A Rose in a White Sky

I have begun to question whether the whole previous argument, and many posts previous, are elaborating something that was settled at the beginning into a whole kind of crazy thought experiment. That the reversal idea is really the beginning and the end of what's happening now and what the solution is. That essentially to birth love out of tragedy is just to reverse the tragedy, like an energy circuit. Which doesn't create the same thing. That the successive principle is the idea of the new, and the integrative principle is the idea of love. Love followed by newness is tragedy. Newness followed by love is love. So what I would speculate this means is that my early work is a love adapted out of the fabric of my surroundings, something old, preceding me, a wildness given whereas O Vocoder is a wildness taken. Or simply that this means the love is a repetition, a repetition of a love inherited, a family complex, a psychodrama which is inherited-- more nuanced, complicated, and expansive than a mere superego, a mere authority principle, or reality principle. It is a 'reality principle' in the sense of being a reality, not the reality. Newness is essentially connected more with the identity, so contrary to earlier reports, the second phase would correspond to the identity, and the first with love, which brings us back to ego/love. The emphasis on Delusional Adam's cosmology may be overstated. What this phase may mean is simply the announcement of myself as an artist, a first discovery of my full powers as a dramatist, comedian, writer, composer, and the dedication of my life to that pursuit, to that ambition. The repression or suppression of love is achieved by way of sequentiality, not trauma. Ego succeeds love; it is beyond love. But to use the term "ego" is to mislead us, it is more the identity principle at work here. Identity which claims "I am this." Rather than a notion of libido which is introverted, narcissism or anything like that. It might be related to these concerns, but it is the main operation-- I am this-- which orders them. 

The problem then becomes how sequentiality renders an earlier stage unconscious. The movement from love to ego is universal, a shift of concerns from the love for parents to the need to establish one's self as an independent being. This means that early romantic love might in fact repeat programs from the past, but maybe not. It may simply mean that the direction of libido is in this direction-- from love to identity. As I picked up a guitar, my feelings of love were poured into the construction of an identity, a musician, a songwriter, and as I picked up a camera, the same, but with the filmmaker and writer roles. And this of course is the Nietzschean psychology, the individuation principle as tragic, as the Orphic sublimation of grief for Eurydice. Comedy is really of little importance to this story, except as a sign of the increasing tragedy of the identity as we feel it in relation to remembered feelings of merriment and play. But it is unclear why the identity is tragic, except from saying it is the succession of love, it is a higher interest than love, which is not a reality principle per say, not necessarily utilitarian, but just the way one's energies get expended. The statement of love becomes a statement of identity, and it is lost in its communication, in the vanity of its statement, in the obsession of its refinement. Regardless as to whether it 'works' or doesn't. The creative work takes the love that inspires it into its creator. 

The creative work takes the love that inspires it into its creator.

A lot of creativity means a lot of love that isn't able to connect with others, perhaps. Or just the opposite. Love that does connect with others, and is celebrated by the work, which sophisticates the identity rather than shares the love. Art is love divided by fame, or identity. But the reverse of this formula is that a love with identity is an artistic love, a new love. It is new love versus a newness that transcends love. And this is highly suggestive of a love, with no identity preceding it, being love within a system, without a self, love which is shaped into the form which is presented existentially. This shaping is creative, but ultimately may be the "derivative" stage. Where we are basically programs, automatons acting out the interaction between love and circumstance, which forges the beginning, the inertia towards the establishment of a clear identity. But the identity is not complete until what was "love" sculpted by circumstance is now fragmented from its circumstance. So the womb-like connection, perhaps, lasts far longer than the mother's belly, but right up to the point where we reach adulthood and discover our difference. This wakes us out of some slumber, questions all our earlier submission to the way things were handed to us, shows it to be a slow prefiguration of an individual distinction. But this is not the mother's belly, this is just circumstance and our love, and the creative connection between, and how the love mirrors the circumstance, and then doesn't-- bam, there's the identity. And perhaps this happens for some people and not others. 

Following this, our whole life is tragic, because we are disconnected from our circumstance, trying with one hand to hang on to it, and with another to defend ourselves from it. But mostly defending. Turning ourselves into a circumstance. To reverse this circuit, from love to identity, to identity to love-- perhaps it means to create one's own circumstance that one can love. Perhaps it means to discover in circumstance something that has never been found in it before, to love. Perhaps it means--

Wrongness is the learning of the soul who is always myself.

I'm in a bit of a trance about this, got a bit down, and started to question everything I had thought about comedy and tragedy. And I feel my whole tower of premises shaking. But one thing I can be absolutely sure of, it is that -- a) the Nivin Trail / Health Violence stuff is pointing in a certain direction which is what is described above, and which did seem to come about from the Pacifica time. This material does essentially spell this out, this reversal operation. Yet I feel already beyond this in a way, in some other realms, photography, writing, and songwriting, I have felt some new aesthetic being born. And this seems somewhat related to what I was saying before but I can't quite pinpoint it. 

The Nivin Trail / Health Violence stuff draws a line from Phase B to Phase A, for sure, from Residents to Pixies. Out of the landscape of a phase which came later, Resident-sy stuff, a phase that came earlier, Pixies-ish stuff, is directly reprised. And what this feels like intuitively is like the Phase B had a landscape, which "Nivin Trail" treats Laffer Curve as the most mature representation of, and then Phase A had a mission, a will, which "Health Violence" treats For Everyone as the clearest indication of. So that's a very different sense, actually, for the difference between these two then a lot of what has been said. Perhaps we've been too abstract and need to get down to the facts. The landscape of sound was something that Phase A "opened up" to reveal, which "succeeded" it. Actually Phase B was a loss of identity. Hence, why I've been saying ego/love, and then birth/death. The easiest explanation of Phase A and Phase B has nothing to do with comedy -- that's perhaps getting too into the weeds with my artistic philosophy's ebbs and flows.  More to the point, it's the difference between language and imagination. Like the Jokebook Spectrum, an egoistic philosophy becomes imaginative. A self enters a dream. Then, so it seems, in the time afterward, there is a grasping for Phase A, an attempt to re-concretize out of this imaginative world something of the song-language. There is this imaginative epiphany, and then a difficulty in returning to the expressions and styles of our pre-epiphanic work. It is as if we have left this world for another world-- Moontown. And our younger self, and the things they were imitating and invoking, we feel some sympathy with, but ultimately they don't happen in the same world. 

But, unless I'm crazy, something has been lacking in my music. And if O Vocoder works for me, it works because it grasps Phase A like nothing before it did, that it finds a new relationship to the world of rock songwriting, and inaugurates a whole phase of voluminous songwriting.  And whatever "Nivin/Violence" or "Health/Trail" ends up being, it has made another version of the same gesture, though I would say not very enthusiastically, but in a way O Vocoder isn't really enthusiastic either. So both O Vocoder and-- I dunno, Digital Non-Presence Machine-- yeah, that's the title. Or we also suggested n-Carnation. I might prefer DNPM. But it grasps further-- O Vocoder I think is a collective past, and DNPM is a personal past. O Vocoder finds the pure rock band sound, the sound of the room. I don't feel it has much to do with anything except, very vaguely, the Shotgun albums, and not much at that to do with them, and TEA. Much like my new songs don't sound anything like Shotgun songs, neither does my new version of a rock band. Basically I just don't think it is super-about Shotgun, that floats up but it's really more about the White Album, Plastic Ono Band, Spaghetti Westerns and Ennio Morricone, The Stones, Elvis, Pavement, Beefheart, and so on ... a whole vibe of very 1960's. And I can get very thematic about how it was supposed to be "Apocalypse of Love" the sort of horrifying aftermath of the Summer of Love into the Summer of Hate. But largely it just works with that landscape as it was originally delivered in 1968, with those influences, that world-- and there are dark 60's and early 70's films, particularly, and Plastic Ono Band is dark. So maybe not such a cultural statement. But I think this grasps back, resynthesizes something that Phase B's imaginative explorations made very difficult to access. And yet the album is very cinematic, very much an extension of that imaginative capacity, but the cinema lines up with the songwriting project. 

