Nessa

Here it is… my first solo album.

This has been a long process & the whole thing is very personal 

Christ of the Abyss - San Fruttuoso, Italy

and i can talk about my process of generating the notes on the page and their generative relationships but that seems. divorced from the existence of a heard composite in a person’s head.

and most of the composers i like the most don’t really talk about either of these things very much. but they are also very sympathetic to chaya’s way of talking.

it’s all stories, stories, stories. i was talking to one of my friends when i was back east, and he think about working in terms of generating a cosmology. i like to think about mythology. someone else we all know builds spaceships.

so many of these decisions are arbitrary! like how long a particular kind of material lasts! if you put together a meaning from the way the sounds unfold in time, great! i’m glad

but it’s not going to be my story. and i don’t care about the difference, just that there is a story in yr head.

he immediately wanted me to justify my decisions - questions like “why is the climax there” or “what sort of relationship are you drawing between these sections”

to which i responded like you: it’s all just arbitrary and it more or less boils down to “because i think it’d sound interesting.”  if you want to connect the dots, you’ll get a picture, especially if you really want to see a picture.  but that’s not meaning, that’s just interpretation. 

i stress the importance of the story here.  that’s how we relate to the world, right?  you’re posting a narrative about your thoughts, and i’m responding to it with a personal anecdote and we’re both separately thinking about language and abstract concepts but we find a connection through the telling of our own stories.  

to me, that’s meaning.  it’s not only a single thesis to be drawn out of arbitrary relationships, or a conceit to be painted on the music for convenience, but the network of implications suggested by our own stories combined with the unfolding of those arbitrary relationships through time.  the unfolding is the telling part.  i suppose in that sense it’s how we treat time that matters the most.

it was only this one guy.