Dip into the creative processes of two of CAAD’s summer projects, Exodo and Soundwalking. This week we bring you some of their sonic discoveries…
EXODO
Daniel Dones
cementerio |Cemetery
noun
the closest symbolic border
extant in the States
twixt life and death
we meandered through the graves
spoke power into their names
perhaps some of those names were spoken
for the first time in ages?
epochal disappearance
remedied in an instant.
but we do not know their stories.
so we wrote atop a glaring hill
to try and tell our own
a glaring hill
that glares upon the rails
and glares upon the trails
of el rio.
where so many go to travel
perhaps unaware
of their motionless friends
beneath la tierra.
so we wrote and wrote and wrote
and we walked and walked and walked
and we told our stories
in a mausoleum
to those who would listen.
i stared into the bust
of a man long passed
crafting melodies
of the folds in his stone clothing.
singing life into the stillness
allowing death into our song–
SOUNDWALKING
Simaya Speed
Image courtesy Wikipedia
Time warp back to the late 90s. The Flaming Lips slurped up surround sound recording and spat out Zaireeka. Really funky. The album was dispersed across 4 CDs, in the sense that, if you played them all at the same time, you’d hear a multi-tiered sonic phenomena whose atmosphere and conceptual wormhole was literally the sum of its parts – in potency, in intensity. Sonic harmony and sonic juxtaposition emerged even if only playing two or three of the discs simultaneously. What’s psychedelic about this album is that it encapsulates a sonic “choose your own adventure” path – it takes the concept of 360 degrees sonic architecture and underscores how sound is based upon perspective. We generally think of the spatial perspectives that compose the information traveling through a sound wave, but The Flaming Lips illuminated how, by extension, this sound can be seen as a single perspective on the information it carries – the perspective is unavoidable. We taint all information we absorb through perception based upon previous cognitive associations. These associations are malleable, but whether or not one has any associations is not. By playing the discs in any order of preference, selecting which sonic combinations to expose yourself to first, you choose how you will interpret the album – which associations come first and then later. You construct the sonic architecture of the pieces as you listen to it; who can say your interpretation is wrong? Zaireeka was made with the idea of stitching together anarchy, instability, and joyous discovery. I think that connecting these two easily abstracted notions is powerful. In my experience, discoveries of value and autonomy are born from revolting against those and that wishing to silence you. Only through anarchy and the political act of continuing to take up space, breathing without reason, can the discovery be joyous for you. Oftentimes, approaching the new means stripping down the hesitations and concerns that came with the old.
Is the “full album” one of the discs with the other albums acting to accentuate? Which disc is it? Is the “full album” all of the discs together? Well, what if I don’t have 4 boomboxes? If I only listen to two of the discs simultaneously, can that be the “full album” for me?
What is the full album, and why does that definition matter if you would gain more from developing your own perspective and actively trying to connect it with those of the others around you in order to get the full idea – rather than trying to swallow it on your own, in a small room with four subwoofers?
I am thinking about ownership that is temporarily superimposed onto spaces. I am thinking about reclaiming. I am thinking about choosing how to reclaim. I am thinking about how to show others their choice to reclaim. I am thinking of all the ways they can reclaim creatively and personally, reclaiming in a way that I have not laid out for them. These thoughts excite me; I’m eager to let people breathe in the way they crave, destabilize in the ways they fear the most. Choosing your adventure may be a bit of a misnomer; the adventure is in choosing at all.