Can the Ocean Be Described?

First, start by hearing this, broken into 3 sections by You Tube User "bebodrummer".

The three sections are of Miles Davis' 28-minute-and-change "Great Expectations", from 1970's-and-change Big Fun. Meaning, I don't know how long the track is, and I don't know when the album came out. I'll even say that it doesn't seem possible to "know" when "it" (the track, the record, the sound?) was made. Miles' music in the late 60's through mid 70's, when he vanished post 1975 into a silent bedroom of white cocaine magic is all vague cosmetics, blurry rainbowed edges, smudged makeup -- all which show the weird similarity of skin and bones and costume between it -- is music of complete indefiniteness, undefinable as praxis. There's a lot of documentation on "what actually happened" at this time -- and a good article here by Electric Miles Scholar Paul Tingen. I'll leave the detective work to you, whoever you are. Let me know what you find and if we learn anything that defines this weird washout period of Miles' music -- from 1967 to 1975 -- that helps us to know any more about HOW to listen to what happened there. To me, all of Miles' music in this time period appears to be about something that hasn't yet happened, but which is always threatening to split the sky in half. It reminds me of a moment in Andrei Tarkovsky's "Mirror" where a little boy may have seen a ghost. How do we know? Because the camera fixes on the evaporating condensation from the cup of hot tea upon the wooden table, the vanished cup of tea that the ghost may have been drinking, but the boy who saw the ghost is now, of course, alone in the room.

I recently restumbled upon this track in making a mix through 8tracks, which allows you to upload tracks from your iTunes collections to make web-based mixes that you can share with other users. Pretty cool. My innovation is to narcissistically make mixes for myself so that I can listen to tracks not uploaded to my iPhone's iPod on our iPod dock while taking a shower (say that 10 times fast, then silence yourself, which is what I did). Pretty silly, and also pretty wonderous. The best part of doing this isn't "making mixes", which I personally dislike -- I'm an album listener, a staunch traditionalist, and a pain in the ass all at once, making pleasing me impossible, so I stick with myself sometimes -- the best part is rediscovering music that, in iTunes, becomes no more than a list of names and titles, so voluminous that one's categorization of music is the shorthand mechanism for the possibility of listening to it. Great Expectations, indeed. (We all hope that iTunes will mean we never have to LOOK at a record cover ever again. But the thing about looking at a record cover is that, through it, we actually associate image and sound, color and depth, timelessness and time passing.....)

But, enough technology aggression for now, since the point is the music and what it SOUNDS like. Because of this weird double technical of iTunes and 8tracks, I found myself looking at my music as if it were an email inbox with messages whose value I suddenly needed to prioritize -- or at least refamiliarize myself with, since the messages were mine, yet I had forgotten them, or what they might mean or say or do or be. And so, I saw "Great Expectations 28:25" and uploaded it to my mix, curious what I might hear later, in the shower, after I had forgotten what I hadn't read or heard but wanted to remember....

Ever since I was a kid, I've always thought the long songs on a record were the best songs. Exactly what a kid ought to think... I mean, more doesn't mean better, does it? Except for the Big Gulp is better than a 12 oz can of soda, and what makes it better is that it is a better value, penny for penny, sip for sip. I think from the start, part of me was a total capitalist consumer of music -- I figured that the song was longer and had more music in it, and because it was more, and the others were less (shorter is less music) -- then it had to be better....I know, that is some deeply circular logic, tautological and impenetrable. A=B because A and B are equal, so if A>C, then A>C. Yet, even now, I can't quite dispute this immature thinking. Perhaps because what I want to do, when listening to music, is be occupied by something, to be taken by something, to have something be there for me to attend to, in time, through time, with everything that I am that listens. If there is MORE TIME in the music, there is more for me to attend to, and more listening for me to do across time (diachronic). Music happens in time, and its happening through time is part of what it engages us within -- time passing, things moving or repeating, things starting and stopping, things vanishing, things appearing, things thinging through something that is a space we can't see, that we know is moving because it gets later when we are hearing it.

