more from
Milieu Music Digital
We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Chiasmus

by Milieu

/
1.
2.

about

"Collecting, I traverse the garden, the world—but soon
I pass the gates,
Now along the pond-side—now wading in a little,
fearing not the wet,
Now by the post-and-rail fences,
where the old stones thrown there,
pick'd from the fields, have accumulated,
Wild-flowers and vines and weeds come up
through the stones,
and partly cover them—Beyond these I pass,
Far, far in the forest, before I think where I go,
Solitary, smelling the earthy smell,
stopping now and then in the silence"

-W. Whitman, excerpt from 'These I, Singing in Spring'

Chiasmus follows the considerable lineage of longform generative ambient works such as Creation, A Small Fire, Cirrus and Zephyrean with a nearly nine-hour meditation on the duality of nature, the cross-modulation of desire and contentment and the gradient of temperature and barometric changes in the transition from Winter to Spring.

All of these things exist definitively within Chiasmus, and yet, Chiasmus is simply a wordless expression of a process, guided by the ghost of emotional impulse and preconceived notions of what the future may yet become. It fills the empty vessels of space and time with an invisible element that vibrates and resounds, and echoes back the questions I hadn't quite thought to ask.

It is this mirrored relationship between mind and pseudo-mind (or machine, for those following my abstract analogies) that conveys the real and true purpose of the creative act - the ability to build just enough of a facsimile of my own thoughts and decisions in order to converse with it, and hopefully understand better what I thought I understood before.

Have I taught myself anything? Is this even possible? Is the feedback of talking to oneself about oneself capable of accumulating into an expansion of awareness? Or is the human condition simply this mundane and easily tricked? Are all the elaborate programs and systems we design merely fragmented mirrors of our own thinking, capable only of surpassing us in our most fleeting of resources, our greatest and irreparable weakness - time?

Does the act of fast-tracking human decisions and thought processes in fact give us a new vantage point on a life fully lived, a program run to its logical completion? Is a generative system, in this way, a window to that oft-imagined afterworld? The divinity of the last new knowledge?

And when I say this aloud, and write it in the air, as I am saying and doing right now, do we share in this moment of disconnected understanding? If I slip a message into time's frothing currents, and I am gone by the time you receive it, does my message change? Am I doomed to be the only one to ever ask or answer any of my own questions?

Chiasmus is an offering of gentle and sonorous sound, to soften the blow of these considerations, to round off the edges of this tragic philosophical maw. I would like it to be something that leads you slowly by the hand, whispering secrets in runic murmurs, drawing you toward exotic and unexpected lands of discovery, all the while tracing a line like a river across the map, where the terminus leads not only to a wider, endless ocean of new understanding, but the realization that you have been alone all along.

Original YouTube broadcast: www.youtube.com/watch?v=S35bXf2YLDs

For at least 2 new generative ambient releases delivered to your inbox each month, consider subscribing to Vibratelepathos: vibratelepathos.bandcamp.com

Vibratelepathos: It's music...I think.

credits

released March 18, 2023

W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded and broadcast live at White Pillar Workshop, on the evening of December 13, 2022, using the R-EW Audioholistics generative system and modular processing path. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Poem by Walt Whitman. Design by ABM&D using visual sampling of "Cathedral" by Frantisek Kupka, 1913. Additional text by Brian. This is Milieu Music number MMD075. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2023. All nights preserved.

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Milieu Dayton, Ohio

Psychedelic electronic music, sun-warmed analog ambient and sci-fi braindance, for cats, aliens and epicureans alike.

I also release music as Coppice Halifax: coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com

contact / help

Contact Milieu

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

Milieu recommends:

If you like Milieu, you may also like: