When it comes to #music, any piece that doesn’t contain an underlying current of melancholy or a smattering of anxiety isn’t ever going to be regarded as great in my inked book. I consider the two emotions the basis of quality art, or, translated into more humble terms, art that appeals to the inner goat.
I quickly lose interest in pieces that ooze what some would call joy or ecstasy. Their surface is too transparent. There is usually little beneath. Thus, club or dance music, in the modern sense, doesn’t appeal to me. In fact, it fills me with a rage that teeters on the edge of genocidal mania. As far as transparency goes, neither does folk music do much for the inner goat. At times lyrics and melodies may pull on the hara’s firmament, but the inner emptiness of the music always overwhelms.
An exception to the first paragraph is droning, mostly harmonically static, ambient music. The deference to an emotionless morass is appealing to my cruder, Taoist sensibilities.
My goal, apart from what I’ve typewritten with a hunk of dirt bashed against the skull of a goat, is to create bare music. Its relation to droning, mostly harmonically static music is most apparent in that it is not defined by any emotion that I, its creator, am oozing during the moment of creation (or any other moments in its temporal vicinity). Any #emotion conjured from a piece is incidental, created by the ooze of chemicals within the listener.
Of course, I have hopes that the primary emotion that surges from an active or passive listener is unbridled RAGE. They transform into their interior GOAT and viciously butt passerbys into metaphorical cunetas.
The ostensible connotation is that none of my music will be, by my former definition, great in my inked book. In that my satisfaction is more with the journey of creating than in the finished product, I’m not bothered. My goat hara is complex enough and infused with enough modular history that I’m sure a mixture of varying emotional material will flow into a piece no matter my intention. I’ll be the “judge” of whether anything is great later in life by the impressions the pieces leave on my later self.