So another simple fucking thing to say is that Phase B is cinema, and Phase A is music for music's sake. And this just complicates my relationship to rock music, and I have to sort of create this spaghetti western world in order to access it. Similarly, to get at the punk roots, I have to go through the Residents, but why? Because the punk roots are a principal thing under "censorship" by Phase B. So it seems they are accessed through the electronic, which also rends them quite original. They don't actually copy Pixies or Pavement, but lean into what was more stop-gap before, the electronic drums. And that also comes from getting tired of the real drums, and how they structure the landscape of the sound. And again, we're getting very concrete perhaps to scale back on philosophical hallucination, but so much of Nivin Trail / Health Violence's vibe is delivered by the use of Logic Pro instruments, new synths I never experimented with, and following that, the use of the Fender plug-in amp-- not to mention the new electric. O Vocoder was a lot of the imitation Fender which broke. Definitely this is the vibe of what I envision -- An album which constellates this reversal, this discovery, perhaps not in the organic soundscape of analog instruments, but in the artificial landscape of an imaginative electronic music like what I did in Phase B, of the exact determinants of Phase A. So much has pointed towards that past, and it was even a thought of mine in the late O Vocoder days, that my attention should shift to being so completely devoted to 90s music as I am to 60s with this one, of tracking that development somehow forward, into the future. But what happened instead was just the reversal of a personal circuit of music development, a regression, a reversal. But it is the same reversal as O Vocoder in a sense, or it moves the same way, and really every album since Shotgun's Nothing has been motivated by attempting this. By returning to songwriting, and this issue is the issue of sort of landscape versus form, fantasy versus self. And it is interesting how Delusional Adam goes anti-self and things are getting landscape-y. 

So yeah, I 'established my identity' then in a sense but I think the real shift is just the landscape, the cinema, the imagination, the dream, Moontown. And perhaps, to date, my cinematic side is sort of schizoid in relation to my musical side. But this seems, again, like something I've kept trying to do since Shotgun's Nothing. And it's as if I had to push and push and push to find a way. Showgirls just doesn't quite work, translating Laffer Curve's weird approach to arrangement to guitars, and then it gets a little better with Codebook Spectrum, and then it gets a little better with RnRG, but it really lands with The Dream Songs, Skeleton, BAAJS, and Moksha. Even though the works are uneven, and have severe flaws, they 'succeed.' But The Dream Songs seems to bear more in common with Laffer Curve and Moksha seems to be pointed towards For Everyone. Somehow it's like, The Residents' conceptual ethos works with The Dream Songs, but Moksha pushes things towards cinema even more firmly and that's actually what's paving the way back to For Everyone. And also this time coincides with film scores. And so I mean it's what Phase B did to my musical artistry which permitted Phase A to be gestured towards, that I had to seemingly 'find' the identity in a landscape, so to speak. Very different, more basic interpretation, but it's highly resonant.

My standards are really high, and I'm not plugged in to any subculture like I was when I was young, and so there's some kind of thing I need to vibe on, which I think is like a cinematic world of sound.  And so while I wish to push into being a rock songwriter because that's such a huge part of myself and a craft I really enjoy and find meaningful, it needs to come 'out of a landscape.' It's not participating in a landscape that's given to it, perhaps. O Vocoder is possible because of the spaghetti western world, it 'situates' the album, and gives it a reason for existence. Perhaps overcomes the absence of social encouragement, through that fantasy world, because it casts its own spell. The other aspect of this is that it also seemingly -- independent of my development stages -- finds the landscape of this kind of songwriting.  Calibrates identity and landscape together -- self and world. And seems centered on Naropa and Colorado, and then later Utah. And what we have is sort of a subject/object thing going on here, where my object-consciousness (contemplative, perhaps, detached) is competing with my self-consciousness.  

