SLOWNESS
solo and slide guitar

Some musicians speak not only of the notes played, but also of the spaces in between.
They speak phrases like “it’s not the notes that you play, but the ones you don’t play”, or “it’s the silence between the notes that makes sense of the music”, things like that. My thought is also that silence is music speaking in its own special way, and when composition talks in this language the notes serve to mark the spaces of quiet. Sounds then serve to mark and amplifying the silent space, the silence then reflects the music like a crystal clear pond reflects the sky.

Samples: This album is currently in a (slow) pre-production phase:
Note that the samples below are rough, unmastered and sketchpad recordings only.

skulp (60 sec excerpt)and complete (2 min) version - the sound, space and feelingI am after!
a gentleman in the garden of spring / ying-yang blues / early this morning long ago

Slowing things down reveals both the finite and the infinite.
Slowness allows us to enter into the heart of things. It expands the possibilities by magnification of every detail. It also offers a broader perspective on where this detail fits into the bigger picture. This state transports us into the magic of the moment, to comprehend and understand these moments in time as well as giving us a glimpse into the workings of time itself. Slowness bares all, reveals the soul or no soul underneath the exterior, revealing the lightness of being, bearable or unbearable.

For life is made up of a succession of moments, moments that are continuously washed away
in the flood of moments that makes up a lifetime. Slowness is about slowing down to look into the essence of the nature of things. Slowness is about the moment of heightened awareness when a sunbeam hits a dust particle just so that it captures the meaning of a thousand poems. It is when a single line or word from a page imbues the meaning of a thousand dust particles hit by the light of the sun to illuminate a timeless moment that can never be recaptured in reality. Yet that moment will live on in the heart and the soul of the poem brought into life by its writers and readers, all those kindred spirits thinking about life, love and the universe while watching the autumn ritual of leaves gliding earthbound from trees preparing for winter. It is discovering a hundred years of solitude in every second.

In slow music the melody is taken apart, the notes are stretched, the character scrutinized under a magnifying glass,
the quality of sound stripped bare, every shimmering nuance filled with layered meaning. Raw, sonically charged acoustic moments that shivers on a guitar like a cold morning, slowly unfolding with the glimmer of glass on steel, of skin and bone on plucked strings, resonating in a chamber of crafted wood. The wood remembers the spirit of the tree it comes from. The strings remember the soul of the earth it was mined from. Slowness music evokes the heart of the moments of infinity that the finite moments are made up of.

21 Nov 2002