virtual reality- or videogame-like experiences, but rather to make use of the dream space to practice mindfulness, yoga, or other consciousness-raising activities.
Two themes run through all of the Deep Listening training, and, indeed, through PO's work: community and acceptance. Although almost all of my fellow trainees were professional artists in one domain or another, the practices are designed for lay persons; there is no expectation or requirement of special skill or background. This is not to say that building skill is not encouraged -- far from it -- but the skills most encouraged are those associated with this kind of global listening and unconditional acceptance. PO's commitment to community as a core of her work has its roots in the social upheavals she lived through and synergizes with the practice of acceptance to create art activities that are the-thing-in-itself, performances that are experiences that are art.
Although I had been introduced to PO's work in the early 80s as part of my coursework in music school, she remained mostly in the background of my musical interests until the last several years, when I began to take a more healing, inward-facing orientation to music and music making. It was two years ago that I discovered the first Deep Listening Band recording described in the first paragraph above and made my first foray into what Deep Listening might mean to me as a musician and composer. In my initial reading of PO's book "Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice" I found it hard to get the gist of her, but something called me back to it and each time I read it, I gleaned something more and eventually realized that she was talking about music as a kind of mindfulness -- and this rung my heart like a temple bell. PO had brought a quasi-Buddhist, present-focused awareness to music in a way that I had felt was possible but had failed to get my hands around on my own. I had to pursue formal training in Deep Listening.
Having completed the first round of training at the end of November, I have since been consolidating what I learned and building Deep Listening practices into my life. I am endeavoring to make time daily to practice formally listening, moving, and dreaming. Deep Listening clicked immediately into my efforts to take a more meditative approach to viola playing and renewed my interest in singing; too, it folds into my practice as a clinical psychologist in meaningful ways, helping me to be more thoughtful and grounded with patients. My physical wellness has been a particular focus recently, as I approach my 60s, and bringing lessons from Deep Listening movement has supported several positive behavior changes as well as added to my general sense of groundedness. The new perspective on dreaming has broadly rekindled my interest in and experience of dreaming, but, more importantly, shown me new possibilities I had not seen or had forgotten: dreams -- along with hypnogogia and hypnopompia -- are incredibly creative spaces and practicing being open to that has already changed my creative process significantly. It has also led me to make a critical connection with a concept I rely on clinically, the constructed nature of reality: given the nature of our perception as entirely limited to physical sensory systems and the epiphenomena arising from their processing, waking and dreaming experiences have more in common with each other than they don't. By purposefully blurring the boundaries between these realities, it is possible to bring the best of each to the other, awareness and agency to dreams and creativity and numinosity to waking.
As a fundamentally communally-oriented person, PO did not create or develop her work alone. Her wife and partner of decades, IONE, and Heloise Gold, both artists in their own rights, collaborated with her on the initial ideas underlaying Deep Listening and continue to teach in the wake of PO's death in late 2016. Having taught Deep Listening workshops, retreats, certification programs, and even academic courses related to Deep Listening since the late 80s, PO and her collaborators have built an international community of artists and teachers dedicated to exploring, expanding, and sharing its insights and processes. Participating in the first part of the certification training tapped me into a robust, active, and creative network of fellow travelers; I hope and intend to continue to engage with and learn from them.
I am deeply grateful to have found this body of work and its community of practitioners. My own work as a musician and a psychologist have been and will continue to be informed by Maestra Oliveros' insights and I feel great personal resonance with her ideas and goals. I look forward to my ongoing exploration of the worlds she discovered, attempting to listen to everything, all the time.
Tuesday, November 19, 2019
Text Score: Sonic Map
Find a large, resonant space. It should be more open than not and allow for movement in at least two dimensions.
Recruit a number of musicians, somewhere around six to ten, depending on the size of the space. Each musician should have a phrase or motif that they repeat; more complex ones should be relatively short and simpler ones can be longer. Each phrase or motif should make musical sense with all the others, as they are part of a single piece.
Musicians are arranged about the space roughly evenly. They should be close enough together to hear each other and far enough apart so that each performer experiences the others through the resonance of the space. Musicians remain in place for the duration of the performance.
