Noise is a Radical Form of Silence - album notes

This album was designed as a perverse kind of relaxation. The world outside seems increasingly cruel, increasingly blind, increasingly stupid. In the same week that scientists announced there is only a decade left to prevent catastrophic climate change (and later that the warming of the oceans was much worse than previously realised) the national conversation continued to be dominated by the government’s inability to negotiate a slightly worse trading arrangement with Europe. The Budget announced precisely zero measures to tackle a species level crisis but held duty on drinks in pubs so if we all try really hard we’ll probably be too pissed to notice the end of the world.

The five tracks that make up Noise is a Radical Form of Silence have been carefully designed to take the listener on a short emotional hiatus from the horrors of the world outside. Through hypnotic, slowly shifting rhythms, walls of static, and deeply buried chord progressions you can take a holiday from the ongoing nightmare. Treat yourself to a wall of noise that obliterates awareness of the nightmare dystopia just around the corner; you’ve earned it. The BPM of the songs gradually drops over the course of the album and indeed over the course of each song. The whole album is a form of audio tranquilliser. Swirling synths smother the pounding beats, smoothing out the rough edges to provide a sonic blanket conducive to a kind of bludgeoning peace. Let it wash over you. The beats are constantly changing, they were manipulated in real time which was great fun except for the many occasions I completely ballsed it up and had to start again from scratch. Everything you hear was produced in real time although some quantisation was used on certain elements of the sound to keep the rhythm from becoming too abstract. Also after 30 takes for some parts I was really starting to question my own commitment to authenticity so a few elements have been stitched together from several takes. It’s not cheating if you own up to it.

I spent a lot longer on the mixing of these tracks than I usually would. I had a very specific sound in mind and it required a great deal of tweaking levels to get the thick, enveloping sonic landscape I wanted. There are elements that are deliberately mixed to very low levels and sometimes when I’m listening on headphones it almost sounds like there are voices whispering just below conscious awareness. I rather like this but it may be an acquired taste. A lot of my music these days is expressed as a form of meditation. I am very bad at meditation, there is no inner peace that I’ve ever been able to access, so I use music to try and fulfill the same function.

In a world which openly refuses to engage with difficult but solvable problems self-care becomes ever more important. I don’t think I can get my carbon footprint down any further without killing myself and I don’t think I can make a meaningful improvement to the world’s chances of survival unless I take Jacob Rees-Mogg with me. I could theoretically go and live in yurt on the moors somewhere and survive off eating heather and backpackers but in world that shows an amazing ability to take collectively awful decisions it feels like too little too late. With the fate of the planet effectively sealed all I can do is try to create tools to alleviate the sheer horror of it all for as long as I can bear to inhabit this wretched, doomed orb. This album is one such tool. If you feel powerless in the face of global corporations, corrupt governments, and a vindictive media that’s because you are. Surrender, at least temporarily, is always a viable option.

As always the album is free to download but a small donation to the wildlife charity of your choice is always appreciated.

Malesperi at Bandcamp

Death Symbol album notes

“Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. [...] Everyday without fail one should consider oneself as dead. This is the substance of the way of the samurai.” 

Yamamoto Tsunetomo in Hagakure: The way of Samurai.

I meditate about death everyday. It’s not something I do on purpose, it just comes easily to me, like drinking and sodomy. Death has always been a troublesome issue for humans. It is instinctively impossible to believe that there will ever be a time when we are not able to reflect upon our thoughts; a time when there will be no thoughts and no Cartesian I to reflect upon their absence. Damien Horst pickled a shark in an effort to resolve the paradox without much success, especially from the viewpoint of the shark. When I try and comprehend death I cling to the little glimpses of nothingness in everyday life, mostly obtained through large amounts of alcohol and the attendant blackouts but sometimes just a product of depressed time eliding into a seamless moment that is impossible later to recall. Evenings and days are easy things to lose and these happy absences seem like a shadow of death, an aperitif for oblivion. Life rendered down to a series of hangovers punctuating blessed silence. Thought about in those terms at least death brings with it the possibility of escaping a nasty hangover or a come down. An overdosing addict is getting away with something, evading the consequences of re-organising their brain. You might call it better dying through chemistry.

I wanted to create some music that would help me explore the idea of death and the irony of being afraid of the one thing that unites us all. People see death as a very negative thing but it has always been good for record sales and the environment. One person’s tragedy is a maggot’s lottery win. Sooner or later of course no one wins because maggots too will die and flies will die and the sun will burn out and eventually the last black holes will evaporate into nothing and a state of perfect mindless balance will be obtained without even a passing photon to mark how tidy everything has become. Perhaps this will be the precondition for a bright new universe to spontaneously explode into being. I hope not. It sounds like a lot of effort and it’s not like this universe has been a roaring success. It’s given us some nice things like vaccines and The Great British Bake Off but it doesn’t really seem to be FOR anything useful, just a lot of flaming gas and a selection of carbon based lifeforms doing their best to utterly destroy their biosphere. If death is such a bad thing how come we’re so enthusiastically making species extinct?

A lot of pessimistic religious types see Armageddon as just around the corner. I think Armageddon started on 6th of August 1945 where humanity proved that they had the ability to wipe all life off the face of the Earth. Instead of recoiling in horror they deployed the atomic bomb and then did it again a few days later in case anyone had any doubts about how deeply our death urge went. A gun man shooting a second hostage just to make sure no one thinks the first one was a mistake. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle and now we’re all just waiting for the right combination of nutters to gain control of a nuclear arsenal and put the planet out of its misery. Like a village built on top of a volcano we point out the village has never been obliterated in an eruption before as if this was evidence of anything other than a run of good fortune. The house always wins and in this case the house has an excellent hand. If nuclear conflagration doesn’t get us then there’s farmers around the world doing their bit for human extinction by incubating the next deadly variant of flu in chickens permanently hopped up on antibiotics. All this so a few KFC executives can get rich off the back of Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. No one involved is exactly evil but then neither is salmonella. If war or pestilence won’t get the job done then we’ve still got famine driven by a runaway greenhouse effect to fall back on. On the upside turning the planet into an absolute shithole does reduce the likelihood of an alien invasion. Conquering the Earth when there are millions of other worlds in the galaxy would be like a Russian invasion force choosing to annex Luton.

All of which is a long winded way of saying that I’ve produced a noise album to accompany a daily meditation on death. It’s 40 minutes long which is almost 20 times too long for the average human attention span and almost exactly 40 times too long for my own. The soundscapes are produced with a single synthesiser line and I’ve tried to avoid an over-reliance on white noise and distortion in order to create something a little bit warmer and less abrasive. The emphasis here is on repetitive droning sounds that evolve quite slowly. Death Meditation 1 could be considered a collapse of sorts into a sea of hissing waves. Death Meditation 2 takes a more roundabout route which resolves towards a dull, moribund pulse. I’m always impressed by how much depth and texture you can find in a modern synthesiser without the need for additional plugins to modulate the sound. As always with noise music there are passages that work better than others, serendipity is a fine thing but it’s not the most reliable muse. Despite that I find the work as a whole quite soothing and relaxing, perfect for thinking about the futility of fear in the face of absolute certainty of annihilation.

Download for free at Bandcamp

Finally, I wanted to share one last piece of wisdom from Yamamoto Tsunetomo which seems particularly prescient about the way we live now.

“It is very important to give advice to a person to help them mend their ways. It is a compassionate and important duty. However, it is extremely difficult to comprehend how this advice should be given.”