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CuBisT GraMmaR 23:300:00/23:30
The Ambient Folk concept, emerged as a solution to my quest for a comprehensive artistic context, while sitting at the kitchen table - Hyde Park, Chicago - October 1995.
It was accompanied by an imaginary scene wherein there existed innumerable music CD’s displayed as indexed rows, inside of an endless warehouse. Each of these rows contained countless columns with thousands of labeled sections- framed by an intricate grid of colored compartments. The infinite sections extended into the sky above and stretched forever down a matrix of corridors- numberless rows rolling like cargo trains, disappearing into the vanishing point.
This vision was one of many musings on the status of inter-netted artifacts.
A residual echo of a childhood wish - a magic bag, which could store all my books and things...
At 15 years old, I realized that my life’s work would involve a musical language which symbolically integrated myth, philosophy, art, poetry & song. Ambient Folk as concept, Idea, description, meme & context became the perfect frame for that work.
Given the state & fate of artifacts in the Noosphere, some thoughts arise which aim to qualify, filter & clarify my position & momentum as an artist:
Art as a function of the imagination is dependent on Insight. As a Function of Integral Individuation in the Information iMploded MassAge, this involves a transfigured sense of Self & World- based in a higher Vision. Thus, art as byproduct of Insight, should involve economy of scale regarding creative force; balancing talent & output. A body of work should be calibrated according to individual potential. This accommodation should be correlated with a consideration for the vast amount of cultural artifacts now in circulation and the limited amount of quality time available to EveryMan, in the course of a quality life.
Good art should include the total ecology of mind in its anticipated effects; it should comprehend and compress the past, encoding & mapping the N0W; prophetically amplifying present currents that shall flower in auspicious futures to fruit; while transforming knowledge & understanding, relative to the simultaneous whole of Western Culture.
This last idea was influenced heavily by T.S. Eliot’s profound discovery of culture as a unified field, as recorded in the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”.
Ambient Folk should function as a hyper-link into that tradition, while simultaneously revealing the logic of the whole, as a multi-valet facet of the N-Dimensional artifact that is the Western Cannon- an object which includes the NeX-Us of the internet itself- as Global Village Museum.
The theoretical foundation of Ambient Folk has roots in the mothership of all consciousness studies; the supreme statement on the emergent Integral Age – Jean Gebser’s Magnum Opus The Ever-Present Origin.
Here we note that the genuinely novel aesthetic modes of expression generated over the last 150 years, reflect a mutation of the Mental consciousness structure. The revolutionary techniques pioneered in art & poetry were developed in order to purify the dialectic of the tribe; reveal the material & the meaning value of our aesthetic arrest; recalibrate sense field parameters, to appreciate complex, manifold & multifaceted manifestations of symmetry, balance & harmony, under new pressures placed on ´point of view´, liner thought & sequential logic; brought about by the factory fired, steam enTraiNed, machine-wired currents driving
(( ElecTr0nic Ground >}#{< AcoUstic SpaCe )).
The scene overlapping juxtapositions between inner & outer landscapes in symbolist poetry; the “mythological method”; the “objective correlative”; collage & bric-a-brac layering in picture & narrative- all attempt to explicate the intrinsic patterns of perception & make conscious the frequencies of Magic, Mythic, Mental structures operative in any act of cognition; rethreading Archaic roots of instinct-image-intuition-ideA-insight <thr0U> <theE> Touch-Beat-PulSe <iN> a Resonant InterVaL; responding to the need to rebalance EveryMaN's shifting sense ratios, in Wake <0f> the UpSurging P0weR <0f> TiMe – aMplified through the new elecTricK-aCoUstiC environments.
The utility of these upgrades in sensibility are in the potential they catalyze within us, to render diaphanous the boundaries of awareness & make conscious the tactile quality of figure-ground interplay, as we rely on auditory modes to process our light speed driven, multiplex perceptions; highlighting the 360° nature of sonic & photonic simultaneities, arising as [ Frame 0f Reference ] goes SphericaL ( 0o°O°o0 ).
