The Water's Path

by Milieu

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	1.	The Water's Path (Part 1 / Section 1) 03:00:25
	2.	The Water's Path (Part 1 / Section 2) 03:00:18
	3.	The Water's Path (Part 1 / Section 3) 03:00:33
	4.	The Water's Path (Part 1 / Section 4) 02:53:42
	5.	The Water's Path (Part 2) 02:59:48

about

"I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.

One world is aware and by far the largest to me,
and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own to-day
or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now,
or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.

My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time."

-Walt Whitman, excerpt from 'Song of Myself' (1892)

---

'The Water's Path' is the twentieth Sleepbuilding session to be released on Bandcamp, and it exists as a referential look back to where the series began in November 2022, with 'Creation' - a Karplus-Strong synthesizer in my modular system, playing the Dorian scale, left to meander through the night as I slept. 'The Water's Path' clocks in at fifteen hours in length, and offers a soporific disconnection from the outside world.

I find that this piece offers a wonderful perspective when placed as a counterpoint to the start of the series - to indeed observe the length and breadth and depth of the water's path - and considering the commonalities between the design of both compositions, they are both extremely similar to one another and entirely different. This state of superposition is one that I find myself referring back to often, with modular music, because within this set of peripheries and possible tangents, I myself remain the one constant, the one element that does not and cannot really change. I can follow the river where it goes, and I can direct it sometimes in order to excavate the visions I dream up from inside the stone, but ultimately, it goes where it will, and anything I could fashion out of the natural world would return to it anyway.

Whitman's words again bring me some gentle reassurance here, in the dissonance of these moments. It is good to accept that I am content where and when I am, and to be doing the work that I find worthwhile and inspiring regardless of whether or not you are here beside me. I've written a lot here about time, about my place in all of this machinery, and in the end there's always a pervading sense that I might as well say nothing at all, because the music itself always speaks far more clearly and completely than my struggling tongue can.

I can laugh at the dissolution of the statues I've built, I can be assured that I am a part of everything just as the grains of the Urth are. The water and the air, the same but different, move across the surfaces, carrying me away and bringing us back together again, where we will have the same conversation once more, wondering why it feels so familiar.

---

YouTube playlist of all Sleepbuilding broadcasts: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbcjgVJRSgeSHy00DZLB8zFFIJbIgcYjo

All prior Sleepbuilding releases to date (all FREE): campsite.bio/oscillog

For more generative ambient music delivered to your inbox automatically each month, please consider subscribing to my Vibratelepathos series: vibratelepathos.bandcamp.com

credits

released December 1, 2023

W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded at White Pillar, August 17 2023 using the R-EW Audioholistics modular system. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text by Brian. Poem excerpt by Walt Whitman. Design by ABM&D using visual sampling of 'Creation I' by Frantisek Kupka (1920). This is Milieu Music number MMD094. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2023. All nights preserved.

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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

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