Between the last release and this one, I released very little. Most of 2005 was spent adjusting to the college life. You know, being in a dorm, paying for things myself, and living the life.
I found that I had very little time, and very little creative juices left. Ritual of Forbidden Blood and Broadcast Pink Seeds (World Love) were the only two songs I made during this time. When 2006 rolled around, I had found out about this genre of music called “noise” and about this guy named John Cage.
All I had listened to was Merzbow and a gaggle of other Japanese noise artists (which are still my favorite.) In one of my classes, we watched a documentary about John Cage. All the talk of indeterminacy inspired me. The less I cared and the more nature took its grip over my music, the better.
The explication behind Cage’s 4’33 got my gears going. 4 minutes of breaks and rests written for the piano. The piano wasn’t the music, the crowd’s noises were the music.
That, along with Hantarash’s Yamataka Eye doing a concert where he destroys a building with a backhoe whilst screaming into a microphone opened my eyes to a whole new world of creativity. I also found out about the Dada movement some time along the way. My mind was blown. I finally had my creativity back.
Finally, I came across this article online called The Aesthetics of Failure.
Ever since I was introduced into making music, this is secretly what I wanted to do. I wanted to stop caring. I want to destroy music theory, and rebuild from the ground up. I want to count on mechanical failure instead of viewing them as a bad thing.
One of my favorite quotes from Cage is this:
If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.
It put a new perspective on boredom. I mixed that with my surrealist tendencies, and you have “The Aesthetics of Failure” album.
I remember it clearly, back in high school, someone once told me, “Don’t be offended, but your music is considered noise. It’s a real genre, you should look into it.”
I didn’t really believe him at first, but I’m glad that I naturally found my way down that path.
My favorite track off this album is a tie between Leviathan’s Call (Intro to Joy) and The Serpent’s Return (Ode to Joy.)
Both were made on an old keyboard where the pitch shifter was on a knob underneath it. I broke the knob off and had my ex-wife play Ode to Joy while I would mess with the pitch shifter with a small screwdriver. I couldn’t see up under there, but the metal contact would freak out the pitch resulting in awesome sounds. The Serpent’s Return was a mixture of me rolling dice/flipping coins, my ex plucking a viola, computerized synths, and the keyboard from the first one.
After that, was Aeon of Horus which used mostly fruity loops and a bunch of digital guitar amps looped together on my computer. I love that particular style of noise music, but it’s tragic that I make so little of it like that.
A lot of the songs were made on fruity loops back then. These days, you get eyes rolled at you if you admit to that. However, I’ve been making ‘music’ on fruity loops for a very very long time. The only difference is that I’m actually trying to break the software and break my computer while rendering my computer. Granted, it’s harder to do that these days with simple audio rendering. Quad cores and several gigs of ram make that a harder problem to have.
Tristan Tzara’s Toothache was made using nothing but a metronome. Circumcision For The Mute was me recording scissors held against a still spinning CD in an audio player with the latch to always think it’s closed, so it will still spin while the tray is open.
This album will always be looked at fondly by me. It’s relatively amateur, but it was just whatever I felt like making. I never saw a problem. It’s a hobby, and I do what I do.
Next time we’ll have “A Wide-Eyed Fawn” which could almost be seen as an extension or sequel to “The Aesthetics of Failure.”
