The Doomsday Clock is now set at 85 seconds to midnight—a measure of imminent global catastrophe. The level of global tension can also be discerned by paying attention to the language of banner headlines gathering across all platforms — paying attention, not so much to the multitude of catastrophic predictions that assail us through the media but to the flow of language. This kind of attention to the movement of language must be an embodied attention and the primary means of judgement must be feeling — the way of musical attention!
When we can listen to catastrophic banner headlines with a musical sensitivity, we depart from the surface content and its horrifying fascinations and begin to “hear” deeper tones.
Over the past several months, I have attempted to find the music ‘in’ the text of dreams and visions I have recorded over many decades. The sequence of production is: dreaming to recorded dream-memory to poem to musical video. The final step is a collaboration with AI Songmaker, resulting in many surprises for me as I submitted my poems to the software and set some conditions (genre, mood etc.) I have now completed 50 such musical compositions.
When successful the poems express the hidden movement “in” my dream memories, i.e., they express dreams-as-movement, more than their meaning or interpretation. The AI music seems to convey this movement very well.
Here is one of my productions:
The Coming Guest
If we listen to catastrophic banner headlines in this musically attuned manner, we will feel otherwise concealed musical movements — unrelenting tensions, wild oscillations in mood, accelerating tempo—that are inceptive musical productions of our governing Nature (i.e., technological Nature) as it “miraculously starts to speak.”
Also take a peek at another example of a “voice of Nature”, Icelandic singer Bjork:
Dancer in the Dark
