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Original notes for the composition
For a planned Exhibition of limited visual information or visually impaired interactive media.
Notes on the composition
The sound of metal, the sound of breath and monsters from the deep
Section1
Introduction of population
The participants
The unknown
The monsters of the deep
The unpredictable but expected
Section 2
The soaring of souls
The second disaster
Alarms and ringtones
The earth intervenes
The souls fall
Section 3
The slow decline, half life
The meeting of souls
The gone and the going
Those who can't let go
The clinging and the clawing
they are victims, they cannot speak
And we don't want to hear them
Section 4
The turbine
Relentless progressive
Interference
The battle of souls and soulless
The ripples from the dark
The echoes
Falling bodies
The wordless voices
The grip of the world tightens
Becomes a landscape
Our backdrop
Unfathomable
The strings loosened, the souls unite and their screams echo through the body of the monster
Section 5
Time tolls. The whales are singing in time.
The meltdown is still not over, it's only just begun.
History closes around the neck of inevitability.
The future acquiesces
The wave is mutating
The half lives are melting
The phones stop ringing
The souls unite
Relatively
We are plunging into the core
Again
Norwich Audio exhibition
Stream-
No reason to reason
Contemporary popular music lots of Rs and Ps
Regular, repetitive, resolute, revolving,reliable,
Prerequisitional, preconceptual, predictable, patterned
Development.
Tonal development the main area of progress over rhythm, content and meaning? Extreme variety of colour masks a limited development elsewhere?
Patterns
Patterns are present on many tonal strata, aesthetic and emotional (non intellectual?) levels and temporal and rhythmic 'frameworks' ( eg. The rough / smooth, soft / hard, impacts and swells, warmth, in first two. Time signatures, bars, sections, movements etc in the last ).
What does that mean?
Narrative.
It seems to be impossible to avoid narrative. Our ongoing relationship with music on an emotional level, with all it's historical baggage may make it impossible?
Is it possible to break through traditional references but still play in the same playground? Ie, within the contemporary, popular arena with all it's rules , regulations, prerequisites, preconceptions
Disappearing views
Second aftermath 5
00:00.Section 1 strings brass / symbols synth
07:02. Section 2. Buzz and ringtone string taps ( canter
16:05 Section 3 Stroll string dissonant break screech bird tweets descending raining screech becoming urgent but not tempo. Sad Harmony strings - intro fighting to return
24:10 Section 4 bells and tones sirens and vehicles real rain missiles and projectiles tense strings promise of rest not fulfilled More interference
31:15 Section 5 space carpenter mono note bells . long string single key monotone deep undertows. Digital bleeps dots and dashes .Alternating reverse breaking disc screeching gradual opening building glockenspiel two chord vibes
43:13 end
Notes on the production
Tasks-
Get rid of organ sound.
Remove strings from section 4
Reintroduce big string note section 5
There are many many voices
The vocies of the thousands lost forever
The voices of their devices - I imagine a horrific scene, thousands of the dead's mobile phones ringing after they have disappeared. Loved ones calling from one world to another.
Installation sounds, alarms and warnings. Emotionless preprogrammed, outside of the present, in their own domain.
Rain but not water, the rain of heavy bodies, the sound of the accumulating velocity of mass.
Inhuman process, digital,electrical and mechanical and ultimately sub atomic.
The sound of a human hand plucking strings
The orchestral sound of the waves and the deep of the ocean in them.
The sorrow cut short
The ringing of time , how time is perceived as separate , our own individual times, unrelated and disconnected from the time of others
Insects
The sound of a breach
Alerts
Echoes
Lives and deaths reduced to echoes
Sounds of dispersal, fragmentation alongside relentless accumulation
More devices
And inevitably screams.
All of these associations and allusions came after the im motive process of composition. I never envisaged them, but our collective consensus, our agreement to the emotional interpretation of sounds,tones and rhythms seems to be impossible to extricate.
There are the sounds of the stages of disaster and catastrophe
There are the sounds of the stages of grief
There is anger and disbelief, apathy and resolute fatality and the destruction or the wearing away of will, where hope demands an energy long lost.
Where is the compassion?
Is it mostly under the surface?
Can we face it, allow it to converse with us?
When do we apply the safety valve?
It's only a film?
A broadcast
Not real
Replaced, superseded
Gone
The visual aspect comes in the form of a ring of columns of light
Inside the ring of light is a black hole
This is a dry wishing well
Throw money in the wishing well
Your wish dries up in the wishing well
It becomes part of the mass of e black hole
The wishing well is a singularity
Your identity disappears with your contribution
You commune and dissolve
Second aftermath
Is an aftermath single or multiple
One process or many?
Does it ever end?
Does it split,divide and multiply?
Does it propagate?
