“This has been a day of solid achievement.” February 10, 1954.
Earth, its moon, and our sun have given us everything we’ve ever known. Yet through war, fear, greed, and brutality we are rapidly disintegrating, and destroying our home beyond repair. Mars won’t save us from ourselves. Homo sapiens are at a crisis point.
One path forward may prove to be a life after bodies, with parinirvana and transhumanism offering two tributaries. Life after Life: intelligence as innate, with humans as vessels for a greater consciousness in which we evolve beyond earthly recognition. At present though, if we have a higher task on this planet, most of us are failing.
How do we, in the renewed arms races of nuclear powers, with the global threat of cyber warfare, and in a simultaneous state of peak information and disinformation, assimilate the totality of contemporary life without complete despair and paralysis?
How do we create, or hope, or love, when Death encroaches from every horizon? When the writing on the wall is melting from calving icebergs? When a sad, deranged, warped simulation of a man in the flabby mass of a former unreality star is in absolute protest of non-objective and undeniable reality?
These next few years may prove to be the end of human civilization. If so, what will we leave behind, to be discovered by future intelligences? This of course presuming a) there will be future intelligences and b) anything will remain to be discovered.
One version of this story has a larger, universal collective consciousness that we are merely a part of. That our human experience flows into something larger, and serves a greater purpose. Not as defined via “God” or Religion or even Spirituality, but as existing beyond our limited scope of being.
I’m often too afraid to fully live our present reality, so I find myself making sounds for a future one. It is in service to this that I offer a hymn and a dirge for our little blue marble. Hello from the past.
Man
2017
"[W]ell-crafted sounds for the big goodbye" -Cassette Gods
credits
released July 7, 2017
Written, recorded and produced by Man Bartlett.
A side: Korg ODYSSEi, Droneo and TanpuraStudio iOS applications, recorded to AKAI GXC-709D.
B side: AKAI MPC2000XL, vocals, INA GRM Tools (Freeze, Delays, Reson, SpaceFilter, SpaceGrain), MIDI Sprout connected to Calathea plant (Ernie) via DRC Synth & Animoog iOS applications, and NLog and Model15 iOS applications, recorded to AKAI GXC-709D.
Cover image: 14” magnetic disk, possibly for an IBM 1311, allegedly of Soviet origin.
The NYC recording by the master Hindustani vocalist sends shivers down my spine. It was also specifically this recording that got me interested in making my own sounds. Man Bartlett
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