An additional person, referred to here as the recorder, is equipped with an audio recording device and stereo microphone(s), ideally binaural. The recorder should choose footwear and be prepared to walk such that their footsteps are quiet, but not silent, part of the performance, but not foreground. The recorder starts and ends their walk in the center of the space.
The performance begins when the recorder begins recording and the musicians begin performing. The recorder then slowly walks through the space, passing close to each musician but not lingering. They should choose a path that takes them through the entire space while minimizing crossing or retracing their steps. The guiding intention of the walk is to produce a recording such that an imagined listener to the recording would be able to get a sense of the space, to map it and the locations of the musicians in their mind. The performance ends when the recorder returns back to their starting position, the musicians stop, and the recording is ended.
Some considerations: How to take advantage of layout, reflections, verticality, resonance, or other properties of the space so as to give the imagined listener sonic clues to its shape? How to place musicians so as to optimize the relationship between the space and the quality of each instrument or voice (and what criteria define “optimize”)? How might the strengths and weaknesses of the recording equipment, especially microphones, be employed by the recorder so as to maximize the imagined listener’s perception of the space? How might the orientation of the microphone(s) within the space (e.g., standing in one place but rotating) at any given point affect the ability of the imagined listener to perceive the space and how might such effects be employed or accounted for?
Some options: Keeping and sharing the recording vs destroying it. Rehearsal vs no rehearsal. Presence vs absence of a live audience. Live streaming of the audio vs not. Original vs established music. Composed vs improvised music. Predetermined vs impromptu walking path for the recorder. Multiple performances vs a one-off. Recorder monitors recording live (e.g., via headphones) vs no monitoring.
Recruit a number of musicians, somewhere around six to ten, depending on the size of the space. Each musician should have a phrase or motif that they repeat; more complex ones should be relatively short and simpler ones can be longer. Each phrase or motif should make musical sense with all the others, as they are part of a single piece.
Musicians are arranged about the space roughly evenly. They should be close enough together to hear each other and far enough apart so that each performer experiences the others through the resonance of the space. Musicians remain in place for the duration of the performance.
An additional person, referred to here as the recorder, is equipped with an audio recording device and stereo microphone(s), ideally binaural. The recorder should choose footwear and be prepared to walk such that their footsteps are quiet, but not silent, part of the performance, but not foreground. The recorder starts and ends their walk in the center of the space.
The performance begins when the recorder begins recording and the musicians begin performing. The recorder then slowly walks through the space, passing close to each musician but not lingering. They should choose a path that takes them through the entire space while minimizing crossing or retracing their steps. The guiding intention of the walk is to produce a recording such that an imagined listener to the recording would be able to get a sense of the space, to map it and the locations of the musicians in their mind. The performance ends when the recorder returns back to their starting position, the musicians stop, and the recording is ended.
Some considerations: How to take advantage of layout, reflections, verticality, resonance, or other properties of the space so as to give the imagined listener sonic clues to its shape? How to place musicians so as to optimize the relationship between the space and the quality of each instrument or voice (and what criteria define “optimize”)? How might the strengths and weaknesses of the recording equipment, especially microphones, be employed by the recorder so as to maximize the imagined listener’s perception of the space? How might the orientation of the microphone(s) within the space (e.g., standing in one place but rotating) at any given point affect the ability of the imagined listener to perceive the space and how might such effects be employed or accounted for?
Some options: Keeping and sharing the recording vs destroying it. Rehearsal vs no rehearsal. Presence vs absence of a live audience. Live streaming of the audio vs not. Original vs established music. Composed vs improvised music. Predetermined vs impromptu walking path for the recorder. Multiple performances vs a one-off. Recorder monitors recording live (e.g., via headphones) vs no monitoring.
Keeping Score
A text score is a set of instructions for a performance, often of music, but not limited to that; I was first introduced to the idea of a text score when I was in music school. The examples I recall from my time in college were ideas that could not actually be performed, such as "The performer comes to the edge of the stage and throws a live grenade into the audience." (I'm uncertain of the composer of that, or even if I'm quoting it correctly, but it might be from Dick Higgins' Danger Music series.) Text scores don't have to be impossible (or unethical) to perform; the format can be extremely flexible. They can be pages-long instructions for execution of elaborate performances or brief, simple, single-sentence statements; there's even a Twitter account for them.
