“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.”