I thought Great Expectations, being 28-minutes-and-change, would make good sense to have on a "mix" because it would kill the mix, since a mix gets its power from the movement from track to track, from sound to sound, from artist to artist or style to style or time period to time period or all of these. A mix needs to "move". But I wanted to confuse that for myself, I wanted my mix to get stuck in the mud of the horizon, which stretches out to infinite blindness. I wanted to hear "Great Expectations" again with no expectations of anything -- I've been listening to it for 20 years now, but what have I really heard?

It's hard to describe music -- I've said it elsewhere, and I will say it even more so now -- in fact, one can't describe music, and yet, there are words to know it with. On Miles Davis' Live Evil, there's a really freaky track called "Inamorata and Narration by Conrad Roberts". Basically, it's a spaced firefreeze where, at some unknowable point, the music receding into an echo chamber, a deep, dark voice narrates a poem of the impossibility of speaking of, of knowing through speech, what music is. He chants "Can the Ocean Be Described?" He kinda takes the fun out of everything there. But the fun is gone, because we fall mute at the center of it. Yet Conrad knows Miles' game -- he ends his poem game with the bext next move: "I love.....tomorrrow". Great Expectations! (You can hear Roberts below, at 6:12 of the 9:33 below. Volcanic Ash Wowzer. Relistening to it, I want to run and hide and have his voice blanket the earth so that I can come out from below and lie down on top of it and forever sleep....)

So, in the center of the mix, anonymously, it came on. How to begin with it? Great Expectations has a riff in 7/4 time. What does that mean? Well, generally, most figures in much western music -- rock, pop, jazz, blues -- have lengths that fall into some category of beats, and that category is "even". Meaning, it usually is 4 or 8 or 16 bars of "pulse". If you tap your foot, every 4 taps, something ends and starts over, or every 8 taps, or every 16, or 16 is made of of 4 somethings that start over once again after 16. There's more to say about this, but for my point, most western music uses phrases that are EVEN, for every yin a yang, for every odd an even. Yet, Great Expectations is built on a phrase (really a guitar riff, but, then, everyone is playing a "riff" here, meaning a series of single notes that repeat in some foundationally rhythmically spaced way) that is 7 beats. Tap your foot and count -- when you get to seven, start back at one. And go on, from 1 to 7 each time. The thing is lopsided, asymmetrical, oblong, jutting out into space, contained yet in the rollicking of its repetition. Because your hips move. There's a drum riff, a percussion riff, a bass riff, a tamboura wave, trumpet soaring echoed over it like a discontinuous seagull. In the depth of the night behind it, a rhodes is plucking away, a bird pecking at the heart of the sky. But "Great Expectations" keeps shutting down after a few phrases, the riff resisted, resetting, releasing. It's very weird. You keep thinking the song will push again out into something else, but the expectation, the loved tomorrow, is the same uneven keeled thing that crashes into the edge of the sea and reemerges careening.

At 13:30, though, the song totally resets. Whatever restarting happened once and many times before does not restart. The day is now awaking, the sky placid, plastic, performed. They bide their time, and you wait. For something. Else.

I've only actively sat and watched the sun rise a few times in my life -- on one hand, enough to know what it looks like, on the other, not enough to be fair to myself and the world around me. One thing about the sun rising is that even while you are watching the sky and you see it change, you also see nothing. Because changing is like something and nothing all at once, it is the fact that things become different and express difference through the repetition of and reiteration of their sameness. Perhaps something is drastic -- as in "Great Expectations", every time the rhythm escapes and there is only floating sky sound of horn, rhodes, tamboura, percussion -- but even what is drastic only expresses everything that came upon it, everything that preceded it.

As you wait out the sky in "Great Expectations", you wonder if everything has always been this way, if things will ever change, if difference is only in your perception, if perception is only in what you have had to unknow.

