P.ST :: The Noise Fields (Silent)

The four fields of noise on this album connect different points in deep time to an essential temporal unity in a carnival of whirling chaos whose sound is as powerful as any cyclone or vortex. It can suck you in, and through its portal, transport your mind into another world of consciousness.

The four fields of noise

With the recent passing of David Lynch, I’ve been contemplating his words about a “Unified Field” as explored in his book Catching the Big Fish. David Lynch, a longtime practitioner of transcendental meditation, often put his creativity into the hands of this “unified field” where elements from disparate sources could be connected together with the medium of consciousness. His efforts at following serendipity outside of linear narrative flows found full expression in his film Inland Empire.

Lynch writes, “I really had this feeling that if there’s a Unified Field, there must be a unity between a Christmas tree bulb and this man from Poland who came in wearing these strange glasses. It’s interesting to see how these unrelated things live together. And it gets your mind working. How do these things relate when they seem so far apart? It conjures up a third thing that almost unifies those first two. It’s a struggle to see how this unity in the midst of diversity could go to work. The ocean is the unity and these things float on it.” So it is with noise music. The four fields of noise on this album connect different points in deep time to an essential temporal unity in a carnival of whirling chaos whose sound is as powerful as any cyclone or vortex. It can suck you in, and through its portal, transport your mind into another world of consciousness.

 

The album is dedicated to the infinite variability of 20th and 21st century music and it is divided into four different long-form “fields,” The Ancient Field, The Classical Field, The Contemporary Field and the Digital Field. Creating conduits for inner-dimensional travel is exactly what these four pieces were designed to do, and they do it through a process of aggravated collage conjuration and dynamic sampling. I have no clue how any of this material was realized, but to my ears it sounds like it could be considered computer concrète. It’s jagged edges cut me just enough to make my mind bleed. From that bleeding, a mild trepanation, I can gain access to new flows of time, disappearing out of the horizontal hyperpresent and into the waterfall stream of vertical time.

Each thing manifested remains part of a holistic consciousness ::

Silent Records isn’t doing many physical releases these days, but one of the reasons to go ahead and purchase the album on Bandcamp is to access the PDF of a short essay by Kim Cascone called “The Noise Field – A Metaphysical Model.” The text here became the instructions for the album by this mysterious P.ST outfit, that includes samples from the following artists, “Milan Knížák, zeitkratzer & Reinhold Friedl, Miroslav Beinhauer, Michel Redolfi and Hiroshi Hasegawa.”

Kim Cascone’s essays have always been a source of inspiration and thought stimulating pleasure for me since I first encountered  “The Aesthetics of Failure” in the book Audio Culture. “Errormancy: Glitch as Divination” pointed to subtle and spiritual issues in computer music, and what might leak out of those errors when unforeseen problems in technology enable conditions for creativity. Here “The Noise Field” essay looks at Neoplatonic metaphysical disciplines, the work of biologist Rupert Sheldrake and his morphogenetic fields, Rudolph Steiner, the work of Luigi Russolo, who gave us The Art of Noises in his Futurist manifesto—but interpreted through a lens of theosophy by way of the writings of Luciano Chessa.

Cascone writes that, “The infinite field of potential, consists of everything, past, present and future, all at once. And as consciousness-as-potential manifests the material realm, each thing manifested remains part of a holistic consciousness. As in the example of an ocean wave being both separate from and part of the ocean, our consciousness is experienced as a wave, yet it is the ocean. Our reality emanates from an infinite, seething, noisy field of consciousness constantly manifesting potential into existence—this is the prime directive of consciousness at work.”

Another way of talking about a unified field ::

It’s another way of talking about a unified field. One of the things I like about Cascone’s work as a composer and writer is that he is not a staunch materialist. This put him at odds at times, in situations where he was presenting his music and ideas in the world of academic composition, where the physicality of listening took center stage, and the presets of the machine commanded attention over artistic intuition. Here he gives a meditation technique that he taught in his Subtle Listening workshops. The ideas is for the students to “immerse their unconscious mind in a particular sound-field, allowing ideas to bubble up into their conscious minds as ‘soundshapes,’ i.e. imaginal shapes of sounds containing patterns of texture, color, density, weight, movement, etc.” He gives a few further instructions with the idea that those who do these exercises will eventually develop the inner ability needed to become a “channel through which the infinite potential of noise flows.” Or as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would put it, they will start the process of growing “new organs of perception.”

 

This isn’t the usual kind of music people think about when words like spiritual and metaphysical are floated around. I don’t see any crystals, smudge sticks, or singing bowls for some kind of sound bath. But this is a sound bath nonetheless. A noise bath. A body bathed in churning transmissions of crunchy surrealism and harsh frequencies. Not all metaphysical music has to sound new age.

Noise heads will find much to love here. An immersion into walls of sound and cybernetic feedback loops of accelerationist destruction that release seeds of creativity. For those who do more than just lurk on threshold, go past the agitated veil, there is a void beyond, but you have to step into the swirling centrifuge in order to find it.

People whose interest has been perked by Cascone’s essay would do well to follow Silent Records on Bandcamp so they can gain access to the Silent Blog where Cascone writes daily missives of fuzz that are top form meditations on philosophy and culture in this hyperpresent era of the Simulacrum.

The Noise Fields is available on Silent. [Bandcamp]