My ear is recovering well today and it has been a good day. I've spent most of it working on new, 600dpi artwork for my albums. More on this later.
I'm making good progress on a new piece of music, The Fingers Of Evil which feels new and exciting, something like genuine surrealist music. It was made using instant images which is the way I write stories, or develop film ideas, and to some extent now, albums too. The idea is that, like the images I paint, this captures an instant emotion and existence, like an 'information blob'.
I began with an image, a scene, which appeared unconsciously - I am always dreaming, even when awake, and aware of these thoughts and images, perhaps the years of meditation allow me to see these dreams at any time, on a 'second screen' of the mind, but I don't believe in a simple conscious and unconscious mind, the mind is many personalities and consciousnesses; we can communicate with and become any, and often switch between many in a normal day.
The image was of long white fingers with pointed fingernails, clawing towards me in absolute blackness, rapping their yellowed fingernails on a hard surface. It was probably inspired by the wonderful ink-black imagery in David Lynch's The Grandmother. I noted this, a quick text sketch, and then kept writing, as fast as I could, just a list of images, text, sounds, people; a blast of information. It's better not to think in these circumstances and just keep writing quickly.
This is the way I came up with some of the pieces I used for ArtsLab, some of which made it onto Tree of Keys, such as Paradise Lost or War Song. The resulting script was a mix of sounds and words:
scratches, candles, darkness, soil
Here are the fingers
Long and spidery
Pulling at your white matter
contaminating you with their ink
in a chessboard arena
GIANT JUDGE'S HEADS
(chanted)
Feel us!
Feel us!
Feel us!
Feel us!
happy sunlit kitchen, 1950s America, birds and flowers outside
Do you remember when times were good
The smell of the bacon in the morning
The sun-people of honey and smiles
Can you recall what it was like?
Is that part of you still there?
black fingerland
Now the fingers play their pipes
seducing you
and your lonely skin
(chanted)
Who is right now?
Who is right now?
Who is right now?
Who is right now?
an aluminium room, at a desk
DEVIL
Which is it going to be?
HEADS
(chanted)
Feel us!
You must choose between good and evil
Are you good or evil?
There are also sounds for each part but it's harder to write those down. These appeared in my head at the moment of conception, so the script above can be seen as a mnemonic.
After this, each section is broken into images and music. Some sections had vague indications of audio, but generally the sections are a matter of mood alone so there is enough freedom to allow some creative unity in the music without betraying the purity of the concept (we must always be careful to honour this - it is this purity of truth that is essential to preserve). The different sections seemed to suggest other music I've heard, from Queen's Lap Of The Gods to Get Out Of My House by Kate Bush. Some sections march, and I thought of Michael Kamen's music for battle scene in Brazil, and Scott Walker's avant-garde voices here and there too.
I'm excited about the possibilities here for something new in music. This feels more like genuine unconscious music - that is 'instant emotion capture' music, a closer analogue to contemporary poetry vs. Victorian poetry. Modern pop music, as I've often said, feels so twee and easy, repetitive, emotionless, and bland, compared to the rawness and richness of tapestries like this; but, of course, as with modern poetry, it might take an evolution of taste to enjoy and understand. All new art must.
