So I guess we should start by talking about what Indra’s Net is.   You can hear this music by going to mattsearles.com/music or, at least in the short run, on my Virb.com/mattsearles profile.  It’s also worth mentioning that it’s both free, pod safe, and creative commons 3.1 share alike with attribution.. so use it for whatever, just give me attribution.. and if you want to use it for some sort of commercial thing, shoot me an email so we can talk about.  

A New Kind of Music 

Indra’s Net is my attempt at making a new kind of music, or it’s one such attempt.  I think of my music as a kind of radicle leap out of the worlds of conventional music, or any sort of music I’ve encountered anywhere else, and its that leap that I find most exciting about it.

Indra’s Net is ambient electronic music, I think its safe to say.  Or if it fits into any genera, that’s probably where it fits. But that doesn’t really get to it.

In many ways music bares the mark of the process that creates it: electronic music and working on a computer can have a big effect on process.  I think of my process of composition and production as being a combination of painting and film making:  A moment in the composition is like creating a painting, and the mix is like moving a camera through a painting..  a painting that it’s self is a living moving thing.

The ambience is like the atmosphere of a space, of a world.  The composition operates on on principles of.. well this deep sort of psychology / philosophy framework of understanding reality.  It’s a little like looking beyond or beneath reality’s surface. 

On top of this you have a kind of surrealistic like process.  You make a mark on a canvass, and like staring up at a cloud, you ask “what am I seeing.”  From here the process becomes a kind of dialog between artist and an emerging dream:  The artist is a facilitator.  So the result is a kind of investigation of the unconscious.  Its an inward exploration. 

To make things even more interesting there is the issue of the relationship between composition and production:  The mix is a part of the composition.  In mix engineering you create a virtual sound stage where in each sound or instrument has a specific location in space, and along with this different instruments are isolated into there own frequency space which has some effect on where you place those instruments / sounds in space.  In my work the location of sounds and instruments, as well as there frequency space, tends to be in a constant state of flux.  So even as we have this experience of a point of view moving through a sonic space, we have the experience of elements of that space moving around..

This is interesting from a traditional compositional point of view:  The harmonic make up of a moment has to do with the sum of all sounds.. but here harmony gets spacialized.  We have harmony that comes out of a kind of modalism, as in Jazz, where parts move in and out of key, in such a way to suggest alternative harmonic structures.  When this takes place in space our notion of harmony is shifted.

Another thing that might be worth touching on is microtonalism.  Conventionally 99.9% of all the music you ever heard in your life is based on a 12 tone equal temperament system.  Working with microtonalism means that we leave conventional harmonic / melodic stuff behind.  Where this is perhaps most interesting comes at the subject of tonal and atonal music.  Atonalism and tonalism are like these two monsters movements in music history.  One of the ways I use microtonalism is to create a music that has a kind of figure ground ambiguity in relationship to tonalism and atonalism.

So this is how it works:  Serial atonalism is sorta an atonal convention, where you could avoid creating a tonal center via not repeating a note until the other 11 notes have played, as well as not emphasizing a note over the others.  From a process perspective composing atonal music this way can feel a little like a mathematical exercise.  But one could interpret this pattern as “maximizing the length of time before a note is repeated.”  If you are working in a microtonal tone space, where perhaps you’re dealing with 72 or more notes, one can maximize the time before repeating a note without bothering to think about it too much. Further, you could compose traditional tonal music.. diatonic harmony style… but then bend the pitches around microtonal wise, so that what you would hear is like tonal music on acid.. ultimately atonal.. but in such a way that you could perceive it as ether tonal or atonal.  In this way you are exploring where certain traditional ideas about music, musical composition, and music theory, break down.

The notion of figure ground ambiguity is another theme we pick up.  In part we are saying that context provides meaning, both in terms of time, and in terms of harmony..  reality is in some sense a constructed thing, and we are exploring how reality gets constructed.  We have multiple pathways through the music, each with moments that can be interpreted in one or another way, so that one could listen to the same track multiple times and hear it differently each time.. 

The problems with Indra’s net

Indra’s Net was produce on a cheap / free laptop.  Yuck!  Which adversely effects things.  The bigger issue is the head phones I was working with:  The head phones give you a full dynamic range, plus they make higher frequency noises sound louder then they are.  This latter point has the advantage of giving a more acute sense of spacial location while mixing, but there’s also a down side:  You tend to mix sounds in such a way that they are not as loud as you might other make them, since you are living in a fuller dynamic range, and because certain things sound louder then they are.  The results was certain elements of the production endoing up sounding too quite / you are not able to hear them on certain systems.  The last problem of Indra’s Net is, because the lap top I created it on had no disk space, all the track got rendered out as MP3 files.  Latter I’d try to render the tracks out of Cubase as uncompressed files, but some of the renderings didn’t work since different versions of Cubase where used and some of the effects of older versions where not present in newer version of Cubase.

So to correct these problems I loaded the files into audio programs and rendered them out louder and with more dynamic compression.. making them finally loud enough.  The trouble was that the origional files I was working from where MP3 files, making them sound a little crummy in some places.

Further Reading on Indra’s Net

Around the time I created Indra’s Net (a long long time ago) I blogged about its creation and ideas.  Here are some links to those old entries:

• Thinkers and Indra’s Net: Arthor Schopenhaur

• Inventing a New Music

• A Most Terrible Happening (More Stuff on the Net of Indra Project)

• More Future Thinking in the (Sound?) Work of Matt

• A Modest Evolution in the Indra’s Net Project

• Indra’s Net Notes Part 2: Electric Metal

• Indra’s Net Essay (part 1)

• Indra’s Net.. to come out in SACD format (someday)

 

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 12:06 am and is filed under Indra's Net, Microtonalism, Music Production, musical composition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.