Now there's also the factor that Moontown is connected to Pasadena and there have been many recent attempts to link environments, cities, locales, to the stages of my music. This shows the depth of the creative project, of what is tried for in it as a work of composition. And this is credited to the Residents because they were really the filmmaker-musicians that changed it all, and RSM is not, and so forth, but I'm still into all that kind of stuff. Composer is linked to world and songwriter to self. The divide that becomes extended -- composer is fiction, and songwriter is poetry. Phase A and B are really just this. Holy smokes. It's really just that fucking simple, don't need to get into all this shit about comedy and tragedy. And so this 'divorces' me from my ego somewhat -- as the director of a film is behind the camera and not in front of it. But it initiates a new understanding of performance, a new more actorly sense for singing. DRDS is an opera. Essentially that's been a lasting change.

Phew boy. Not too sensational. Reassuring somehow, but leaves some questions open like -- why then can I only really 'stand' O Vocoder, why does that red-con my previous music? Already answered-- because it firmly touches base with Phase A through the analog instruments. Then the new shit, it just dives back in time in those two stages, like we let go of Phase B -- or let go of the way in which Phase B was sculpting itself into Phase A, with The Dream Songs and Moksha, out of the 'living substance' of how Phase B originally came. Death/rebirth. But Phase B energy is certain sleeping in the whole thing of O Vocoder, and then it shoots out very confidently in a new, somewhat more rich and vibrant texture. Like the flavor for the organic and shifted the attention towards the digital, deepened the blacks, made more bold the colors, indicated even more gradations and wildness of soundscape than I was tuned into before. And that's important. That feeling of just not being able to access a production, the sound being plastic and sealed up. And I can't access it, I sense that it felt different at the time. And that after O Vocoder I'm very sensitive to this feeling from the synthetic stuff and have a lot of techniques for getting around it. So we have constant reversal since Shotgun's Nothing. The only difference is we've drawn the underlying movement since Shotgun's Nothing -- more like Nothing's Shotgun, a singer-songwriter without a world -- in absolute intellectual terms. It is: movement from Residents-influence to Pixies-influence, a Pixies which remembers Residents, versus a Residents which remembers Pixies. But it must be said this is a completely different approach to the problem of reversal than O Vocoder!

What I mean is, this is not the setting of the stage for some 90s rock. This is not the finding of cinematic genre to correspond to it. Despite some thought of 'noir music' or 'LA music' it is only vaguely suggestive of that whereas O Vocoder is vividly suggestive of Ennio Morricone and Plastic Ono Band and so on. I thought of Nivin Trail a bit like Laffer Curve's "Tomorrowland" -- but less like that World's Fair vibe I had going on then with the archival footage, but more like this dark moody science-fiction horror landscape. Really more Howard Shore than anyone, aha.  Nope, that's important. Wow. So hard to see what you're doing, to connect all the little pieces together. Yeah so there's that movie I began making and abandoned: The Last Movie. Really sad it's gone actually. It was pretty cool. The new film Oblique Angle gets some vibe of it on there, which I'm happy with, but its not quite the same. In a way it's more like the emergence of the Health Violence material out of the Nivin Trail material, in terms of the photography. Sort of a watery feeling, like Shore ... Pisces into Aries. 

But that would still construct the whole goddamn thing like a Cronenberg movie. The Last Movie. Oblique Angle. Which is a weird/cool concept. Like, a Pixies-ish rock album, these rock tunes, emerging from this texture. Why? Other than the reversal. What intuitive circuit connects them, in the same way -- if at all this can be composited -- the Beatles-ish songs are connected to Morricone.

