I thrive on the discovery of the fruits that sprout and flourish on the borders between things.
If you can’t tell by now, I'm so intrigued not just by bodies of knowledge but of the ideas, thoughts, and art generated by their borders. That’s one of the reasons I dig Jaron Lanier so much. He’s a man of my own heart, living life with a microscope on the edges of things, and as a result, superseding a palatable professional identity.
Another guy who talks about this and whom I respect so much, naturally as a cellist, is Yoyo Ma. I can’t find the original speech, but I watched an internet broadcast of one of his speeches at some point and his central thesis was that creating anything new and worthwhile will happen when things with established mental/social/political frameworks collide. One example that comes to mind is his performance of The Swan with dancer, Lil Buck.
I don’t know about you, but I think there is something compelling about that performance that outlasts its novelty.
Meowg
I did a Google search for “space and synths” hoping to find some cool random artwork, but all I got was Moogs & cats.
In my career I have always had a microscope on the edge of things as well. It’s always a fine line between skill-stacking; gratify the universe’s minimum quota for examination of nuance, versus just going off the rails and chasing novelty. I try my best to stay on solid ground, but as both of these men, I find that my identity is blurrier and blurrier as I progress in my exploration of cello, which became an exploration of music, which became an exploration of nuance and life itself. Jaron is best described, in my own heart, as a brilliant mind, someone who keeps us from adhering too hard to frames of reference and showing us precisely that almost everything is such, and instead urging us to wash away the socially normalized contextual references and to just see the thing, think about the damn thing. As for Ma, Most people would describe Yoyo as a cellist primarily, but to me, he is a goodwill ambassador. He’s really just a guy who saw the importance of a thing and had a really compelling vehicle. It’s a really, really good kind of blurry. :)
So right now one of the borders I’m exploring is space and composition. I don’t want to be too specific here because there’s so much room to see where all of this goes, but one of the certainties is that it will involve source recordings, such as these (click the button to hear), from the 2017 Music Radar article “Turns out the Universe is one massive space synth and you can hear it”. I mean, come on, it’s too easy.
I will ABSOLUTELY figure out a way to use these in some sort of space related musical project. To come soon. In the mean time, check out the article. And think a bit about forcing a Venn diagram out of your favorite things in life and seeing what turns up in the middle. It might surprise you.