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Can I rant in an unfiltered way? It might feel refreshing to vent some complicated thoughts. Please bear with me as I bare my doubts and affections for a few paragraphs. I need to express some things that might not make sense immediately - perhaps even to me until I manage to say it in print:
To quote a poem by Daevid Allen of Gong "We are a community of hermits!" which is to say, that I don't want to speak for any concept of a movement or overarching direction in "style" that I have trouble believing exists. I mean this in the most optimistic of ways. I simply don't see music in terms of categories, and I don't picture those people who make slow atmospheric-sounding music as any different from a person up on stage singing their songs with an acoustic guitar, or a pianist practicing arpeggios to strengthen their fingers, a dance DJ triggering loops on Ableton Live, a cellist playing Bach, or a shaman in the Amazon rainforest trying to heal someone with yage while journeying to the spirit world.
Having said that, I think we can't ignore the continuing splatter of the baby-boon record biz (yes, I meant to type 'n' not 'm'). Our info-world becomes an increasingly self-informed polyglot idea-farm. Splintering constantly occurs, and I doubt that we'll ever see (in our lifetimes at least) a time where only a few artists manage to state the thesis that captures the zeitgeist of a generation, as rock music did in the late '60s. I think many of us late era baby-boomers yearn for the imagined purity of a sociopolitical-mystical-psychedelic art; and much of the vocabulary of space-music derives from that longing. I certainly consider myself guilty of that cultural vocabulary. So, we mystics struggle on in obscurity, mostly ignored by the mainstream media culture, Quixotically tilting at our aural windmills.
As an aside for context: When I started making music, I was trying to come up with something that sounded individual and truthful to a shamanic destiny - but not blindly copying the composers who influenced me. That's partially because I was influenced from such a wide range: everyone from Harry Partch and John Cage to Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros, Popol Vuh, Tangerine-Klaus-Kluster-Caberet Voltaire-Wire-Throbbing-Residents-TuxedoMostanythingthat sounds cool -GongYesCrimsonBlahBlahBlah - whatever sparked my plug, in other words. I think a lot of new music makers resemble that confusion of influences, and I applaud it! I don't want to hear things that sound too worshipful of their heirs. I want to hear things that blur lines we never knew existed.
As I look into my crystal ball, I see - not a fog - but a chaos of colors and multiplicity. I see a world where people can search for what they like, and possibly find someone who might surprise them. I hope that boundaries blur to the point where nobody knows what a "style" is; where the techno-dance folks don't feel compelled all the time to come up with a new hybrid term to define their personal style ("Dude, like, this isn't Jungle because it's not 150 BPM; we're doing GahGahHouse, which is kinda like Jungle but with funny hats and samples of laughter and pre-Columbian native instruments, dude.")
So speaking to the outside world - I hope to see crazy new surprises that sound incredible, beautiful, personal, thoughtful, meaningful, private, Hermetic. I want to be flummoxed when I hear it, like I felt when I first heard Sufjan Stevens, only a couple years ago. Surprise me! I don't want to recognize a source, nor a sample, nor a riff, nor a genre. I think new ideas are unstoppable, especially now, because everyone has access to everything. When everyone starts getting bored with the status quo, we can hope that everything will get broken and rebuilt with new surprises, new flaws, new humanity. It's all the same, over again, every time new, hopefully crazy and ever-so-personal. (Reminded just now of the lyrics to the Who's "Baba O'Riley", and thinking that song's title source was also one of my big inspirations - Terry Riley... funny how that works...)
Personally, I am trying really hard to slow down. I chide myself with how many albums I released in the last couple years, some of which were responding to external demands. I keep thinking we have too much music in the world right now, and certainly few people clamoring for more of my style of indulgence. I find myself fascinated by the fringes of musical possibilities, and I always poke around the edges So, I want to take a longer chunk of time to make a new album that sounds complete and self-contained, and different from the past. I keep trying to do that, and I like it. Of course, I'll always have more requests to collaborate, or to make sounds for some visual element. Collaboration is fun and it inspires me. I guess I still think that music becomes more interesting on its own, rather than subservient to an image.
"Ambient" music seems more and more destined to fill a subservient role underneath visuals, unless something resembling a new psychedelic culture arrives to appreciate the energy within that sparseness. I still love a rarified stimulus, but I tend to get it mostly from walks down the local creek trail, or up in the coastal mountains, listening to birds and water, even within the sound of nearby freeway traffic, airplanes overhead, all the noise of the urban world. If music can help people to appreciate that chaos, then it serves a purpose to condition us against the world we have created as we destroy the natural world around us. If we succeed in becoming comfortable with our artificial world, perhaps we have failed in our better mission to save the world from ourselves. Who knows? I just want to add something small and beautiful to people's life, because I doubt I can do much to change the world around me beyond improving it in small local environs. If I can help people remember one thing about why they exist, then I have done the best thing I know how to do.
Robert Rich 2008 http://www.robertrich.com/
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