Use and composition of text scores has been part of my recent training in Deep Listening* and their role in Pauline Oliveros' work -- both DL and her broader oeuvre -- appears mainly designed to promote an experiential orientation to art, the communal production of art, and civic engagement. Oliveros' scores also tend to give a fair bit of leeway to the performers in how they might execute them. I also think that text scores also allow a composer to share an idea -- and, to my mind importantly, take credit for it -- when they may not want or be able to produce it themselves.
Recently, I had an idea for a work that I was excited by, but for which I do not currently have the resources or time to perform and it occurred to me that it would make a good text score, as it had a fair bit of built in uncertainty and would benefit from respecting that. So, having written it up, I will be sharing it here. I expect there may be others in the future, thus my introduction/explanation in this post. In sharing them, it is my intent that others are free to perform them, provided that they credit the authorship appropriately. I would be grateful for any notification of any performances.
*This is something I've been meaning to share about here; I plan on writing an in depth post on it once the course is complete at the end of this month.
Use and composition of text scores has been part of my recent training in Deep Listening* and their role in Pauline Oliveros' work -- both DL and her broader oeuvre -- appears mainly designed to promote an experiential orientation to art, the communal production of art, and civic engagement. Oliveros' scores also tend to give a fair bit of leeway to the performers in how they might execute them. I also think that text scores also allow a composer to share an idea -- and, to my mind importantly, take credit for it -- when they may not want or be able to produce it themselves.
Recently, I had an idea for a work that I was excited by, but for which I do not currently have the resources or time to perform and it occurred to me that it would make a good text score, as it had a fair bit of built in uncertainty and would benefit from respecting that. So, having written it up, I will be sharing it here. I expect there may be others in the future, thus my introduction/explanation in this post. In sharing them, it is my intent that others are free to perform them, provided that they credit the authorship appropriately. I would be grateful for any notification of any performances.
*This is something I've been meaning to share about here; I plan on writing an in depth post on it once the course is complete at the end of this month.
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
War of the Worlds(?)
My first exposure to what might arguably be H. G. Wells' most famous novel came when I was probably 10 or 11 years old, in comic book form, an adaptation from Classics Illustrated. I remember devouring it and others from that series, images filling my head and populating my daydreams, reverberating even now, nearly half a century later.
In particular, I was fascinated by the Martians' heat ray. As the son of an engineer who worked on military applications for lasers, I talked at length with my father about how closely it resembles modern lasers, invented more than sixty years after Wells' vision. One dissatisfying aspect, however, of real lasers at the time was that they were visible and the heat ray was not -- red, blue, green, probably other colors, as far as I knew, but colors you can see (given a typical amount of particulate matter in the atmosphere, anyway).
Several years after my first introduction to WotW, Viking 1 landed on Mars, the vanguard of an invading army of Earthly probes. While we've sent no tripods (so far), a handful of the probes are mobile, including the most recent, Curiosity, arriving in 2012. I have, along with all of the Martian landers since the Vikings, followed its wending way with wonder and excitement. I've long known of a particular feature of its geological laboratories, but it was only today that I made the connection: Curiosity is equipped with an infrared laser -- that is, an invisible heat ray.
Wells' Martians arrived on Earth nakedly hostile, an invading army with the goal of extermination or enslavement of all Terran life forms and Areforming their newly possessed planet; humanity's intentions on Mars appear, in our own narrative, more noble (although that may only be enabled by the apparent absence of sentient culture on Mars). Our probes are hexapedal rather than tripedal and we claim to be seeking knowledge of our own origins, along with some distant and possibly pie-in-the-sky aspirations for full-scale invasion and Terraforming.
But we sent an actual heat-ray.
In particular, I was fascinated by the Martians' heat ray. As the son of an engineer who worked on military applications for lasers, I talked at length with my father about how closely it resembles modern lasers, invented more than sixty years after Wells' vision. One dissatisfying aspect, however, of real lasers at the time was that they were visible and the heat ray was not -- red, blue, green, probably other colors, as far as I knew, but colors you can see (given a typical amount of particulate matter in the atmosphere, anyway).
