Beyond Sustainment

Background

'sustained life', for me, is an interesting album as it was conceived before I wanted to publish my music. The music represents a private collection of thoughts and images that is closely related to some personal changes in attitude and ideology. One of the results of those changes is that I decided to start publishing my music. In that sense its greatest relevance, to me, is that it truly is an emotional prelude to 'The Dance Of The Plastic People'.

Many people might and will think that 'The Dance Of The Plastic People' has little or nothing to do with 'sustained life' and vice versa. Nothing could be further from the truth. In my mind they are different incarnations of the same musical expression. It would be too easy to just categorize the music by its most apparent and superficial physical attributes.

'sustained life' is an instrumental album. What I needed to express, I did by way of timbre, rhythm and melody. The context of the album is one of an ever growing sense of desolation and detachment. Where 'The Dance Of The Plastic People' takes charge and transforms those negative feelings into a self preserving and a more logical view of things, 'sustained life' conveys the emotional process that led to those changes.

At the time I was quite surprised that the resulting music did not amplify these clearly nihilistic tendencies by way of equally nihilistic sounds and atmospheres. I was puzzled that the music did not turned out to be dark wave or something like that.

I can only explain it by the fact that I have always found the most tragic music the most beautiful. The very source of tragedy, pain and sadness gets fed back to the mind in an abstract form that installs a realization of what it means to be a thinking entity. Instead of ignoring such feelings by feeding the mind contradictory stimuli that makes one temporarily forget, or just plain numbing the true sensations with depressing musical downers to assert self pity, I rather revel in those feelings as I would with ecstatically happy feelings. Consuming, yes even enjoying, them, puts me back in control and enriches the repository of emotional tools to further create and experience with.

It needs to be noticed here that such thoughts and opinions are absolutely subjective. My current set of values, believes etc. though strengthening and enlightening to me in every way, may well drive a different person into manic depression. And so it is with music too. What I find beautiful an other may find depressing or boring beyond belief and vice versa.

The concept of 'sustained life'

I would like to start with underlining that music is purely subjective. The beauty of music, the most abstract of all art forms, is that it can not be compared to natural physical phenomena. If music just copied sounds present in nature it might still be beautiful but it does not create anything new. Most music is an individual expression, an act of creation. How such expressions are interpreted by other people can only be predicted roughly by applying cultural and social frameworks that describe the current set of rules for a group of persons tied into a form of society or organization. That those rules are created from within the society does not increase the accuracy of such predictions and will surely bias the propagation of contemporary values. In any case, such predictions can never account for the individuality of the persons in such a group.

The fact of the matter is that it can not be predicted how an individual mind interprets a purely abstract expression. The idea the creator had with it is relevant only to him. Complaints of the type: 'I was misunderstood' are basically expressions of self pity. If an artist wants to communicate a concept he should limit the amount of abstraction. Singing is a way to make (more) sure that what the creator intends to communicate gets across. Choosing a type or genre of music to go along with a certain type of verbal content makes sure that the art work is associated with others of its kind within the confines of a certain value set or society.

'sustained life' is instrumental and I leave its meaning open to all who would like to listen to it. If I was to analyze my own music I would invariably influence the listener and rob him partly of the experience, be it a good one or a bad one.

I can however tell you about the concept. As I wrote earlier, the basic inspiration for the music came from an ever increasing sense of desolation and detachment. Those feelings were the result of the observation that human beings crave organization to relieve themselves from the agony of choice and responsibility. In other words: Act in compliance with contemporary values so you do not need to create them for your self. Some questions remain: 'who defines those contemporary values and why?' Many would say that such questions are the result of advanced paranoia but I dare anybody to actually redefine some of these values for themselves and see if it does not result in conflict and disillusionment with the 'freedom' of the society in question. The mechanisms inherent to all form of organization seem to be recurrent without fail. Any form of change is initially resisted then embraced and protected. Yesterday's revolutionaries are today's fascists. But even change is predictable and repetitive. A true change would be to abandon the concept of social organization in any form and instead value the potential of human individuality, creativity, spirituality and emotionality. In short let man indulge his humanity instead of inhibiting it. This is often described, in senseless but apparently very effective defense, as chaos.

More I will not disclose, I limited my own abstraction slightly by this text and the poem 'IN THE END' in the booklet. The rest is up to you.

Irritum.