Eventually, as in everything we come to know, a rhythm settles in, the drums are the end result of it, and everything reiterates into a blend of earth and sky, all of which makes the world return, reappear, remain.

I guess what we can expect, then, always, only, is the world unfurled, unfolded, recapitulated. That is, we can expect only what is always great. This is the essence of Miles' silence, the ocean undescribed in, as music.

Turning the Tables

I just bought a turntable, a week ago Thursday, tragic to say that it took me this long to visit the land I come from, the land of plasticized, double-sided dreams. It took me buying a record -- which turned into 5 records, because the inexpensiveness of records and the randomized element of their eternally earth scattered endangered species selection makes buying just one not only impossible, but predetermined -- for my buddy Joe for his birthday (because he has a turntable, he loves it, and he seems to have something to love in this world that having it gives him to love) -- to realize that I was partly buying the record for myself and my own disowned dreams. Only disowned, though, because I decided I wasn't going to have a turntable, which means that records are, for me, to be held, touched, gazed at, but never HEARD. Now, perhaps the smartest thing I did in this whole confused jumble of ambivalent cinched up inaction was have Joe as a friend, because Joe saw all this and said "You should get a turntable, man, mine was $125, go here...(more details, etc)." Now, what do you do when your buddy looks you in the eye and says "You ain't me, man, you is you?" You be you, that's what...

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A similar, yet longer term memory -- years ago, in the same life that is also the other life that was mine and that is the "you be you" of any past for any wo/man -- my buddy Brian had a turntable, and with it, he was able to expunge himself in all the used record shops of Boston, he was able to take that city and make it come across the country with him to California because that city was the shops where the circular shapes of tender, imprinted grooves held their secret lives in dazzling silence. I carried on a secret war with him, I carried myself across time and space by refusing to join him, I pulled a "u-ee" and went in the other direction, towards CDs (which, at that time, were the new best next thing on earth, since they would LAST FOREVER). What's sad (and another kind of memory, that of the past sadness of something that is passed over in time) is that those records he bought were records that CDs would never become, because records are to be forgotten, while CD's, which LAST FOREVER, become a reason for Bryan Adams, for example, to give us 75 minutes of unbroken stardom to gaze into and become dulled from. But Brian would show me a record he found in his wanderings across town -- always something that he was proud to show me, and always something I would have wanted to own but had decided I never could -- and I would REMEMBER IT. Always. Even now. Even later, when I'm too old to remember the name of that girl I copied out Black Sabbath lyrics for as a token of my gnarled heart.

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But, today is today, which means turntables don't fall from the sky and into our preamps, even though the sky is more wounded than ever and less things stay there than ever. I can't easily walk down the street and trip over an inexpensive record player without finding myself in a part of town where the record player would matter much less than my making my way home, NOW. So, I amazon'ed this Audio Technica for $79 and sat on the edge of the couch and waited and stared out the window into the street where the UPS van would come and lift me back up into the falling sky. Because I don't care about anything else than the record when I have the player. Because the player is the record, and the record is the thing I'll play and the turntable will fade into the sky, too, like a bird whose flight is more than the bird itself, is only the arc of the air on which it has flown.

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For the record -- pun intended -- CD's don't LAST FOREVER. At least one I have owned needed a complete clutch overhaul. I had a 1980 Honda Civic with a broken carburetor that lasted longer. Actually, if I remember correctly, the thing about CD's was not that they LASTED FOREVER so much as that THEY WOULDN'T WEAR OUT. What's funny to think of in response to that marketing fact is that wearing out a record was like proving your deep love of it, like Velveteen Rabbit-ing it into its own alternate reality, such that the crackle and hiss of the sunken, collapsed grooves meant that the music on that record had melded with your mind and become that very thing that walked around with you and thought two steps behind you. You wanted to wear out a record, but you wanted to do so simply by living with it, by playing it whenever there was time and space to have the sound of the world be the sound of that record. I don't actually think anyone anywhere ever bought a record and thought that it was a too-difficult-fact of the world that they may have had to one day replace this record because it might wear out if they loved it too much. In fact, no one has ever known how much they might really come to love a record until they bought it, brought it home, removed the tenuous plastic coating, and gently placed it on the rotating wheel, so how could anyone have ever worried that they might love it too much and kill it? A record isn't a person, so what could you ever worry about? Spilling bongwater? A CD is no improvement there, el capitan....

