Sunday Synth Jam: Mid-century style electronic music artist Atomic Shadow performas a ‘semi improvisation featuring tape machines, sine wave generators, burst generator, tape echo, various effects, and a dash of reverb.”
He adds, “This piece includes sounds recorded during a very recent trip to the hospital.”
Given the hospital recordings utilized here and that the last album had a very strong lunar connection, I’m thinking there’s a lot of mystical meat to Atomic Shadow’s work. Yes, this is already eccentric stuff given the tech involved, but the possibility of a pervasive esoteric backbone to this material is interesting to me.
Interesting hypothesis about A.S.
A lot of music, especially classical, from many times and places has used esoteric symbolism as an arbitrary scheme by which to organize information, a way of limiting choices and yoke the results to a linguistic-metaphysical system encoding ideas and values intended to be universal, objective and transcendent.Creative artists thus informed of classical metaphysics could pretty well communicate with each other across space and time (usually only in one direction of time) on that basis. The listener would not necessarily be ‘in’ on the esoteric meaning, but relate on musical aesthetic and emotional terms, good enough for casual listeners and even music critics.
I think with the onset of modernism, knowledge of metaphysics (or belief in their validity) has waned and more personal symbolism is substituted, effectively closing off the possibility of such communication aspiring to the universal. Modernist value of ‘transparency’ of artistic intent and comprehensibility – music for the masses – results in a democratized view of art supposed to convey the same message and experience to every audience member, assuming no hierarchy of understanding among them. Perhaps ‘narrow-streaming’ via electronic networks can support a return to the esoteric.
If only he’d pour a tin of Bird’s Instant Custard over his clean white lab coat, my fantasy would be complete.
The Incredible machine