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.
"I think it's a little bit ironic that my discovery of such beautiful and profound poetry happened in a really banal way.I simply saw someone repost one of his poems on Instagram.I was utterly stunned.It was like having a lemon squeezed on my brain.I immediately reached out to him to say how much I loved his work and to buy a copy of the book.I really believe in immediately acting on those kinds of impulses.It's so rare to be utterly captivated by a piece of art like that."
-What aspects of his poetry particularly resonate with you?
Make music. Then Invent a god to play your music for.
"His words make my scalp crawl and my pupils explode. It is the world and not the world. At the same time. The holy and profane. The Holy Ghost and Jason Molina getting fried chicken at 7-11. Angels with data plans.
Whether I am creating or consuming art I am always looking to get to that same weird place. That uncanny valley where beauty and terror walk beside one another. Where it feels like you are about to be told something you absolutely should not know. Like learning how to look round corners. A lemon squeezed on the brain. A 1-800 number to talk with the Void about the best way to crack an egg."
"I don’t really think of my music as a form of expression because that feels like a one way thing.It is more a form of communion, a ritual, a liturgy.Something I am compelled to do.Barton’s poetry feels the same. Like a ritual or a weary summoning. And like my music he uses the same elements over and over, often in ways that should not work but do. Always mixing the cheap, the forgotten, the mundane with the otherworldly. Using the ordinary to try and say extraordinary things. A beautiful melody played on a old toy Casio synth or a poem that speaks of ‘top surgery and passwords’ and ;god and distance; in the same poem and makes them all seem as ordinary and profound as each other."
"In the first line in the first poem in the book he says:
A song played that made me forget a song was playing.
"This just shocks my soul because I GET IT. There is a song under the song. You must hear it. This is the exact moment I am always trying to get to in my music. Just like Basho:
Temple of Suma—
hearing the unblown flute
in the deep shade of 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 wild and isolated places in and around Donegal in the Republic of Ireland.I was definitely shaped by those beautiful, strange haunted spaces.So spare and elemental.Although it probably sounds pretty pretentious, I think that I've always felt that I am still connected to the Unbegun.The formlessness from which we all came.To me, that's not a dark or negative or bleak thing at all .So for me, poetry and music have always been the shortest distance back to that."
-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 actually don't see instrumental electronic music as having expressive limits compared to music with lyrics. I think that music with words narrows and locks meaning in (and is often concerned with conveying a particular moment in time) so the song is saying the same thing each time you listen to it. Whereas with electronic music, there is so much space in it that you can bring all of your experiences to it each time you listen and IT changes as YOU change. It's like that idea about never stepping in the same river twice."
"That being said, I am really interested in how poetry and especially Barton's poetry can get to that place of the numinous using so few elements and in so few lines. So I think one of the ways that his poetry has influenced me is that my next record will be much more direct and distilled. I want to try and be confident enough to just let the melodies and harmonies sit there exposed and vulnerable. I just want to have that almost naked feeling to the music and allow it to be vulnerable and exposed and say what it needs to say rather than burying it in processing and layers."
Dear Ethan Hawke
The healer's secret diet confuses starvation.
The television is a monthless calendar. In the mirror, I am the only mirror to taste the blood of a ghost. I want you to know that time is safe with me. An angel's eye fills with fog.
These bodies aren't 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?
"For me, I think the role of Japanese culture in my life and in the music I make has been more about confirmation ...So when I travel there (and I think many people have said the same thing) it kind of felt like walking into my own mind!"
"When a human life comes into being, a unique form comes together, like a drop of water when it is separated from the wholeness of the river as it hits a rock or falls down a waterfall. And when that separation occurs, the drop feels a deep sense of disorientation and longing to return to its natural, undifferentiated state. That is how Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki expressed the condition of being after visiting Yosemite National Park and seeing water cascade down the 1,340-foot waterfall there. When we can understand our life and death in terms of the separation of the particles of water in a waterfall, he said, we can find a new point of view from which to live, and although the flight down the waterfall might continue to present us with difficulty, we are better able to connect with the truth of the river that waits to receive us at the bottom."
- "Unbegun"... 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!