Well, time, for one. Because the Pixies and Cronenberg are contemporaries, pioneers of modern music and cinema, which both hit a stride in the 80s and I believe inspired a lot of people in the 90s, and they also had a strong presence in the 90s. The Residents also at least embody something about the 80s musical technology. And that was a major idea in the texturing, the notion that 90s music, grunge, is sort of this weird return to punk after punk has died. The 80s pop has embraced synthesizers, and now there's this resurgence of guitars. And synths are important to Shore's work, or the work that really grabbed me, and even the recent Cronenberg films he's favoring synths though he's big on orchestras and I'm not really getting into that at all. But I'd say I'm conjuring a lot of Shore in the landscapes. Lot of Pisces energy in Naked Lunch: Shore, Crone, Coleman. Interestingly, with Crash, there's a 'return to guitars,' and it has a very 90s vibe. Moontown, the album, also referenced Crash and Morricone, together.  Along with Carpenter. And in terms of Residents-y stuff, what stuck out was the way I started to use the guitar in conjunction with that Residents-y stuff. Looking at BAAJS, not to be too melodramatic about how this energy died and was reborn, you can see the vibe that's there in the instrumentals which is not especially Laffer Curve, but which looks forward to Nivin Trail's darker vibe, and what I'm saying is that it sounds as if there's a pollination between Residents-style film scoring and Howard Shore.  And that has maybe hit upon some much more original styling with Moontown, because its ye old hybridity concept again. It's a magic combo. But the point of this is its pretty directly reprised by Nivin Trail, but -- song-oriented. And there's a feeling that it's sort of reversing that -- maybe that's Moontown in the Sun for you.  Well, the Pixies are kind of far off at that time. I don't really return to Frank Black until Indie Cindy in 2015, and that's not much of a love affair with that album 

So if we're approaching this as a new cinematic world which permits the songwriter identity -- that the object has to be constructed in my musical art, and this is why it has gotten difficult. Our artistry is too sensitive to that dimension to just throw songs together and 'participate' in a musical world. We create our own, which sort of 'stages' the songs as dramatic occurrences within a landscape, a texture, a cosmos. So there's like a disintegration of the subject in the object -- "Nothing" -- and then an immediate movement towards theatricality. This may be why comedy comes up, the playfulness and the ruse of comedy. It comes up because the music is asking for that to permit the songwriter to speak again. And perhaps, more amazingly, I am trying to put a stop to this. I am trying to find a 'voice' in song production that is just without the imaginative setting and just strikes the right formalism. But it's like that songwriting thing has to come out of the pure imagination. So I think that's what's happening. I'm imagining a spaghetti western, and then imagining a Cronenberg sci-fi film featuring an alien punk rock band -- not a bad proposal, but not sure that's so intuitive.  Well -- A song for everyone and La La song, they certainly have a dark texture that sort of belongs to this imaginary world in this weird way. Also sci-fi is very neatly opposed to western. Future versus past. And again the Pynchonian idea of narrative time travel. I wonder if the albums and this writing about it is all committed to what I've just said, feeling out the way to be a singer-songwriter in a cinematic imagination. And this could be like the metaphor of Moontown, O Vocoder -- Digital Non-Presence Machine is perfect, n-Carnation is not bad either, but I think I prefer that since that's actually a track. A sci-fi punk film, like Crash or Lost Highway in a way. Yes! That's it! Which I acquired both of those Criterions in short succession purdy much I think. So I think we're finding our past again in a collective past. Or for the first time. That O Vocoder is just the collective past, and then DNPM is catching up with my own past, drawing the perfect reversal, drawing the chronological reflex, but also in a way straightening it out, because actually the electronic stuff did lead into the punk rock stuff in the grunge era.  And something like Crash or 90s rock albums have this electronic quality, like OK Computer of course. So in other words, not just any arbitrary imagination going on here, but a chronology which starts with what precedes you and then continues with what you grew up with, sort of perfectly rendered, and which therefore, pushes ever further forward ... hm ... it's only a reversal relative to the sort of thought process I have. 