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The thing that Brian had, which is what Joe has, which I now have, with a turntable, is ACCESS. This access is to two basic and totally essential things in musical life -- one, to the fullest sound there has been of what has become recorded. While I declare that I think records "sound better" than CD's, I'm not very interested in that argument. I am happy to inform the world that what they sound, doubtless, scientific, is FULL. Like the sky with clouds, the sea with water, an ancient tiger with stripes, a contemporary novel with tropes. There is a totality to music on record that no other recorded medium provides. This is not the fascist view of the natural world, where you must do something specific in order to be anything at all; it is a totality of the sound that you then are finally in a position to interpret, let come to you, succumb to in the name of your ears and your eyes and your mouth and your hands, fill the ceiling with something you can't see but will try to see. The second bit of access is to the actual recordings themselves. There are the ones that you can find also on CD, the recordings that you can find in their native state, that nativity that is the reality of technological form informing the thing that has been mutated to ever meet that form's requirements. When records were "being made" -- and each era of recorded music, as well as the genre and styles that existed within each era in relation to each other and in relation to the eras themselves -- the recordings themselves were made with the record as the God of the form the music was to take, in terms of the TIME of of the music (how long is this going to go on for, anyway?) and the BREAKS in the music (when does one thing end and another begin? When's the intermission? When can I go outside and have a smoke and come back and have missed nothing?) All of this is built in to the music, just like turning the page is built in to the writing when you read a book, which means the writing of the book means the page must always be turned until there are no more pages for you to turn, which means there is no more writing, which means there is no more book, because a book is the writing that writes it, right? The access to the recordings also means access to the records that are now only scattered amongst the endless debris of the world, the debriefings of those documents in time when these things were made, reproduced, and abandoned, and which will never come in from the cold unless we gather them up in our solidarity to the remembrance of records past. It is access to the endangered species that are the beaten, battered, weathered cardboard squares with images and photos and illustrations and titles and informatives, all older than everyone who doesn't know them, all handled by multiple parties, all fingered and which put the finger of ownership right on you, right now, when you realize that if you don't take them, they will disappear and be melted into uncut ozone.

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As a perfect example, and essential epilogue to my turned table, where what was once on it is on the floor, and what was once under it is now the only thing I can attend to when I sit at it, I give you Alphonso Johnson's Spellbound. I'm sure you could find it on CD, but this is one of those recordings that is an ALBUM, from the cover of Alphonso with a Chapman Stick, to the wicked double tremoloed guitar kraut of Pat Thrall, to the vocals that seem both strained and restrained, stranded and standing tall. The whole thing could only have been made as an album where there are such things as rock and jazz and fusion and cars and sensitivity and industry and ambition and thoughtlessness and thoughtfulness piled into pure plastic form.

There is funk everywhere, but politely, with old timey moog synths that make you think of the old west, like a gunslinger with a gun just a little weirder than everyone else's. Now, the record, here, in MP3-post-CD-newspace, sounds super thin, fusion goof earnest world road trip innocent sunscreen. But on record, this whole thing is ALL BOTTOM, the only thing that goes out are your geeky lights because you realize that what's dark about this stuff is that there is actually muddy soul at the bottom of it, which the record lets hang in the air, lets distort and then fly off into dream drama realspace.

