A musical accompaniment to The Irreveries, a poetry book forthcoming this fall.
The Deserter's Continuous Music In The Key Of The Fields was originally composed for sine waves in a 'dream house' installation at The Kerr Foundation in St Louis, as part of an exhibition organized by Caesura Magazine. The building had 3 floors, so I arranged 3 sets of 12 sine wave tones binaurally tuned (so really 24 sine waves) on each floor. The listener was free to move about the space & modulate the different components of the chords with their ears & bodies. The Deserter's Continuous Music was the second 'movement' & was featured on an open main floor, tethered between the basement's lower pitch drone (titled The Rogue Philosopher's Septimally Splayed Gloria Drone Blues Base Mentality), & the upper floor (titled The Howling Wolf's Most Lucid Celestial Azure). As a whole piece, the dream installation was a reference to the history of blues music in St Louis. To this end, the tunings were based on harmonic sevenths. Running for 11 hours, the result was the first long-form drone environment about blues music in St Louis.
The tuning is influenced by La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano, but not exactly the same. I call it my 'BS Lucid Septimal' tuning, with ratios as follows ...
I have many versions of this scale, where e.g. I substitute the fourths with slight variations of fifths, each separated by small intervals of 'wolf' tones. Likewise, I occasionally remove the seconds & substitute 3 discreet unison tunings. For example, placing the "Slendro Diesis" in the 8:7 slot, thus creating 3 distinct unisons at 1:1, 64:63 (the "celestial comma), & 49:48 (Slendro Diesis). One of the goals is the "emancipation of the comma" (Michael Harrison). The reference pitch is a very low C at 8.175 Hz. This falls in the upper 'theta range' frequencies commonly associated with dreamstate brain waves, & which almost all of my rhythms/pitch are based on (3-7 Hz).
But the music is not limited to the acoustic difference tones created, as radiantly dispersed as they can be. Like the Endotones series, I am still trying to find a suitable marriage of light, arid French piano music, & the acoustic innovations of the last half-century (Amacher, Young et al). Ideally, I could freely lyricize the acoustics in a more artful, & less brutally scientific mode. The goal is ultimate freedom, hence the deserter character who is both lost & free. "I am free & that is why I am lost" — Kafka.
Like all of my music, this album is live-composed, meaning that the musical phrases, harmonic progressions, and so forth are created spontaneously with the aid of a customized composition program that is part conscious research, part unconscious free association / intuitive play.
The cover image is by the 19th century Belgian artist Felecien Rops. (For a more detailed discussion of him, see my essay on Baudelaire's Late Fragments at Caesura.) The title is A Clef Des Champs — Key of The Fields. I like the poetic image of a hypothetical musical 'key' of an open field, something that unlocks what is otherwise closed & provides a grand opening through which to explore & wander. Such openness of course has an analog in the extremely, almost unprecedentedly expansive chordal arrangements, & the form of the dream house which provides a laconic environment that can evoke an eternal state of mind. It is a continuation of my interests in idle time, loafing, & convalescence, inspired by Baudelaire, Whitman, & Walter Benjamin, & forming a lot of the content of The Irreveries poems & aphorisms.
THE DISSONANT MAY BE BEAUTIFUL
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PSYCHOACOUSTIC
PHANTASMAGORIA
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SILICON ROMANTIC
MUSIC
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EXCITED SOMNAMBULANCE
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NOCTURNAL EAR DANCES
......more
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