Noise in the Seashells
Hello and thank you for reading.
Sometimes I feel like I am looking forward to listening to music that is more and more weird, and abstract. Maybe I just need to replace the noise of my own thought with some other noise.
Some nicer and better noises. Sometimes, just a bigger noise.
This kind of “music” comes in handy when I need to relax, or when I am doing things like tidying up the house or doing the dishwasher.
Sometimes I feel a little guilty about my need of filling this void.
It makes me think about Mildred, the character from Fahrenheit 451. Mildred is addicted to the noise produced by Seashells and she spends the nights awake listening to the buzzing of these retrofuturistic in-ear headphones.
And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time.
When I first came out with this parallelism I thought I was really smart. As usual. Then I found out that, obviously, a lot of people wrote about how seashells in Fahrenheit are similar to things that we use to escape reality and interfere with our ability to think. And then again, I realised how great and truly visionary Ray Bradbury was at the time (the book was published in 1953), and still is.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451_(film_1966)
In my defense I must say that I consider almost
I also suspect that what I consider to be passive listening is a little more active than I think.
Futhermore I use ambient and noise music to reset my mind after a day of hard work and start again with some other activities (hopefully).
At the end of the day, maybe, I feel the need to listen to this kind of music just because it is just relaxing to me.
Even if it could sound weird.
If you had the occasion to read my previous missives, you probably remember I started this mailing list with the idea of composing a small piece of experimental music every month and share my musical travel with you.
Obviously that was too much of a challange for me.
Let's face it, every new project looks promising at first
but results are incredibly uneven and the struggle is real.
Also, I tend to procrastinate till I forget about what I am doing. That’s the reason why I didn’t write to you in the last couple of months.
Luckily I am experimenting with sound at least 8 hours per week so I will continue to share my results with you and hopefully write about it too. Most likely, not EVERY month.
This week I was jamming with the beautiful instrument that is Bastl Microgranny and came out with a recording that is both organic and mechanical at the same time.
And I think it fits my other compositions incredibly well, even if the approach is completely different.
I know it’s not really the most pleasant track, but that’s it.
Those lucky seashells