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I could always upload all my records, through my turntable, onto my laptop using its USB. When the martians come for me, I will make sure that I keep Alphonso Johnson in my space disaster kit and take everything with me to the moon. I'll find myself an old couch and have all my records eternally ready to be played into the purest crackle.

Sabotaged by Tomorrow's Dream

It's funny to think of Sabbath now -- not "funny ha-ha", but "funny strange", maybe even "funny wistful", or "funny sad" -- after all that's happened in rock music, heavy music, popular culture and with every parody of what rock music is. It's tough to remember that there was no such thing as "self-consciousness" when rock began as we know it to now be, no empty reflection on the lack of meaning or absurdity of intended meaning, which we now have and by which we will always be plagued. I don't mean an "innocence" here, though  -- there is nothing like that anywhere on this earth, which is unearthed with the sound of what has always lain beneath. Nothing is innocent there, because there is no guilt where no one has ever been.

What earth, anyway? And whose? As "Hole in the Sky" from 1975's Sabotage shrieks, (please) "Take Me to Heaven". Which heaven, nohow? It's the heaven of space, of non-planet Pluto, of a future where there is nothing but the future that promises us the future. Black Sabbath had, since their second record, Paranoid (1970), authored a sound of doom they then enrobed in a bucket of glorified sludge, but, weirdly enough, they held this sound at enough of a distance to give you a space into which you could crawl and hide and safely wait, en-wombed, for the sun to crash into the sea. This sound continued down its dark path through each subsequent record -- the pope-on-a-rope-hopelessness of Master of Reality, the cocained-emotion-freeze of Vol 4, the morning-after-Bloody-'ell-Mary of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath -- until the high voltage hero came across the other side of the world to the depressed pill popper, they commingled translucences, and they effervesced a sacred problem child: the complete annihilation of everything, Sabotage, which seems to believe less in nothing than in what is the "less than nothing". "The food of love became the greed of our time / and now we're living on the profits of crime" - these lines aren't even sung, they are smiled over a riff that evokes the electricity of any abandoned power station on any planet not yet learned of in any science fiction novel. What I always thought, when I dropped the needle down on this track, was that the windows over my stereo would implode in a fit of static recognition, since the song wasn't angry as much as it was scolding, explaining to each earthling, with each rabid and overamplified sound, that the narrator's gaze through the heart of the sunrise, beyond the purity of space, was a wish to start everything over again, was to rebel against everything that had driven us all into depravity. This was heaviness in the name of clearing everything and replacing every piece upon the board, cleansing us all in a mud bath of delectable regret.

Of course, after we have catapulted through the sky to the end of things, and we interlude with fluttering butterflies of acoustic guitar layered across the path of the nevermore, we come upon a universe that we won't ever understand. Gug-gug-gug gug-gugga-gug NAH naht - Gug-gug-gug gug-gugga-gug NAHT NAH naht-- the riff of "Symptom of the Universe" breaks open the typical Sabbath heavier-than-thou-lead-doom and spills the blood of punks into the black space, punks who have not yet invented themselves, but whose DNA blueprints the end of history so long as we decide to critique it. As a kid, I longed to know how this riff -- simple to the point of blank absurdity, creating the raw deal that one can only have always lived beneath -- could shake the world to bits and leave behind this trail of dust that one could follow beyond the sun and the yoke of its setting. But the song is stranger than the riff, Sabbath was always stranger than doom and more ambiguous than this metal genre they helped to make into a gorgeous dark joke.

