Music selected by ammel. This project asks the artists who created it to select books.
The sixth installment is, I'm MIDI Janitor, an IDM composer from Vancouver, Canada.
I still remember "Holy To Dogs," which was constructed using a MIDI controller found in a trash can on the side of the road and materials scraped from old media.
He named his album after the Gospel of Thomas and created music by combining things that could become trash. The book he chose was "57 Letters to Ethan Hawke, or I wanted to stop saying god" by Barton Smock.
It was "Letters 1-57".
-First of all, could you tell us how you first encountered Barton Smock's poetry? Some of his works seem to have been published by publishers, but most of his works seem to be self-published, and this collection of poems, "57," is one of them. I feel that his works are quite rare.
"It's a bit ironic that my encounter with such beautiful and profound poetry was actually quite mundane. I saw someone repost one of his poems on Instagram. When I read it, I was truly blown away. It was like someone squeezed a lemon on my brain. I immediately contacted him, expressed my love for his work, and offered to buy his book. I believe that impulses like this should be acted upon immediately. It's so rare to have such an experience where you are completely captivated by art."
-What aspects of his poetry particularly resonate with you?
Quote: "Make music and invent a god to listen to it."
"His words make my scalp tingle and my pupils explode. It's the world and not-the-world all at once. The sacred and the profane. The Holy Spirit and Jason Molina buying fried chicken at 7-11. Angels with data plans. Whether I'm creating or viewing, I'm always trying to get to that strange place. The uncanny valley, where beauty and horror walk side by side. The place where you're literally told something you shouldn't know. The feeling of knowing how to turn a corner and see what's beyond. A lemon squeezed on your brain. A 1-800 number about nothingness and how to crack an egg. It's like that."
"I don't see my music as a one-sided 'expression'. Rather, it's like a 'communion', a 'ritual', a 'liturgy' - a driven act. Burton's poems are similar to that - like ritual, but also like a weary invocation. And just like my music, he reuses the same elements over and over again, combining them in ways that shouldn't normally work, but somehow they do. He's always mixing the cheap, forgotten, everyday with the extraordinary, using the ordinary to say something extraordinary, like a beautiful melody played on an old toy Casio synth. He talks about 'gender reassignment surgery and passwords' and 'God and distance' in the same poem, and he portrays them all as equally ordinary and equally profound."
"The first line of the first poem in his collection reads:
Quote: "A song was playing, and I forgot that the song was playing."
"This shook my soul, because I understood it. You have to listen to the 'song beneath the song.' This is the moment I always strive for in music. Just as Basho wrote:
"Suma-dera Temple, listening to the silent flute, perhaps in the shade of the trees"
-It's interesting to have a worldview where contradictory elements can exist at the same time. Have poetry and music always been familiar to you? If so, please tell us how you first came into contact with them.
"I spent my formative years in some pretty desolate and isolated places around Donegal in the Republic of Ireland. I feel I was definitely shaped by that beautiful, strange and somewhat ethereal place. It's a very simple world, so basic it's all there is. It might sound a bit pretentious, but I've always felt connected to the 'Unbegan ' - the formless world that existed before we were all born. But that's never a dark, negative or pessimistic thing. That's why I think poetry and music are the shortest path back to that for me."
Instrumental music is sometimes seen as more limited in its expressiveness than works with lyrics, but do poems and books like Barton Smock's influence your music-making?
"I don't think that instrumental electronic music has any more limitations in expression than music with lyrics. Rather, I feel that music with lyrics often narrows and fixes its meaning. In many cases, it is focused on conveying a specific moment, and it seems to be speaking the same thing every time you listen to it. On the other hand, electronic music has a lot of 'space' , where you can bring your own experiences into it each time. And, 'as you change, the music changes too.' I feel this idea is close to the idea that 'you can't step into the same river twice.' "
"But I'm very fascinated by the way poetry, particularly Burton's poetry, reaches a 'mystical realm' with limited elements and lines. His poetry has influenced me, and so for my next album I want to be more direct and sophisticated. I want to leave the melodies and harmonies there, raw, exposed, vulnerable and fragile. I want to let the music speak for itself, rather than burying it in layers and processing."
Quote: "Dear Ethan Hawke
The healer's secret diet confuses hunger.
Television is a calendar without a moon. In the mirror, I am the only mirror, and I taste the blood of ghosts.
I want to tell you that time is safe with me. The angel's eyes fill with mist.
These bodies are not doing anything.'
-Your attitude of accepting the inherent existence of contradictory elements, and your approach of giving electronic music "space" - perhaps we could call it "white space" - seems close to Japanese and other Eastern thought and philosophy. I was surprised to see Basho's name and haiku come up, but does Japanese culture have an influence on your outlook on life and music?
"I think the role of Japanese culture in my life and music is more of a confirmation than a discovery. Every time I visit Japan (as many people say), I feel like I've stepped right into my own heart."
"I believe that the birth of a human being means the birth of a unique 'form.' It is like a drop of water in a flowing river hitting a rock or falling down a waterfall and becoming separated from the whole. At that moment, that drop of water loses sight of where it came from and longs to return to its original 'state of non-distinction.' When the Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki saw a 1,340-foot waterfall in Yosemite National Park in the United States, he felt that this was the true essence of human 'existence.'
"If we can understand life and death in terms of the separation of water in a waterfall, we will be able to look at life from a new perspective. While suffering may certainly continue as we fall down the waterfall, we will ultimately be able to return to the river that awaits us below."
- "Unbegan"... Your attitude of accepting existence and essence as they are was shaped by the culture of Donegal where you grew up. That's why it makes sense that Japanese culture such as haiku and Zen is closer to "confirmation" than "discovery." You see your view of life and death as the water of a "waterfall," and the relationship between your existence and music as the water of a "river"... It's very interesting how you express this in "never stepping in the same river twice. "
The journey of words that started with BartonSmock's poem was a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to the next piece of music!