“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, August 28, 2014

A Darker Ecology

Henry Warwick you have f'd up sound madly on your new album, to which I am just listening!

It's like early Tangerine Dream, before they went a bit wrong in the early 80s. Phaedra and Rubycon not to mention Journey through a Burning Brain and so forth. Atem. Alpha Centauri. Before they started to mean something and use FM synthesis. Otherworldly, spectral--dark ecology indeed...

Weirdly all kinds of musicians now making things to do with Dark Ecology, and some film makers. I hope I can do the album somehow.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks! Early Tangerine Dream was a big influence. I would say equal influences would be :zoviet*france:, Roland Kayn, Brian Eno, and more recently (as in the past ten years) Tim Hecker, Andrew Chalk, and Rapoon.
The album, "Something Borrowed", which be acquired at the link below, comes directly from a "Dark Ecology" sensibility, hence the title of the closing track "A Darker Ecology".
Everything in "Something Borrowed" is borrowed, even the cover photo. I borrowed it, with permission, from an Old Friend I've known since high school, Bill Kobasz. The song "Old Friends" was made of samples provided with (now long defunct) DJ software. Each sample is juxtaposed with every other sample used at least twice. In this way, the samples are "Old Friends". In the song "New Friends" samples only meet each other once. This assumes "Friend-ness", similar to Derridean hospitality. The use of borrowed sounds and samples indicates a kind of communism of media. But not one of enforced equality, as much as one of a celebration and liberation of all sound for creative purposes.
That the record itself is "dark" (I used a lot of "Warm" reverbs to give it a "dark" ambience) makes sense: this is a record of warning as much as a record of psychic expansion. For example, the song "Mitigations" comes before "A Darker Ecology". There will always be attempts to "Correct" things before acceptance, and there should be, so as to reduce negative impacts as much as possible. "Mitigations" is very "glitchy" - parts scatter and chirp - everything is constantly shifting. These are the grounds of mitigations.
There's a lot more involved with all of this, and I'd love to type it, but I have a million things to do today, and classes start on Tuesday and I need to finish a lecture....
Thanks for listening to the record. I'm glad you like it.