immanence

Music is an occasional topic on this blog (as shown in the Soundscape category). It was my first university discipline and love (when I was an undergrad at York’s wonderfully eclectic Music Department), still figures in my scholarly work from time to time (as in my work on Cape Breton Island and the Chernobyl Zone), and I continue to harbor thoughts of one day doing for music what Ecologies of the Moving Image did for cinema. Of course, the 130 year history of cinema is not the 130,000 year history of music, so an ecophilosophy of the latter will have to be a much different, and much more humble, affair.

What I haven’t done here is shared anything about the music I’ve made over the past 35 years. You can now get some of that over at Bandcamp, where I’ve recently updated my page to include things spanning a diversity of projects over the years: electronic and electroacoustic music made in the days before digital (some of it at York’s Electronic Music Studio), psychedelic and “oceanic” improvisational forays (including with my bandmates in the ethno-psych-Slavic-folk-thrash band Stalagmite Under a Naked Sky, a.k.a. Вапняки), avant-jazzy piano work (some of it utilizing alternate tuning systems in the vein of La Monte Young and Terry Riley, other pieces inspired more by Cecil Taylor, Matthew Shipp, Keith Jarrett, and modernist composers Dane Rudhyar and Aleksandr Scriabin), and even an album of choral work from the years when I conducted a Ukrainian choir in Toronto.

For those interested in the connection between music and philosophy, there’s a certain trajectory that tracks with the evolution of my ecophilosophical inclinations and obsessions: from the eco-apocalyptic and “mockalyptic” themes of the earlier albums (Storm Warning, Age of Aquariums, Resurrected Fields) to the “process-relational strategies” of the Pluto Descends trilogy. The latter is most evident, I think, in the intonational experimentalism of Distempered Landscapes and the chromatic abstraction of Mercury Rises.

I would make a case that the “comprovisational” methods I keep coming back to are a form of process-relational practice: in setting up a compositional system, situation, or set of options (a kind of Brian Eno-like cybernetic forethought plus “non-thought” to open the way) and then following an immersive, time-based improvisational path into and through it (a form of Francesco Varela’s “laying down a path in walking“), comprovisation is a form of actively responding to processes underway, all the time remaining maximally open to the situation at hand. Whereas improvisation suggests a kind of spur-of-the-moment “extemporising” in relation to what’s there, comprovisation acknowledges its own hand in shaping the initial situation, even if that hand limits its own movement in very specific ways. (An early rendition of my argument about composition, published long ago in Musicworks magazine, can be read here. It’s perhaps one of the reasons why I like to favor the “com-” in composition over the “im-” in improvisation.)

Since there’s a lot of music on that Bandcamp page, and on the hunch that music is supposed to have some practical applications, here’s a guide to a few sample trajectories for journeying through it.

• For sonic hyperventilation and aural-mental cleansing: all of Distempered Landscapes; Resurrected Fields III; and some of Meditations/Dances in Etheric Fields.
• For extraterrestrial scuba diving: “Bumping Noses/Slow Sea Extase” (Age of Aquariums), “Mycelial Running” (Meditations/Dances), and “Erotic Landscape 2” (Intimations of the Veiled).
• For sober contemplation of the state of things in their naked and transient luminosity: much of Pluto Descends, especially the three “Dusksongs,” and some of the later pieces on Mercury Rises (like “Sentiment” and “Settlement”), Distempered Landscapes (“Waving to Blue,” “Sadra’s Pool”), and Architectonic (“Actual Occasion,” “Prehension”).
• For lava lamp and snow globe watching: “Aquarium Age” (Age of Aquariums); more minimalistically, “Afterglow” and “A Dream” from Pluto Descends, and the three tracks on the Ambient Erratics EP (which will eventually turn into an LP).
• For fugitive reconnaissance across bumpy folds of erratic terrain: all of Mercury Rises; maybe some of Aquarium Age.
• And perhaps my favorite genre, EDM, or Ecstatic De-oligarchization Music: the opening and closing tracks on Fall of the Oligarchs 1. (And hopefully a number of other things all around here.)

If you want to know where to start, and which albums I feel most satisfied with, I would say the Pluto Descends trilogy, particularly Mercury Rises, which features some of my best playing (on piano) and which compositionally remains closest to my heart, and Distempered Landscapes, for the sonic and affective “distempering” and de/re-tuning it enables. Test it for yourself to see what you think. Bandcamp is set to allow several free listens before it asks you to download; and the price, in any case, is low. And both of those two albums are double-length, clocking in at between 70 and 85 minutes of music each.

But I also really enjoyed the oceanic and otherworldly phases represented by some of the earlier recordings. Those come with a warning: The sound quality of the 1980s recordings (those credited to “vax”) leaves a lot to be desired, especially where the early master tapes have been lost. The best versions I have for some of those are on Teac Tascam encoded cassettes, which require the same machinery for playback, but my machine melted several years ago and they don’t make them any longer. The original tapes are also in various stages of disintegration.

There are plenty of things that didn’t make it here, for lack of adequate recordings, and some that probably shouldn’t be made public (like parts of Architectonic, Fall of the Oligarchs, and Meditations/Dances in Etheric Fields). I may still tweak a few things and add some more information when I get a chance. But I offer these pieces because they exist (in digital form), and I hope there’s enough here to entertain and provide some adventure for those willing to give this music a try. Expect some new music there eventually.