a t:me allowance
an essay by Hue, em:t.cc contributor extraordinaire (part I)
in the summer of 1995 i had set in mind to improve my ambient sounds, whilst digging and delving in my small town local music shop quarterdeck, after a five mile walk past two hundred foot cliff that fall straight into the ocean. sifting though the unheard labels (at that moment for myself) of warp, ninja tune, mo wax; reading their track titles and analysing the covers to try and get a sense of connection. slowly, and feeling ever so foolish working my way through what i had no idea was in my hands.
around then i was keen on the orb, leftfield, massive attack, good looking records, the prodigy, levellers (in a big way), bob marley, smashing pumpkins; other sounds too, mainly surf punk nofx, sublime, gas huffer, ten foot pole, to name a few. it was not until late 1996 that a friend of mine who had a large background with listening to electronic music, gave me a crash course and many a compilation tape.
so with the notion of 'spacey' in the forefront of my mind, running my audio illiterate fingers over the CD boxes, i stopped to digest some of the words and images that i had been viewing. just above the shelf display the was a hanging frame arrangement, that various aesthetic CDs were put on show.
i recall reading someone saying on the em:t.cc message board, a year back that most people seemed to have found t:me recording's em:t division just by chance and those people were few in numbers. in 1997 i was sent the em:t press catalogue, in the back there was a page of sharp quotes, one of them was "there is no such thing as chance" by friedrich von schiller; and i have to agree, that it was more a case of 'attraction' then 'chance' that forced my hand to reach out and remove the em:t CD from the display frame. as i did so there were two other em:t CDs, with just the design subtly causing me to understand that they related. i double took, being that qubism 2294 was so bright and miasma 1195 being so brown and dark, whilst the last album that i jealously removed em:t 2295 was more a tightened repressed image of nature, but full of song; with only the digipaks, font, inlay, and back cover to confirm they unite.
a year previously i started to focus my visual art on 'the conflict of nature reclaiming the man-made'. this was very current for me that summer - endlessly observing the capital 'Y' everywhere, using plastic acrylic white paint upon poles of large lumps of driftwood. logging all the y's that i had noticed in various area's that i had visited, with the super soluble white. y's from the just shy of 'a' frame waves, to the corners & edges of rooms, and object resting on object, to light falling over grounds & land. what i could not record with a thumbnail drawing, photography provided.
these act's of singlemindedness was very much apart of who i was, i had little time for people and more then enough time for interplay's of observation and outside the general accepted thoughts. to my joy there were these sounds being extracted from the newly bought em:t CDs; not just hinting a direction but providing an extensive peripheral vision, to a multitude of subject matter's. with a dictionary at the ready, i begun to learn language to weave out from the incessant needs of social conditioned responses. i had begun to allow t:me to help me make my break for it - & when the polite conversation halts, it compresses to familiarity. just under two years of letting the y's invade my minds' eye had caused me to consider that i'm very intolerant to the state of 'similarity' and 'familiarity'. whilst persisting with exposing my minds' ear to t:me, it was incredible indulgent in the terms of using time - though it was never a waste of time listing to the em:t tracks, as the give you something back on each occasion - you just have to allow focus. 'em:t is designed to reward the careful listener" - t:me
no more then recently, as it seemed to me that this is indeed an 'anxious age' - with so little happening with regards to improving surviving life. based on astonishment, very little happens within the social structure to amount anywhere near the experience of becoming astonished. i observed this point so much today that intangible escape seems now to be our only way out. i say this with a hasty voice before i'm pined to another conversation of so & so - did you hear about - & the big bad I said "NO". it is again far to apparent what celia green has to voice, about people held in the psychology of sanity; that they would have you talk yourself into exhaustion, rather the search for a way though the crux of the matter. a blind eye seems to be over used when the solution / axis is so near to hand.