Several years after my first introduction to WotW, Viking 1 landed on Mars, the vanguard of an invading army of Earthly probes. While we've sent no tripods (so far), a handful of the probes are mobile, including the most recent, Curiosity, arriving in 2012. I have, along with all of the Martian landers since the Vikings, followed its wending way with wonder and excitement. I've long known of a particular feature of its geological laboratories, but it was only today that I made the connection: Curiosity is equipped with an infrared laser -- that is, an invisible heat ray.
Wells' Martians arrived on Earth nakedly hostile, an invading army with the goal of extermination or enslavement of all Terran life forms and Areforming their newly possessed planet; humanity's intentions on Mars appear, in our own narrative, more noble (although that may only be enabled by the apparent absence of sentient culture on Mars). Our probes are hexapedal rather than tripedal and we claim to be seeking knowledge of our own origins, along with some distant and possibly pie-in-the-sky aspirations for full-scale invasion and Terraforming.
But we sent an actual heat-ray.
Sunday, October 13, 2019
The Nature of Evolution
There's a new lcrp collaboration/collection that I'm on:
I was privileged to have my idea for the project -- punctuated equilibrium -- selected by the group and to help with the cover design as well (ideas, not actual art, which was done by another Lines Community artist). If you're interested in how I imagined PE as a musical idea, my original prompt (and the full collaboration thread) can be found here. Technical notes are near the bottom of that thread, but can be accessed directly here.
This is likely to be my last effort with the lcrp for a while, as I have several musical projects of my own that I want to focus on. As mentioned in my last post, I hope to consolidate my non-professional creative efforts under Circling Crows, including porting this blog to a host offering better owner's rights. As part of that process, I plan to revisit my old musical works here and on Soundcloud and collect the ones I like the most into a Bandcamp album, a process I intend to use as a demarcation between what feels like much more formative works and my more recent ones which have felt more authentic and meaningful to me. I'm also working on a series of pieces for viola, which I plan to organize into an album for Bandcamp.
I do intend to keep an ear cocked to the lcrp; they are an amazing community and much of my new self-confidence as a musician was fostered there. I doubt PE will be the last thing I do with them, even as I orient myself in other directions.
I was privileged to have my idea for the project -- punctuated equilibrium -- selected by the group and to help with the cover design as well (ideas, not actual art, which was done by another Lines Community artist). If you're interested in how I imagined PE as a musical idea, my original prompt (and the full collaboration thread) can be found here. Technical notes are near the bottom of that thread, but can be accessed directly here.
This is likely to be my last effort with the lcrp for a while, as I have several musical projects of my own that I want to focus on. As mentioned in my last post, I hope to consolidate my non-professional creative efforts under Circling Crows, including porting this blog to a host offering better owner's rights. As part of that process, I plan to revisit my old musical works here and on Soundcloud and collect the ones I like the most into a Bandcamp album, a process I intend to use as a demarcation between what feels like much more formative works and my more recent ones which have felt more authentic and meaningful to me. I'm also working on a series of pieces for viola, which I plan to organize into an album for Bandcamp.
I do intend to keep an ear cocked to the lcrp; they are an amazing community and much of my new self-confidence as a musician was fostered there. I doubt PE will be the last thing I do with them, even as I orient myself in other directions.
Thursday, October 3, 2019
Twenty Years In
Circling Crows, as an idea, an inspiration, a name, has been part of my life, in various manifestations, since about this time in 1999. The idea came to me in a hypnopompic vision I had, an image of crows wheeling in a desert sky, revolving black brushmarks against the pale ochre hues of a dusty, cloudless dome. That image has come to be associated with a series of activities related to art, creativity, music, and the nouminous.
The name Circling Crows was first attached to what I had planned to be a company that would produce a creativity workshop series I designed in late '99 and delivered once in early '00 in New York City. Together with a handful of graduates of that project, my co-leader and I made a valiant attempt to build a sustainable and scaleable business plan for a training company based on that course, called the 10,000-Fold Path, but could not find a structure that met our resource parameters at the time. It is in my initial notes for the 10KFP that I first wrote the words Circling Crows.