Does it allow us to decide, interfere or intervene?
Is it personal or impersonal
Can we leave it behind?
Is it like grief?
Does it have paths, stages, peaks and dips?
Waves and particles?
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Nat Chifflet Beautiful and sensitive. A propos Aftermath, I'll send you a picture of a piece of theatre, <Observer> directed by the French Bruno Meyssat. A work after Hiroshima. After the nuclear devastation, the devastated humanity.
28 August 2013 at 21:43 · Like · 1 · Message
Robert Miles-Kingston Audio Thank you Nat. Yes I received thanks. Have you ever experienced his theatre? All the images I have seen have immense gravitas. 2nd aftermath 5 has been quite a deep experience for me, not just for personal empathic reasons, but also because of the natu...See more
29 August 2013 at 00:24 · Like
David Charles Williams This soundscapes was exceptional!
29 August 2013 at 07:35 · Like · 1 · Message
Robert Miles-Kingston Audio Thank you very much David, for taking the time.
29 August 2013 at 09:14 · Edited · Like · 1
Nat Chifflet I agree with David. About Bruno Meyssat and Observer, yes, I ´ve experienced his theater, based on accumulation of different sources (he went to Hiroshima with his actors.) And there was an exhibition and a debate (how to think the disaster?). This theater caused me serious emotional disturbance.
I agree with David. About Bruno meyssat and observer, yes, I've experienced his theater, based on accumulation of different sources (he went to Hiroshima with his actors.) and there was an exhibition and a debate (how to think the disaster?). This Theater caused me serious emotional disturbance.
Automatically translated
29 August 2013 at 10:35 · Like · 1 · Message
Robert Miles-Kingston Audio I had mixed time in Hiroshima. I found the place a mixture of extremes
29 August 2013 at 10:45 · Like · 2
Robert Miles-Kingston Audio Sorry I have taken so long to respond to this. Thank you Nat for the referral to Meyssat. I will devote some time to it later this week. There is so much to consider here. The notes I have published really scratch a small surface of insurmountable dept...See more
4 September 2013 at 12:04 · Like
David Charles Williams It came at the right time! 4th time around now!
4 September 2013 at 13:09 · Unlike · 1 · Message
Robert Miles-Kingston Audio Have you got too much time on your hands David? Thanks!
4 September 2013 at 13:33 · Like · 1
David Charles Williams Time is a mystery to me Robert Miles-Kingston Audio! I work with music in my studio!
4 September 2013 at 13:34 · Unlike · 1 · Message
Robert Miles-Kingston Audio Bruno Meyssat. Incredible. But very difficult to find any indepth report or footage. My French is also so bad so I suffer. I watched some footage of the theatre production which I think manages anyway to transcend, so the spoken language, even though f...See more
9 September 2013 at 23:02 · Edited · Like
Robert Miles-Kingston Thank you Nat Chifflet for the Kenzaburo Ôe Interview transcript below, translated by Machine from the french LE MONDE DES LIVRES | 13.11.2013
Philippe Pons (Tokyo, correspondant)
.......................................................................... Kenzaburo Ôe has never ceased to think each of his books as if it were the last. But is this really the case with this new novel? In farewell, my book !, a double of the author, valuable Kogito, aging writer withdrawn in his home, trying to think about the crisis in his country by linking it to the end of its own existence. As Kogito and the civilization that it embodies, the Japan of Ôe would it on the point of disappearing? A Tokyo,The world has questioned the Nobel Prize (1994) for literature.
Farewell, my book !, published in Japan in 2005, is, do you say, your last novel. A writer knows it really if he writes his last book?
I published my first novel in 22 years. I have today 78. During these years, I said three times that I was going to stop to write novels. That I wrote would be the last. For periods of three to five years, I have published that in magazines or newspapers articles that have been gathered by the suite (Notes of Hiroshima, 1965, Notes of Okinawa, 1970). During these "intermissions", I read the poems in English. I would pick an author and i absorbais all his works. It is as well that I have known William Blake, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot ¦ Then, influenced by these poets, i was recovering in the novel. I think, actually, that Farewell, my book! Would be the last. But i continued to write tests on the company, to accumulate notes ...
you say that, long ago, you have not understood a passage from the inferno of Dante: "You understand as well that our knowledge/will any dead from the moment/or will be closed the door of the future "…
After Fukushima, i have abandoned the work I had in progress. One hundred days after the disaster, I have undertaken another book, which began publication in review. In this work, which is entitled in english In Late Style ( "In the late style" ), in reference to Edward Said (On Late Style,Pantheon, 2006, translated into French - style Tardif - among Acts South, 2012), I am responding partially to this question. After March 11, I have better understood Dante. Today I have the feeling that Japan passes through one of these moments where the future seems closed: the knowledge that we had on the world and society seem devoid of meaning. Farewell, my book! Retraces a inner journey, mine, which coincides with the collective disaster that saw the Japan.
