kokorodoko wrote: Wed Jun 02, 2021 7:30 am
seby wrote: Wed Jun 02, 2021 1:17 am Seriously however, if only for the moment, thanks for both listening and reflecting on it!
Hey, no problem. To be honest the music is pretty confounding and off-putting to me. I immediately thought of the very early Tangerine Dream records, which are like that. But that's why it interests me to consider what would drive someone to make music like that. I like the whole thing of channeling the atmosphere of a location that I feel you got going on.
seby wrote: Wed Jun 02, 2021 1:17 amThere is a kind of vastness to
negative space that I am chasing,
What does this mean?
God sorry, this is hard for me to grasp, and my explanations are thinner than they might be. I am going to resort to analogies (which is often a sure fire sign that I have no idea what I am talking about, but I digress).
Painting. To paint a huge space you cannot paint in the empty space (the negative space) between things directly. If so there would not be negative space there anymore, by definition. There would be some object instead. Some painters can paint the tiniest thing, just hanging there in nothingness, but you feel like you are hanging in the voids as this thing passes by. It's just incredible. Paintings like this repay repeated viewings. Think of traditional Chinese guó huà painting. There are so few strokes on the parchment, but they are like windows into other worlds. If they were to fill the painting with detail, then this effect would be lost.
Film. Some great films can let you peak into entire histories, often with very little dialogue. I am thinking of films like Bladerunner and Rampart. They leave negative informational space there to great effect, and fill it with few things. Films like this repay repeated viewings too. Other films completely butcher this, by describing every detail in very heavy handed ways. For example, take John Hillcoat's The Proposition. The scene where the bounty hunter is referred to as "bounty hunter" (in the shack), is so ham-fisted. It ruins the film in a desperate attempt to make the situation clear to even the most stupid viewer. By adding the descriptive detail, the thing being described is destroyed.
Music. Same as above. I love the Cure, but almost every idea is on display and up front. There is nowhere to move with the experience. Everything is laid out in front of you in great detail. Around Seventeen Seconds and Faith, they were happier to leave vast spaces, as the melodies are sketched out as opposed to displayed in full detail. So I guess that I am trying to approach melody along the lines of guó huà painting. To let negative space engage on its own terms. This means sketching the elements of a sonic world very carefully and delicately. Otherwise instead of revealing this sonic world, I would be displaying the sketches, displaying the sonic gestures themselves. It is hard for melody to do this.
Is this making any sense at all?