The massive cymballic flash on "Symptom of the Universe" -- it's as if the cymbals create a blankened space for the "A" part of the riff, the guitar and bass a raft hurtling down a desolately endangering river, the cymbals the smooth rock canyon walls on either side. But when part "B" of the riff comes, the guitar and bass stop short and the drums are the raft thrown over the rapids, cymbals fading behind the sound of the falling sticks hucked in panic at the drumskins. This being Sabbath, this song has too many parts for a song to have; they shoved too much music into a small space in order to crack the space open, in order to explode space into a blackness for the world to believe in. "Symptom of the Universe" literally explodes after a series of multiply interchanging parts, --verses, choruses, post shard-shooting guitar star solo -- into a universe where the lone planet is future hippie desire -- "O my child of lost creation / come and step inside my dree-eams" -- this is pattered over a slight funk vamp, with a village of acoustic guitars and extreme post-Woodstock noodling across each passing second, which are hurtled into the asteroids of tomorrow's hallucinatory promise.

"Megalomania" closes side 1, and it closes the hole in the sky, it reverses the exploding universe by imploding everything back into the center of your mind. I had to look the word's meaning up when I was a kid, but even reading what it meant didn't change the absolute otherness of the word itself staring into me from the back cover. What does it mean to name a song "Megalomania"? It is a mania of the metaphysical; perhaps the symptom of this mania can only be known through the universe itself....

The song is a dark cauldron of impossible sorcery, something that seems to be from beyond time, but also in the time that is the time inside your head, which is the same hole as the space in the sky. There are swirls of guitars spiraling within synths stacked atop the dream brain that is the one who thinks only of himself in his blindness. Sabbath has always courted madness as a state of mind in their songs, and "Megalomania" is the pinnacle of the madness that plagues the mind that knows nothing of itself, not even its own pain. We get to deal with this for 9:46, and when everything fades, we are still getting to deal with what faded away.

Side 2 entices the most Vegas-ed of us with "The Thrill of it All", a perfect cynical counterpart to "Megalomania', which ends in a cannibalistic carnival of total confusion. "Thrill" begins with forked tongue guitar, soon overridden by the return of the cannibals in droves, 30 guitars and synths and bass and drums and too many people in too few rooms. But when we get to the verse of "Thrill", everything drops out but a greedy rock riff played with democratic vision, even the singing sliding over it all is the riff, too. The thrill is the fact that the self obsessed autocrat is engaged with only this thrill, everything is included inside it, the entire universe compromised by lying still, lying perfectly in the lap of this lie. The narrator is only all lies, the intent of the lying voice is to thrill you with a forked tongue. Lying leads only to tyranny, a tyrant's fantasy of a swirled world of voices, strings, and death.

"Supertzar", whose only words are the play on words of "star/czar", and whose only song is the chorus that accentuates the ascension of each musical mountain, is the result of this tyranny, this mutation of the real into the space that is behind the mountain, that dominates it with its barbaric yawn. The song is "heavy", but what's weird about its "heaviness" is that there is only a lone guitar amongst the multiplicity of strings and chorus, whose mutivalence atop the simple rock accompaniment of bass and drums (these are there but almost unheard) gives the guitar its extra chainsawing cinder block-ed power, as if the guitar is the black figure of the lone rider (as in Clint Eastwood's "High Plains Drifter") and the strings and voices are the sky and sun and the drums and bass are the impotent ground beneath it all. The future, beyond the sun, lies where there is nothing beneath anything, the ground is helpless to crumble, the mind is everything that is every crumb in any world. Insanity, when I walk into a room and everyone stares at the bright new world painted lazily behind my eyes.

"Am I Going Insane" seems to ground us for a moment, the song disguised as a sheen pop surface with entwined guitars in splendiferous harmony. We hear that everything is right, except for the fact that everything feels wrong in this song, the bass awkwardly loud and thundering and stomping like a zombie stalking the moon, the crunchy edges of the guitars peeled back to reveal only a pierced vein of twisted soloing. The singer seems too loud, too large, a baby crushing the zombie stalking the moon, semi-articulate and semi awake. As the song fades, a crazed chorus (the mirror image of the warlord choir in "Supertzar') arises, cackles and frantic howls and intensities of the inner voice gone to the zombie moon. The voice that wins out over all is the voice that screams the loudest -- the screams of a child whose pain will outlast every universe. Sabbath lets that voice extend 11 seconds into the next track, the exploding monolith "The Writ".

