Control.

It was bound to happen. I was eventually going to write about music. It wasn't like I was trying to avoid it, but I certainly took a concerted effort to take a break from my obsession with music. I was misled, by myself, that it was an unhealthy obsession. I've come to realize that it wasn't unhealthy, but that how I interpreted my relationship with it was. I thought music took up too much of my time, I thought I gave it too much thought, too much concern; I would sometimes get anxious about listening to new records or trawling through the newest write-ups on up and coming bands and musicians. I often thought of it as FOMO; the idea that if I didn't know who was going to be the next big thing, or the latest innovation, something, I don't know what, was going to happen about my sense of self-worth.

If you're like, "Jesus Christ guy!", ya, I feel the same way. When I put it out like that, it sounds as ridiculous as it is even for me. But these are the kind of defaults I fall back on sometimes when I'm feeling emotionally vulnerable. We all have these defaults when we feel emotionally vulnerable, and some of us have ones that feed into it, perpetuate it, instead of giving us a way out.

So why all of this preamble on my mental health? Well, I think it gives us an interesting framework when considering our relationship with music, especially among those like me who have given so much time to it that it's become an integral part of how we understand ourselves and how we orient towards a future that is always emerging and never completing. With all of this out of the way, however, I'd like to begin at the moment where this train of thought began for me.

I was listening to a record made by Patrick Shiroishi and Noel Meek called Break Your Eyes. It's an interesting record though it explores some pretty well trodden ground; the interplay between electric noise and the naturalness we've come to associate with conventional instruments, such as violin and saxophone. The majority of the enjoyment from this record is just how in sync the two can become, but, and this is not a fault as far as I'm concerned, the record leaves as many interesting answers as it does questions; are the discrepancies between these two sounds bridged by an abnormally strong connection between the two collaborators, or is the distinction itself, between 'electric' and 'organic', have to be reexamined for its validity? These are hardly new questions. They've been circling around the music scene ever since Wendy Carlos made Switched on Bach back in 1968. But they're nevertheless interesting questions to continue to come back to if only to provide us, hopefully, with some new insight into our contemporary circumstances.

Anyways, I'm getting too much into the music here. What I really become intrigued by with this record is more so its method of improvisation, and I don't mean how the record improvises, but the idea of improvisation itself. Much like the theme's explored, the idea of an improvised piece of music is nothing new. Hell, I think it would be safe to say that, considering the entire scope of music across its existence, not improvising would be the outlier. What Break Your Eyes forced me to consider, however, was the purpose of improvising music, recording it and distributing it.

Improvising serves a lot of different purposes for a lot of different folk. One person might be going into it with a very different hope than the other. For my purposes, since every one of the articles on here is essentially improvised, I've come to a few idea regarding improvisation as it serves my interests. One, it's practice. Boom, bam, done. Easy enough. Secondly, it's to see what happens and this becomes even more interesting when you're collaborating and when its done at a ridiculous speed, such as the case with music. Thirdly, it's a practice that fulfils itself. The goal is that there is no goal. The achievement is to not achieve anything. It begins where it begins and it ends where it ends. One could say "Well, isn't that the case with all records?" and I would disagree. Improvised music, for one, cannot be repeated. This music will not be played live. The recording you have is all there is left of that time. Any other attempt to re-achieve what was already done will be seen as either an entirely new improvisation, or a short-sighted practice that would render the original motive of improvisation completely irrelevant. Another aspect is that there's something inhuman in improvisation. There's a divide between the artist and their art when it's improvised. It's hard to explain this without getting to distracted and going into a full blown discussion over who was right, Nietzsche or his advisor, Arthur Schopenhauer, but there's something about the erasure of the will from improvised music that allows the music to have a quality that is completely in and of itself. With the erasure of the will, the music becomes something pother than the specific work of an artist who finessed and edited their project to say something specific that conforms to their perception.

After considering all of this, I soon came to wonder, why record and distribute this kind of music considering it seems completely inaccessible. I'm completely convinced that this is music that is only for itself. I'm also convinced that if any purpose can be gleaned from this piece, it would be for the artist themselves to explore. Improving can help illuminate ideas that were either once unformed, or were never there to begin with. But this are ideas for the artist, not the audience, and I'm not a jazz musician. The only role I, and many others, can occupy is as that of an observer. So, why release this record to a public that was completely disregarded during its production?

What this record made me wonder was how the audience functions in the relationship between an artist and its consumer. Improvised music is not meant to really have an audience, or at the very lest, it certainly should not be a factor in its creation. Ideally, this is not only the case with experimental music, but with how we as an audience tend to evaluate music. Paradoxically, there's definitely an audience for a musician who doesn't care about their audience. But there is something different between an artist purposefully crafting songs for an audience they don't care about, and someone recording an improvised piece for an audience they don't care about. The former is indifferent to whether or not an audience arrives; the latter reminds its audience its place in the piece of art's priorities. A purposed piece of art welcomes its audience should it arrive, the improvised piece of art directly addresses its audience and says "This is not for you, or anyone. Either accept your place, or go."

Identity has no place in an improvised piece of art. For someone to say that they identify with an improvised piece of art would not only be incredibly confusing (are you schizophrenic?), but it would also undermine what the piece achieved, which is itself and itself alone. By making a piece of improvised art a part of how you identify is to remove the complexity and timeliness of that art. It's to make sense of something whose purpose was not necessarily senselessness, but at least a traversal of how our senses create within the immediate moment.

I'm still left with the question though. Why record and release something I'm convinced will be a lesser version of what originally occurred? For one, honestly, why the fuck not? But there's also the fact that I, specifically, haven't heard it, so it's new for me. That's one of the most crucial aspects of improvisation; something new could happen. It might not, but it could. Improvisation is seeing what happens that couldn't happen otherwise. It's a roll of the die. For us, however, as a consumer of these pieces of art, we need to accept, as much as we might not like it, to take a certain passive stance towards what's happening. These pieces are not things for us to will into our sense of comprehension, validation, or what have you. These pieces keep you at a distance and remind that we don't always have to be in control of everything.