That meant Edward Said?
Said, who was born the same year as me, has been swept away by the disease. He spoke of the "voltage which is neither calm nor harmonious" and of a "sort of production deliberately unproductive" in the evening of life. It was well before that, contrary to the artists who reach maturity with age, other sinking into a crisis, in a state of ill-being, strained. As Ibsen or Beethoven in their recent works. Since 11 March, I sense in Japanese society the symptoms before-riders from the end which coincides with the last phase of my life. It is this personal feeling that I want to make on different registers: these texts will form the compendium of style of the last phase of my life.
That is to say?
Milan Kundera has talked about the "return to basics" of the writer on the evening of his life. I will continue to live the time which remains in thinking that the moral of the essential is to let the next generations a world that deserves to be lived.
Highlight on Farewell, my book !, you quote T. S. Eliot: "If I do not hear talk of the wisdom of the old but rather of their folly "…
madness is not to take here in the true sense. It is a madness mitigated, not a maniac. For my part, I am committed to the small things in life but I also believe that we must not abandon to defend of great ideals, as the pacifism of the Japanese Constitution.
Before they give the death, the writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) referred to the "vague concern" that the lived. In his case also, two disasters seemed coincide: one personal, the other collective (Japan would sink into the militarism). Is that not what you express also in Farewell, my book! ?
Akutagawa has used this adjective "wave" in full conscience to make what he was feeling. My book is not dictated by a feeling imprecise but very fertile. This does not mean that it is more easy to face that at the "vague concern" of Akutagawa.
You have always been engaged in fighting for your time - democracy, pacifism, antinuclear movement ... More that policy, your commitment seems before any moral.
That is correct. I have never participated in the activities of any political party. In this sense, I am not a writer engaged. But the vulnerability of fundamental rights has been the essential theme of everything that I have written and remains at the heart of the fighting that i conducted.
As your first visit to Hiroshima, which made you discover the horror of the atomic bombing and marked to never your reflection, the catastrophe of Fukushima became a haunting theme at the evening of your life.
The atomised survivors of Hiroshima have continued to participate in the movements to prevent that others do not suffer the same fate. Fukushima has made new victims of the atom. In the case of Hiroshima, the Japanese have understood the horror of nuclear weapons but they have been insensitive to the dangers of atomic power plants. After having lived the March 11, 2011 and its aftermath, and claimed the output of nuclear power, they have begun to demobilize. The memory of Fukushima is it being called to go off? This is the nagging question that is at the heart of my "late style"
21 November 2013 at 18:18 · Edited · Like · Message
Robert Miles-Kingstonhttp://www.purgatorio.com/divine_comedy/inferno2.html
Upon my mind's return from swooning shut At hearing the piteous tale of those two kin, Which confounded me with sadness at their plight,
PURGATORIO.COM
21 November 2013 at 18:20 · Like · 1 · Message · Remove Preview
Robert Miles-Kingston A quote from the above which echoes similar sentiment in the up-coming work 2nd Aftermath-
Kenzaburo Ôe
“ The atomised survivors of Hiroshima have continued to participate in the movements to prevent that others do not suffer the same fate. Fukushima has made new victims of the atom. In the case of Hiroshima, the Japanese have understood the horror of nuclear weapons but they have been insensitive to the dangers of atomic power plants. After having lived the March 11, 2011 and its aftermath, and claimed the output of nuclear power, they have begun to demobilize. The memory of Fukushima is it being called to go off? This is the nagging question that is at the heart of my "late style". “
22 November 2013 at 12:08 · Like · 1 · Message
Robert Miles-Kingston Audio the line between what we want to remember and want to forget and what others want us to remember and want us to forget. our profit and 'theirs'. traces and imprints read in different ways from polarities
22 November 2013 at 21:48 · Like
Robert Miles-Kingston https://www.lensculture.com/.../kosuke-okahara-fukushima...
Kosuke Okahara - Fukushima: Emergency to "Normalcy" | LensCulture
LENSCULTURE.COM|BY KOSUKE OKAHARA | LENSCULTURE
30 January 2014 at 12:39 · Like · Message · Remove Preview
Robert Miles-Kingston Documenting Disaster
It has been two and a half years since the nuclear power plant Fukushima Daiichi exploded. But the attention span of the international media is short. The story dropped from the headlines just a few months after the disaster, even as many acknowledged that the effects of radiation continue longer than human lives.
Each time I returned to Fukushima since the accident, I did not see a process of development and regeneration but unchanging stasis. The government has labelled the still emergency situation “Normal” because it is in a stable (though stagnant) state.