Or! This whole emphasis on reversal which Nothing begins, eventually takes us before we even exist. Then leads into our true personal past, but lensed as if it is the sequel, not the beginning. So the "reversal" is continued in more abstract personal terms in a sense, a landscape forges the song scape less immediately than O Vocoder did but in a shift of phases that reverse our personal history-- that's all true, but what the finished work really amounts to or what it keys into from the very beginning, like "Late Goodbye," which also combines Residents & Pixies excitingly -- is this very modern sound which to me sounds quite contemporary with a lot of the vibe of other pop these days, which is very fused with electronic instruments, and feels as if the 80s has revenged itself upon the 90s in much the same way that there's a "reversal" here. Yet all the same it points towards the 90s. And my deep suspicion is that ultimately this is like a spaghetti western 60s movie, a 90s movie thriller with rock flavors like Crash and Lost Highway or others, and its sort of like a genealogy ... a very deep integration of these important stages of my own musical influence, shaped out of the instruments themselves. And like I'm saying I believe the third one takes us out of this time entirely, because I feel like the vibe I'm describing is simultaneously nostalgic for the 80s/90s and just very much like the vibe of the pop music I checked out as I was suiting up on Nivin Trail. Again I was grasping at some kind of 'standard' to conquer, which initiated this -- like I hit the limit of playing my own drums and setting up a grimy rock band and then I hit the limit of copying the feel of the electronic productions I heard and that brought me back to my own early music and how it used electronic drums. And I think it's a trippy thing to do. 

But vis a vis the 'new' aesthetic that is manifesting -- it would probably show itself as something beyond the Pacifica movie and its connection to the new music --  it seems tied to the songs. And I think what it is attempting is actually perhaps not cinematic -- it's just through my cinematic sense that this progression is coming about. I'm feeling in the new zone -- Mozart, Paul McCartney. Something psychedelic and rigorous, brightly colored, not especially emphasizing analog or digital.  Songs in a pure space, a glinting prism showing colors, but especially a pinkish-red and an off-white perhaps.  A rose in a white sky.  Acid-y, highly structured ... and today's theory is that beyond this personal reversal or what that says ... hm. Perhaps it says that whatever this new world, this new music I will make, it is sort of beyond this issue of picking a cinematic world. A cinematic world reflects the time in which it was made, like a 40's film does. I have the feeling like the whole purpose of this is to project into a yet unrealized future. To track the developments genealogically and, like a speculator, allow it to send us out into a "new love." And perhaps the pattern is that this might succeed in having our music pioneer something for our film. Perhaps our music has been too influenced by our film, and it has had to go through this madness to get to a place where it can exert the same influence backwards, because cinema is tied to era, to technology.  I feel like the analog stuff pushed us to the other extreme, and now its more like -- we want a sort of cleanliness of expression, not either project's swamp of texture, but the texture comes from the idea, from the composition. And I'm not sure that connects us to an era, but maybe with classical music, since that works much that way. But what we'd do wouldn't be classical music, it would be rock which like Paul hearkens to that. It would lack 'staging.' And that seems a bit acid-y in itself, and like the impact of that on the cinematic landscape it starts to suggest ... as if birthing the subject out of the object is a bit more like, the object declaring itself to the subject. And maybe this would declare the object more so.  Imagination and language -- going a step closer to the economy of language, the austerity, the leanness of how it communicates -- like mathematical patterns. 

Patterns/relations, versus worlds!

Patterns/relations, versus worlds! Very shocking argument since this was a closing Pacifica idea, anti-follow the image, the study of relations. So perhaps again, we are making an "image" of our early days, and in copying it, recovering something of the vibe of how it is language, that early stuff, not a fantasy.  The Dream Songs has a bit more of that quality actually then I do later. But it does still feel like molded in the plastic of Logic Pro and a Yamaha keyboard. But if this is the direction I'm going on, from analog, to digital, to austere, to sort of not depending on texture to carry the composition, embracing formalism as songs do as limited opportunities to create effects, which force everything to be done by the notes.  The interesting thing is that while classical music is not subjective, it is more like 'pure songwriting' in how it is not about timbral variation and imagination, which so much electronic production features. So maybe we are driven to try to get the whole production declared from that language, and not by the moods it sets. It does feel actually anti-Cancer, pro-Gemini. It goes against the Beck ethos, the song in a landscape. Its more like the song is a landscape. And my feeling is without that timbral mix and match you have to really make it work, kind of like with writing fiction, you really have to be good, you can't resort on the spectacle of the camera. And this seems like an organization of energy, a sharpening reduction -- well, I said it moves from instinctual to imagistic to verbal, but I just didn't realize how much further it could extend into the verbal.