lovers alone wear sunlight and all lovers are the song
The monikers are a kind of fiction, a way of shifting perspective.
The three monikers focused, each in slightly different ways, on a progression of compositions in the field of piano music. They are part of an artistic venture occurring after an intense decade of touring within the field of contemporary circus, theatre, live gigs, choral works and film. It was in response to the sudden shift in social and world perspectives as a result of the pandemic. It meant I could be home. The work with them led to a kind of reflective state. Arvo Han and The Island Collection; swaffer and drawings; rudibaum and photographs.
The monikers now carry a following of nearly 30 million listeners worldwide from Japan to Canada, Romania, Morocco, France, Australia and Africa.
I sometimes think of music like the grace of water running through our fingers and belonging to no one. They impart definition without asking the listener to do anything except listen. The emotion remains intact or it falls apart. Without this we lose a position in time and space. The mundane, however, is still the canvas. Everything has the potential of meaning.
This shift in music making made the creative process more accessible. Music is always about emotional illusion. A possible direction is suggested for the emotion to go. We look for the blind spot in the familiar. These pieces imagine they hear and feel what isn’t immediately apparent. There is dualism between the real and the imagined and the difference between them is minimal. I think it is validated by the intention to overcome fear.
The digital platform, with its ever expanding library, is illuminative and searing, an ingenuity all its own using the works created.
Fiction has always been key to the kind of symbiosis with the imagination I’m looking for. Living as we do, in the middle of an imaginative crisis, we experience daily a kind of dialectical death in the making. Nothing feels so nothing is. If nothing is, what isl? Not to feel is disorientating and yet that feeling is most relevant. Love sits at the heart of all things. Love and love again.
I hope you enjoy the ones already out there and will come to enjoy those that await.
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The swaffer compositions are influenced by the deep Scandinavia culture of melodrama. This is what I thought initially and it became a kind of standard way of describing them. Now, I don’t think this is quite correct. What influences them is something earlier and more fundamental. Fear.
The swaffer melodies are departures as opposed to arrivals. They carry a sensitivity for the cinematic, but that’s because I like the relationship between sonic and moving images, the way music influences a mood. I’m not always happy with the outcome since the mood we feel tends to become standardized and therefore is sometimes deflective and not at all in keeping with what’s at play. However, there is always something immediate in the process. Like putting your tongue on a pane of frosted glass.
A melody can evoke an image of the mythical so one could say they are departures from fear. Myth is about putting what we can’t explain into a familiar form. Even when we don’t recognize them as such. Existence has a tendency to seek refuge in the mythical.
swaffer melodies emerge and submerge themselves. If I were to make a statement here, this moniker brings together two elements of the intangible – that of the breath and that of the poem. Like condensed essays.
They explore the movement of sound and emotion which comes from the word ‘émouvoir’ - to excite, to be in motion.
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‘Do not console me, nor kiss the unbecome of i. Nor think of me as motion other than something where absence is that love I do not hold. In appearance we are each other, negatives against the pane of glass as if the eye alone could see the other you. Tame me not. Make me wild. I will then bless you with emotion.’ From Keepers of Future Dreams by Hannes Salomon ©1883
The artwork chosen was a conscious effort to create a counterpoint to the drawings I used for the swaffer compositions. The melodic structures of rudibaum and their association to a particular photo make me think of the fairy tale. Each retelling, each relistening provides a new story, a different rendition of the original. Some of the pieces were made impatiently. Like the impatience of desire. Others, like trying to remember something incomplete. Memory and melody are often one and the same thing. It’s in their nature to appear and disappear. There is no logic to the way rudibaum melodies appear. If I were to think about it long enough and deep enough, I would probably find the trigger. As opposed to swaffer melodies which are clearly departures, I think of rudibaum pieces as arrivals.
‘In times entanglement are the folds of inertia which is its way of showing a desire to experience absence. Time is jealous of humanity. This jealousy is occasionally visible as a kind of melancholia. Without it we would not experience longing and we would not know what love is.’ From Time in the Age of Melancholia by Margrit Bøhme ©1879
Someone said to me: ‘Make the compositions simpler. Focus on pattern and repeats.’ I don’t think this is what I’ve done but the collection seems to have its own shape and identity. The names are inspired by the islands in the Finnish Archipelago where Tove Jansson and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä spent their summers - Klovharun. The names of the other 12 tracks all come from the Finnish Archipelago. The drawings followed. The name comes from the first name of someone I listen to and the second name of someone I read. Two artists I hold dear to my heart. The next collection will be all about mountains.
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Linked to the Wuxing Cycle, made of five distinct elements, Sonic Meadow is an exploration of an unforeseen space. Composed as a cycle of worlds, it presents four variations of the Earth element - Water, Air, Fire and Metal.
Inspired by Wuxing, a precursor to nearly all the later philosophies in China - from the Neo-Confucian philosophers who, during the Song Dynasty, returned to the principles of the Wuxing Cycle and its five virtues.
Four or five letter words attached to each world act like keys towards a point of meditation. I imagine if one holds the word long enough in the mind’s eye, the letters will begin to move around and create a kind of symbolic reference of possible insight. Sonic Meadow can perhaps best be described as an out of body sonic encounter exploring the non-physical world through these soundscapes. Each world is released as an EP.
Since the concept of worlds is intrinsic to our idea of the universe, I have used it as the framework for the collection. The first 14 worlds are presented in five versions corresponding to the WuXing Cycle. We may never encounter any of them but they are there, waiting.
Here is a text written by Edrien Bümer which was key to the work:
‘A sonic meadow is a place of uncertainty,
an open meadow that appears uncalled for,
something accidentally stepped into,
sculpted out of nature by fire and water,
by tempest and darkness and there,
in the most unlikely of moments it appears,
a place of light and shadow, of sound and gesture.
The sonic character and temperament is utterly contrasting
to the darker forest within which it exists.
The sky has become a heaven untangled from branches
and the arms of trees and their foliage,
suddenly impeccable, pure, translucent,
blue, aflame, red, are full of the play of insect -
butterfly and dragonfly. Everything bends.
In this place of insolubles, of absence,
exists a calmness. It fuses with the arrival of you,
and if luck is there, there is also a realisation,
like the quickening of the senses
that you are one with everything.’
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