As the Summer wound down to its appointed end, I spent about a week processing some very potent thoughts, after a meeting with someone left me with a tangle of unresolved emotions, primarily involving mortality, and the loss of awareness as it approached. Much within the art world has been done in the name of trying to grapple with mortality, and the degradation of human memory, and this triptych of recordings is not attempting to say anything new or particularly profound about it. It is simply my way of coming to terms with things that are not normally brought so directly before me in my day to day life. I meditated, I wrote a poem, I wrote another poem, and then I recorded this session. It felt like enough. It would have to be, because I prefer to use any creative mechanisms I possess or have access to in order to figure out how I really feel about something, in order to keep myself from fixating on it, letting something like grief, depression or worry self-oscillate and spin out into something more mountainous.
The sessions sat unnamed on my hard drive for a while, and all last month I considered them in the back of my mind, feeling that they were appropriate for the onset of Autumn weather, texturally speaking, but they still remained bereft of any finer details that elevate the mundane to the meaningful. They were named, then they were renamed, then I left the work again to consider the changes, until returning to it now, discovering almost too quickly the real identity of these pieces.
They have been renamed a second time, with a phrase that I mindlessly uttered aloud one night walking along the sidewalk, looking at the fluttering blanket of orange leaves that now covered my front yard. I laughed and wondered what it meant, and then realized what it meant, and felt as if I'd simply quoted someone. No online searching turned anything up, and so it is with many of my titles that arrive in a purely subconscious way, that there are always processes in motion somewhere in my creative mind, things that even I am unaware of, meanings I know, but bury or ignore or simply cannot detect until a window opens and they are allowed to surface, like driftwood wrested free of an ancient shipwreck beneath a stormy sea.
Perhaps this is evidence of whatever mental defragmentation I underwent, by way of my writing and my modular patching, that the system works, albeit without a time table, and I have once again transmuted grief into gold. After some time away from these sessions, I find them much more comforting than they felt at the time, pouring out of so many cables and pulsing lights. They feel like a complete thought, a literal beginning middle and end, and now they should be published so that the public may read and write into them what it will. I have given you my reasons for making them, but you should have your own reasons for listening to them, and you do, whether you know that or not. I'm hopeful that they will add to your day or night, rather than subtract from it, and as always, it never ceases to surprise me the variance of fruits borne from my strange modular tree, and I am thankful to be so lucky, to have such useful tools within my grasp, when and where I need them.
credits
released November 4, 2022
W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded at White Pillar, September 19th 2022, using the R-EW Audioholistics modular system and Behringer's reproduction of the Blue Marvin ARP 2600 monophonic analog synthesizer. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text by Brian. Design by ABM&D, using visual sampling of Frantisek Kupka's 'Mme Kupka Among the Verticals', circa 1911. This is Milieu Music Distributed 70. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2022. All nights preserved.
A longform drone piece from New Zealand sound sculptor Mo H. Zareel plays subtly with listeners' perceptions as its layers unfold. Bandcamp New & Notable Jul 21, 2020