Here we must learn to measure the size of space by listening into a resounding echo & determine the distance of a source by the duration of a Doppler fade; to separate the signal from noise; perception from projection; the probe from a permutation; a pattern from the pantomime; a filter from fantasy; the formula from the feedback; design from distortion. To sense the meaningful rhythms in the eventful reiterations of the NeWs cycle & tune into the True, by refining our taste for Beauty in all its protean, metaMorphic fluX. The Good increases with our capacity for mapping complexity in a state of integral intensity.
Ambient Folk, as a fusion of high philosophy, spirituality, sensuality, humor, wordplay, pun, paradox, meta-perspective & trans-contextual elements, becomes a continuation of this process- a refleXi0N of our transforming awareness; viewing concept, song, picture, poetry & design as dimond facets in a dynamic system of ideas, symbols<&> soUnds- to perform MetA-FoR => our Phase-Shift <iNt0> InteGraL ConScioUsness.
In this mixture of muses, methods & approaches, it continues an unbroken cultural ethos of Hermetic experimentation involving mind, media & technology; transmitting a signal relayed by the Beat writers; bounced from Italian Futurists, German Electronic Composers, French Musique Concrète Pioneers & American Jazz Masters; amplified by McLuhan & the Moderns, leading back through the Romantics & Symbolist, the Metaphysical Poets & the Alchemists… reaching deep into the Archaic past >*< Ech0-RinGinG
As an ´Extension of Man’, technical invention & linguistic innovation; encompassing Printing Press, Radio, Telephone, Television & Computer- the Internet is understood as the culmination of all Mediums- generating the Noosphere. Through a McLuhan lens, the tree-branching nature of Hypertext, which is the bases of the web, is seen as having been anticipated by the synthetic cubism of Picasso & Braque; & by the techniques of Pound, Joyce & Eliot- their patchwork play of narrative variation using different genres, eras, styles, formats & fragments; to Zo0m-Magnify thematic implications & reCord temporal textures layered in the many storied fractal. Through their discoveries of the embedded & enfolded nature of Past as Present, they revealed the whole-part nature of History as Hologram.
Integral Individuation inVolves
Self-Understanding <&> Self-Transcendence
<thr0U> full SpectrUm ApPercepti0N <0f> the `auditory imagination´ ;
ReCoGniZing < theE> CuBisT GraMmaR <0f> oUr Global Village:
Who = EveryMan;
What = Noosphere;
When = Compressed Time;
Where = SuperPosed Space;
Why = Industrial, Electronic, Communication, Atomic, Genetic, Space, Information [ Age ] MatriX;
How = Effects as Cause.
Expressing the synthesis of Culture, Communication, Commerce & Code;
Ambient Folk takes up the challenge
left to us by the Moderns-
to evolve an ArT
which is simultaneously a function ~ In-F0rM; genre as concept & category;
performing the notion of context as content, projecting package as probe-
Dancing <the> Figure-Ground }{ 0scillating,
Resonant Interval {[( Where )]}
Local <&> Global >< Self <&> World
=> ReVeaL<theE> {[( Power <0f> TiMe )]}
<aS> MassAging { M0saiC } ArchE-TeXt-U-Are.
In light of this notion, the World Wide Web becomes the ideal medium for producing a kind of multidimensional Book.
The art, poetry & music of Ambient Folk is derived from empirical data; informed by direct phenomenological experience, gained through submersion in the primordial, Clear Light of Wisdom 'itself'.
This is the diaphanous Sphere of Integral Intensity.
Intuitive intimacy with the Radiant energy of Time as the Being of Presence, brightens into a Hyper-Space yielding detailed, insight-states of subtle knowledge, through transformed awareness; producing durable understandings out of inspired analysis- in a process which is both exact & repeatable.
The work produced from this 4D experience is whimsical & fanciful, yet scientifically literate & artistically inventive; mathematically precise in the realm of the imagination; organically constructive in the development of metaphor & analogy - preserving the inner dynamic & intrinsic rhythm of awareness, before the shape of the idea is fractured by what T.S. Eliot called the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, which divides intellect from feeling.
Ambient Folk is playful while being firmly grounded in Truth, as a communication of the Good that shines through Beauty, in an effort to tune into LOGOS.