The steadiest manifestation of Circling Crows has been as a blog, of which there have been two. The Internet tells me that Blogger started August 23, of 1999, so the first Circling Crows blog seems likely to have existed from about spring of '00, probably as an outcome of the 10KFP. I believe its content was a largely unthemed mix of stream-of-consciousness, commentary, essays, and poetry. I maintained it spottily for a few years, perhaps through the mid-aughts, when my irregular posts waxed to full-on neglect and, probably sometime in '06, blog was taken down by its host. Later, I think in late 2010, for reasons I don't now recall, I was inspired to seek access to the old posts and perhaps to restart the blog and so began negotiations with Blogger to do so. Although those efforts were ultimately successful in regaining rights to the name, I was unable to retrieve any content; with the exception of a few notes in my journals, those writings have returned to the cyber-ashes of random 0s and 1s scattered across the terra incognita of endless server warehouses. I've been archiving this iteration.
In the last year or so, I've been increasingly active in reconnecting with the creative parts of myself, especially memories and states that buoyed so much of my childhood and youth. The latest project to bear the Circling Crows moniker is a consequence of those efforts: I am now publishing the sonic works I create under that name. In retrospect, it seems a long time coming; as the image of crows circling in the sky represents a foundational part of me, the vision in which they first appeared is an apt context for the artistic explorations I engage in. I am already working on the next collections to be shared as Circling Crows.
Going forward, I expect the projects under Circling Crows to expand in number and in kind. This year I finally splurged and purchased the domain names circlingcrows.com and circlingcrows.org and I hope before too long to point them at something(s) useful and artful, including a porting and consolidation of this blog. Other projects I hope to fold into what may become Circling Crows Productions would overlap with my clinical practice and some would be new but long-dreamt of directions, such as musical instrument making and collecting. Time will tell what I have the capacity for, but whatever I accomplish, I will always be tripped to reconnect to my childhood, to wonder, to magic, and to music when I look up and see crows circling in the sky.
The name Circling Crows was first attached to what I had planned to be a company that would produce a creativity workshop series I designed in late '99 and delivered once in early '00 in New York City. Together with a handful of graduates of that project, my co-leader and I made a valiant attempt to build a sustainable and scaleable business plan for a training company based on that course, called the 10,000-Fold Path, but could not find a structure that met our resource parameters at the time. It is in my initial notes for the 10KFP that I first wrote the words Circling Crows.
The steadiest manifestation of Circling Crows has been as a blog, of which there have been two. The Internet tells me that Blogger started August 23, of 1999, so the first Circling Crows blog seems likely to have existed from about spring of '00, probably as an outcome of the 10KFP. I believe its content was a largely unthemed mix of stream-of-consciousness, commentary, essays, and poetry. I maintained it spottily for a few years, perhaps through the mid-aughts, when my irregular posts waxed to full-on neglect and, probably sometime in '06, blog was taken down by its host. Later, I think in late 2010, for reasons I don't now recall, I was inspired to seek access to the old posts and perhaps to restart the blog and so began negotiations with Blogger to do so. Although those efforts were ultimately successful in regaining rights to the name, I was unable to retrieve any content; with the exception of a few notes in my journals, those writings have returned to the cyber-ashes of random 0s and 1s scattered across the terra incognita of endless server warehouses. I've been archiving this iteration.
In the last year or so, I've been increasingly active in reconnecting with the creative parts of myself, especially memories and states that buoyed so much of my childhood and youth. The latest project to bear the Circling Crows moniker is a consequence of those efforts: I am now publishing the sonic works I create under that name. In retrospect, it seems a long time coming; as the image of crows circling in the sky represents a foundational part of me, the vision in which they first appeared is an apt context for the artistic explorations I engage in. I am already working on the next collections to be shared as Circling Crows.
Going forward, I expect the projects under Circling Crows to expand in number and in kind. This year I finally splurged and purchased the domain names circlingcrows.com and circlingcrows.org and I hope before too long to point them at something(s) useful and artful, including a porting and consolidation of this blog. Other projects I hope to fold into what may become Circling Crows Productions would overlap with my clinical practice and some would be new but long-dreamt of directions, such as musical instrument making and collecting. Time will tell what I have the capacity for, but whatever I accomplish, I will always be tripped to reconnect to my childhood, to wonder, to magic, and to music when I look up and see crows circling in the sky.
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