On my first visit to the region, I witnessed the sudden death of the region. Then, over time, I saw how the area lost its color and became leaden, dulled. During my last trip, in the summer of 2013, I realized that I had grown used to the situation as it was. It had somehow become normal to me. Upon realizing this, I felt the color returning to the region.
Today's Fukushima
March 11 will mark the 3-year anniversary of the accident. I believe it is time to recognize that an unchanging emergency situation is not a "Normal" situation.
Today, the most obvious remaining issue is that of contaminated water leakage into the Pacific Ocean. At the voting ceremony for the 2020 Olympic Games, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe proudly said, “the contaminated waters have been blocked inside the port of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant”. Just a few days later, the Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide said the port has not been blocked, leakage is still very much a problem.
For this project, I only used a large format camera since I wanted to be very selective about the fragments I chose. The medium also required that I take a long time preparing each shot. This forced me to only take pictures of things or situations that were slow-moving. Since the radiation will stay for decades, I found my medium effectively conveyed some of the impact of this disaster.
—Kosuke Okahara
30 January 2014 at 12:41 · Like · Message
Robert Miles-Kingston Audio https://soundcloud.com/robert-miles.../2nd-aftermath-mvmnt-1
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They are individuals performing individual tasks, living individual lives. Paths crossing, sometimes touching, sometimes aware there are others, sometimes in an autistic bubble. Sometimes open and susceptible, sometimes hard, closed and insular, but always living and doing. Does that life look damaged? Is it searching for help or trying to hide? Does that life care, does that one notice? Can it even understand?
A cold breeze is felt by all, you can see it hit them. They move on. More life to be lived, more heart beats. Is there love? Animosity? Pain and elation? Still we are individuals and time passes while we meander through our lives.
Another cold breeze.
More time passes.
But very slowly they are getting closer to a centre. And eventually they start to slowly, carefully, unconsciously come together and curl together like a flower on a stem.
They hold each other in delicate balance. The breeze is visible in their movement and they hold each other as one organic interaction. There is love. Hands hold and caress, legs bind together and support. Heads and faces nestle
A wind with white grey powder is blown over them covering their backs changing their rich flesh colour to the colour of stone.
They become petrified petals.
Stone flower.
Slowly one by one a dancer falls off and lands with a hard noise of impact onto the floor. Dust flies into the air and catches the light.
The dancers rich flesh coloured chest is exposed
The stone exterior of the flower cannot protect its soft heart. The stone exterior is hard, but brittle and the inner heart is soft and vulnerable. There will be conflict.
Another drops like a dead body landing from a great height and the heart soft and squirming grieves the loss. The stone hard protection is too heavy and brittle. It has the opposite of its desire.
There will be conflict.
The soft flesh becomes slowly more exposed. It is fluid and dangerously susceptible to its surroundings.
Another gust of wind and there is faltering. The powder that covers thei backs has blown in. It is stone cold and brittle. It is inside now and another performer drops. Is the wind an agent of harm? Or does it bring protection? Is the stone killing or protecting the heart?
There is conflict.
There is less fluid colour visible. Those lying on their backs with the colour exposed becoming grey.
The interior organic fluidity struggles with its hard protective exterior which creeps or freezes slowly inward.
There is conflict.
Another one drops...
From losing and shedding dead cells to losing our children with their changing from child to adult, we unconsciously cope with losses, through its subtle relationship with creation, regeneration and replacement. And so in most of our shedding, we are creating and although the replacing becomes less efficient with age, we can still hope for some kind of balance between loss and recovery.
When a tragedy comes along and the loss is sudden and destructive and great, the gap between the loss and replacement becomes a void between creation and destruction, expanding suddenly and violently to a chasm that may never be possible to fill, or for the natural process of rebalancing to happen.That is the void of grief and despair that can destroy hope. That is the vacuum that sucks the breath of life from its victims and abandons them in an emptiness that expands away from creation exponentially like a Big Bang or a singularity.
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Apartness
Dispersal
Fragmentation
Lethargy
Potential
Voice
Everything is under the wave
Fluid against panic
The nuclear wave spills over
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Everything is absorbed through the heart
And the heart inhabits your whole body
The mind is inside it
So everything is interpreted emotionally and felt in the body's centre
And it is sometimes overwhelming
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I hear screaming
I know now why yearning
Is called heartache
And why love is not a product
Of the mind that can be reasoned or controlled or chosen or refused.
I hear screaming
Somewhere
No in my mind
Or in my thoughts
But somewhere
In the centre of my body
I feel it in my stomach
From my solar plexus
Deep within my chest
Travelling downward
To some eternal hell I never
Knew existed that when I do sleep
Wakes me up every morning
Umbilically feeding me some chemical reminder of what is lost forever
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