as much as vice and others want to put a happy spin on these guys, they sure seem like crazy terrorists to me. lipstick on a pig and whatnot.

wow. i've been calling myself an evangelical atheist for years, and thought it was a sort of a unique description. is mr. eno also an alphabetical egalitarianist and general grammar anti-authoritarian? you know what they say about great minds...

...and regarding u2 and christianity, bono's position has always been very skeptical of organized religion, despite wanting to connect to the moral underpinning. i'd interpret him as a secular humanist. i mean, it's kind of weak to suggest he needs to share philosophical positions with the artists he produces. but there's not much hypocrisy, if you really follow what bono was actually saying.

"i'd break bread and wine if there was a church i could receive in."

as for what's he's saying...i get his point..

but, if you legitimately reject the concept of faith, it's not really a debate of whether you should or shouldn't have control. i think this is kind of meta - he's discussing the question of whether we can choose to be in control, which necessitates us being in control in the first place.

and, ironically, if you really don't believe there's a power, that breaks down to really not being in control - you're at the whim of the universe. it's not just some kind of pantheism. it's the inevitable consequence of really seriously diving into atheism. atheism is not some randian thing about free will. in fact, it's christianity that gives us free will (calvinism aside, but calvinism is very weird in relation to most religions). atheism rejects that and replaces it with stochastic processes, randomness, chaos...

it's a better fix to add this to adblock:

youtube.com##div#theater-background.player-height

the intersection of two identical particles moving in completely opposite directions (vst mix) (for thru)

ok...

so, to understand this piece, it's necessary to go back to 1998.

i was working out primitive sequencer parts for the first inri demo and it just sort of crossed my mind that there was really nothing stopping me from composing symphonies except for a lot of music theory. well, if i could write electronic music without training, why couldn't i write symphonies without training? i mean, the score writing program exists in front of me. it was just a question of experimenting with it. i could do it myself...

...but i actually already had a pretty hefty disdain for music theory by the age of 17. i'd managed to come across a music history textbook that traced the deconstruction of western theory from beethoven through to schoenberg and this, combined with my experiences as a guitarist, was enough to prevent me from taking it seriously. the perception i had was of modern composers viewing music theory sort of like how biologists viewed creationism. i use that analogy fairly frequently. it just didn't strike me as relevant.

now, i've softened a bit over time to a view that music theory is best understood in terms of the underlying physics. this renders the theory useless, but upholds the basic relationships between tones as physical, mathematical realities. the thing is the next step of abstraction is understanding that these mathematical objects can be arranged and analyzed in any arbitrary way, and the conventional theory really *is* a fallacy akin to creationism. so, i still hold to the general thesis. this is actually the first serious example of me putting that disdain for the idea that music should have a theory into real action. i remain adamantly of the view that art is not a realm where theories should exist or be viewed with anything other than scorn. theories are rigid, formal things; art is informal, chaotic.

so, it's 1998. i have a scorewriter and a very basic soundcard and i want to bullshit a symphony out of it. i did this by composing a single brief melody by randomly mashing notes into a scorewriter. i then took that melody and pasted it over top of itself at differing speeds (64th, 32nd, 16th, 8th, quarter, half, whole notes). i then took that, cut it off near the end of the half notes and pasted it over itself, backwards.

that might sound like it's going to sound awful, but it actually sounds quite lovely. one could analyze it quite easily, but it's creation is beyond the realm of any rules of construction.

which is where art belongs.

...excepting the algorithm i used, of course. i suppose it's more reich than schoenberg, but kind of more xenakis than either.

in 2001, i ran the midi file through my soundblaster live!, which as primitive as it is, has a much nicer wavetable in it than the primitive soundcard i used in 1998 and 1999 (i don't remember what it was). i also slowed it down by about 20 bpm and allowed the full file to "intersect", which let it breathe more.

why? well, i was writing a lot with scorewriters at the time and was just experimenting with the old file, really. but i was also finishing up what would be the only year i would spend in the math-physics department, and thought it sounded like i would imagine intersecting particles *should* sound like. i was generally interested in finding ways to combine science with music then - an interest that is present in older tracks as well and that has stuck with me. i may explore these themes further in time. one of the ideas i really wanted to accomplish was a physical modelling of the universe, to actually simulate the music of the spheres, as pythagoras imagined it. i think i underestimated the complexity of such a task....

of course, i never expected the music of the spheres to be tonal. and i wouldn't expect the sound of particles intersecting to be musical, either. but, we can take some artistic license. if intersecting particles are to make a sound, it OUGHT to be something like this!

written june, 1998. reimagined june, 2001. slightly rearranged and re-rendered at the end of july, 2014. this render is from july 24, 2014.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/the-intersection-of-two-identical-particles-moving-in-completely-opposite-directions-4

the symphony of psilocybin induced madness (vst mix)

this is the vst update, for the second half of the thru disc.

the core of this was written in my parent's basement in the spring of 2001. planning on going to a rave that weekend, i had previously purchased a large amount of drugs; i was, however, forced to stay in due to having a calculus test that sunday (the rave was out of town). well, my parents were gone for the weekend, most of my friends were out of town and i had a massive stash of drugs...

it is quite literally a symphony of psilocybin induced madness and was written directly into an ancient, hacked score-writing program. while it has been labelled as a symphony of drunken confusion in certain contexts to get around certain social stigmas, this is inaccurate.

written early 2001. this render was completed on jan 10, 2015.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/the-symphony-of-psilocybin-induced-madness-4


also available here:
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/vst-mix-3


inri027 has been updated:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-symphony-of-psilocybin-induced-madness