Writing about this is tiring, and "The Writ" is the most tiring of the writing. Why? Why write something formal, something to order and organize the world such that the universe itself is no longer only the singular amorphous mass that is the "it" it is? "The Writ" is made up of many shapes, it is also amorphous, and it seems to slip past you before the 8:17 it occupies. The song is like the presence of something that is in a space, that vanishes, that has vanished even while it was there, a law laid down by ghosts of the never to be remembered future.

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Sabotage is that memory of something that never was; it is the reduction of that thing to what can never have been. It's where Black Sabbath was last seen, before we forgot what it meant to see something appear and mean even nothing. It is the meaning of the "less than nothing" that is the universe you will forget right this minute.

Future Nature

Track Titles for Michael Brooks' 1985 Hybrid Album -- Hybrid, Distant Village, Mimosa, Pond Life, Ocean Motion, Midday, Earth Floor, Vacant.

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Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 science-fiction "future" film Solaris' opening scene shows a close-up shot of long florescent blades of yellow-green grass swaying in what appears to be slow motion, then what might be liquid wind as the camera backs away, and then finally the image fades to clear -- the grass is underwater, on the floor of a pond, and what we see is the image of the grass from above the surface of the pond, as our eyes are connected to a head that is perched on the neck and shoulders of a man who is observing the pond from outside the pond, standing at its edge. We are the eyes whose gaze is transfixed upon the pond and the swaying grass. This is the only explicit image of nature in a film about space. The image is distanced, obscured, technologized, hypercoded.

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The "hybrid" of the title of Brooks' record refers us to a specific gene-splicing of sound: from the natural, which is the sound of this moment, to the future, which is the sound of what may be, which is the projection of the world that we would hope for (or fear or already hate or have already loved). 

We may stand transfixed, too, before an image of what "nature" is when we overlap it with "future", or when we hear the sound of nature spliced into future. In our dystopic, endlessly realistic dreams, it may refer to a world where nature is dead but preserved. Or alive but dangerous. Or finally done away with as we had always wanted. Or perhaps we finally have a reason to really live as we once would have, before the city laid waste to the mountains.

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The "sound" of "nature" in music originates with our idea of the "acoustic instrument" -- stringed, drummed, breathed, hammered. These sounds begin in a village, which is where women and men and children live together in a collective home. As soon as you plug something in and electrify it, nature recedes, the volcano scatters the village inhabitants into distant atomic parts. As soon as you plug something in and electrify it, the village is the city, the city is the planet, the planet is the to-be-colonized white fire surrounded by a raging inferno of nothingness.

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If there are any acoustic instruments on Hybrid, they are buried deep within the sound -- you would need some sort of hyper-magnification technology brought back from the future to extract them and restore them their originary status. The music seems to only reference, by way of its sound, things in nature like grass, or the ground, or the sea, or the day. No one is there to witness this nature, because this nature is what stands apart from us. Even if we look directly into its eyes, we don't see it as anything but othered.

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Solaris is a story about a man who takes a spaceship into space and ends up imprisoned in the deep guilt of his flypaper unconscious. He may as well remain under the water, the grass filling his mouth with projected reality.

Hybrid is a record that sounds like the nature that will outlast us, even if we live side-by-side amongst it. Can you imagine a day that you aren't actually inside of when you imagine the images of the day -- the fusions, that village, those flowers, that living pond, the moving ocean, those shifting day times, that surfaced earth, these no ones. Hybrid is the sound of an emergency crashing calmly into the sun, building a village there whose ashes are the remnants of every new day.

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(Further information on Michael Brook can be found at his website. His other records all showcase different aspects of his performing, composing, and production abilities. Hybrid, however, is a unique work that imagines a future that lies far beyond, and external to, us -- (humanity, I mean)...)