I was driving our drummer Sean home from the KFJC 50th Anniversary Party concert at the Cafe du Nord tonight, where we'd listened to our bassist Will and his drummer Laura from his other band The Thralls make a guest appearance with the band Al Qaeda. Good show.
Dropping Sean off, I had to run up to his place to grab my bag (which I had left there earlier in the evening) and experienced a moment of déjà-vu. About a year ago I had dropped Sean off after another show and didn't come up, but in tonight's episode I experienced that first instance again as if I had.
Sean and I started talking about the phenomenon and reflecting on the refraction of déjà-vu, the whole thing suddenly came to me.
As announced in our last blog, Project Soundwave accepted our proposal for their Green Sound festival next summer. In its Green Sound manifestation, this performance won't be taking place in the form of a show on a local shoreline, as conceived in that proposal, but we have still been intending on incorporating some form of the visual prinicple of the original proposal.
In our original proposal, to explore the visual aspect of sound and environmentalism for Green Sound, we projected visiting two Bay Area shorelines, one which has been well preserved and then another which has been environmentally devastated. We wanted to record these visits in some form of a visual documentary, recording our interactions both with these two forms of landscapes and with each other as a band mates.
In déjà-vu, our unconscious minds simultaneously enact a moment of observation from within the space of the mind and a moment of preservation of the environment outside. You are both within and without, observing and preserving, but these processes, which are concomitantly empirical (i.e. of the conscious mind) and transcendental (as are all advents of the unconscious), these oxymoronically deconstruct each other.
Another aspect of the visual element of our Green Sound proposal was this. Alex (our didj player) filmed two short films in a visit to Sequioa National Park. In both films, he pointed his camera straight down towards the water and the shallow river bed beneath it. In “Reflection” (the first), he had the camera above the water, recording the reflections of sunlight upon the surface of the water. In ”Refraction” (the second), in the same location and at the same angle, he immersed his (waterproof) camera in the water, and recorded the refraction of that same sunlight within the water, its refraction onto the smooth sandstone floor of that river bed.
Reflection:
Refraction:
The idea is that the light and water and environment are all the same---even the orientation of perception and the representational means for framing that shore, that liminal space-- even these are all the same. But for both our eyes and for the natural as well as the unconscious elements of that empirical experience, for these the image and the sound are correspondingly different, yet the antithetically the same. This came out in both the visuals of the films and in the audios of those two same-different spaces.
Reflaction, refrection: (the 2 below aren't our videos, but they illustrate the principle we're after)
Our idea was we wanted the songs to be based on this relationship, this interchange, in the several literal as well as metaphorical meanings of this word and its roots. We already wrote and recorded a full demo of "Reflection" (hear it on our Myspace page), one of our best recordings, and it was done in one take watching Alex's first video. The sound for this song is very smooth, streamed, organic, mirroring. It sounds like an experienced environment, how we subliminally perceive and participate in that natural setting, as any one hiking through it would.
But then, in anticipation of part two, the second song Refraction, anticipating the 2nd film's footage inside the water and refracted light, it ends with a sample taken from part one of Kit Clayton's album Lateral Forces. I ran this sample, which is already an experiment in static sound and electricality, through a series of filters to make it "refract" the sound of the keynote sample which composes the rest of the composition, and this effect will likewise be replicated and further refracted in the version of "Refraction" which I will be writing over this Christmas break.
The Reflection and the Refraction form and interweave the intersecting interstitching yet deconstructing diffracting electroacoustic environments, that of the natural shoreline setting, and that of the psychosomatic experience of that shoreline.
This, finally, extends to my new (re)vision of the film and documentary component of this project. When we played our first show in the Mirror room, Chris Gray projected his experimental film upon us and upon the mirrors of the room, immersing us in a visual sea of refracted light, refracted light which was being reflected off the walls of mirrors composing the performance space. Jaakko Vilpponen, in turn, filmed this environment of sound and light around us,
(Other videos of this show by Jaakko can be found here)
Chris reflected, Jaakko refracted; in interchanging their visuals both with our sound and with the performance space, the two together composed the total audio visual, electroacoustic environment to contain our art in, for the audience at the show and for the audience of the videos of that show. and for us performing then building on our sound off those recordings in our initial phase of rehearsals as a band. conscious made unconscious and unconsciousness making consciousness.
Déjà-vu, Déjà-auditu, refraction-reflection, refrection-reflaction
So, an idea for the film that could serve as footage both for the documentary and for the visual projections to (write or actually) score the songs would be this: Jaakko films the raw footage of our visits to these two shorelines: our visit to and reflection the preserved shoreline (that initial moment of déjà-vu) and then our visit to and refraction of the environmentally devastated shoreline. In our immediate experiences of these environments we are in direct reflection. As filmed, the first preserved shoreline is the reflection of a reflection: our original "nature" within nature, how we feel participating as part of that environment. Also as filmed, our experience of the second, observed shoreline constitutes a reflection on a refraction (the shoreline has been refracted--"broken" by industrial incursion--but we are still directly experiencing in it-----and as part of the (in)human nature which broke it, we are reflected in that refraction).
(Jaakko would record not us as a band observing at the shoreline, but through our eyes, his eyes & the camera lens as a kind of 6th pair of eyes & third eye for the band.) Jaakko's raw footage of the preserved shoreline would serve as the first part of the documentary and the projections for our live performance of Reflection.
Then, Chris, would collaborate with Jaakko to take the footage of the second observed, environmentally-devastated shoreline, and edit and manipulate it, refract it. This would then form the film that would compose second part of the documentary and the projections used during the live performance of "Refraction".
Déjà-vu enacts and arrests the aporia between these two spaces, by curving unconscious reflection into conscious refraction and by raising our consciousness (our reflection) of how humanity has unconsciously or unconscientiously refracted, broke down and damaged, that environment.
Now, after that, the question is how do we traverse that aporia, cross its boundaries, unite the natural shoreline with the liminal space of the self. Transcendence is of course part of this, but in what form, through what manner of engagement (oxymoronic of transcendence), this is still to be determined. But that is a matter to work out in "Coda", the third and final movement of this series. Much work to do by Green Sound next summer.....
