Oceans and Voids
“From nothing to more than nothing”
I’ve been thinking of Brian Eno’s famous comment on ambient music being both ignorable AND something to be intensely engaged with. To me, this intersection is fascinating because philosophically, he’s really asking what music is for? Or, at the very least, what is ambient music for?
I’ve loved ambient music pretty much my whole life. Yet I’ve never come up with a satisfying answer to what it’s actually for and I kind of don’t care anymore.
There’s all kinds of pragmatic reasons one could give (music improves cognitive development, it creates social bonds, it helps us through trying times etc..), but none of those things ever convinced me to become a composer. If money and time didn’t matter, I’d probably spend the rest of my life recording and testing various sounds together forever, feeling the differences they create in my mind, admiring the varieties of audible tension and release.
But the part that’s less sexy to discuss (as an artist), is when to write for the audience (or algorithm) and when to write for oneself. And where exactly on the Venn diagram do these circles actually overlap?
This ‘diagram’ is just me riffing unscientifically, the reality is obviously much more complex.It’s a balance. Because love letters written to oneself, by oneself, are depressing. But love letters written solely with image craft in mind, how will I be perceived, those letters are often vaporous and one-dimensional.
In general, I think a composer has to care about this balance. People can hear the difference. Understanding music theory terminology isn’t a prerequisite for understanding how music makes us feel — we all just know.
Anyway, these thoughts have been bouncing around my mind for weeks now, as I’ve begun writing two new EPs (maybe an album), both ambient, but both exploring very different ideas: Oceans and Voids.
Here is an itty-bitty teaser:
And some more books I’ve been loving:
Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope — Mark Manson
I read this book in 2021 and loved it so much that I’m reading it again this year.
As the title suggests, it isn’t really a “feel-good” book, but, I have to say, the takeaways are honest, mind-blowing and incredibly constructive. In that way, it might actually make you feel good. I think of it as existentialism as self-help. His description of moral gaps has stuck with me over the years because it explains a lot about human behavior:
“It’s our natural psychological inclination to equalize across moral gaps, to reciprocate actions: positive for positive; negative for negative. The forces that impel us to fill those gaps are our emotions. In this sense, every action demands an equal and opposite emotional reaction.”
And my favorite quote from the book, about how we isolate ourselves from each other:
“Whether you feel as though you’re better than the rest of the world or worse than the rest of the world, the same thing is true: you’re imagining yourself as something special, something separate from the world.”
Into the Planet — Jill Heinerth
Man, I knew scuba diving was risky, but for those that have the courage to explore the dangerous depths the way professional cave divers do, it is next-level bravery. And every bit as dangerous (probably more so in some cases) than what astronauts do. The physical and mental toll on the body, nitrogen narcosis, underwater currents, erosion, loss of visibility, there’s a million life-threatening possibilities.
Jill Heinerth has written a fantastic and somewhat tragic story, an autobiography of a compelling life of exploration and courage. If you like books on exploration, I’d recommend this as well as Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson.
Fun quote:
“As we trekked west, I cleared small saplings and tied orange tape on the dripping chechem, or poisonwood, trees that oozed a skin-dissolving alkaloid sap. Just a few drops on your skin and your arm would begin to look like thick cheese pizza, followed by three weeks of a maddening, sleep-depriving itch that made poison ivy seem like a pleasure.”
At the Existentialist Café — Sarah Bakewell
An amazing overview of the thinkers labelled under the umbrella of Existentialism.
I love Sartre’s concept of the self as a vacuum — that we fundamentally base so much of ourselves in terms of something that doesn't exist. And the only way we can describe it is in terms that ignore this fact.
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”
I love how Bakewell points out the fundamental difference between the philosophy of Camus and the philosophy of Sartre. And as I’ve gotten older, I have to say, I’m joining the Sartre camp more and more. Sartre rejected Camus’ idea that life is absurd. To Sartre, this conclusion isn’t a deep discovery of something profound about the universe — it’s a complete failure of imagination. The analogy is, if you look out and see a bunch of players kicking a ball around on a green field, and if it feels random and chaotic to you, it means you’re not actually watching soccer. And according to Sartre, if you really feel like you’re not watching soccer, than you’re not observing the context of what reality actually is.
There are other great sections about Gabriel Marcel and Merleau-Ponty — and the disagreement with Sartre’s concept of self as a vacuum:
“Consciousness, he [Merleau-Ponty] suggests, is like a ‘fold’ in the world, as though someone had crumpled a piece of cloth to make a little nest or hollow. It stays for a while, before eventually being unfolded and smoothed away.”
I really love that ^
As always thank you for reading and listening my friends. Until next month!
Oh, and p.s. my friend Teun van der Zalm and I collaborated on his latest video, Twilight Sky, which is so utterly beautiful:
