Let me take you on a journey through a musical soundscape of the Bagua

First, there is no saxophone on this recording, if you know me as a saxophonist and you’re waiting for the saxophone you won’t hear it. The saxophone has been such an important part of my life that it becomes an overwhelming preoccupation in my music making, by putting it aside for this project I’ve had the opportunity to focus on other things I’m interested in.

This project is about Soundscaping. What is Soundscaping? It is the act of creating a sonic landscape, a world of sound. Every sound on this project was created with an analog oscillator (often more than one at a time). Although some sounds emulate acoustic instruments like the percussive sounds of drums and cymbals or the melodic sounds of bass, guitar or strings, it was never my intention to try to recreate an acoustic sound. These sounds are not supposed to fool you into thinking they are real snare drums or cymbals you are hearing. If I wanted the sound of an acoustic instrument, I would have just recorded the real thing. The point of the project was to dive deeply into sound design and to explore how one might go about creating every sound very much from its point of origin

I approached each song, to the best of my ability, from a Zen mindset. (Trying not to try, Ha!) At the outset of recording each song I zeroed out every parameter I had set from the last song. I attempted to create and shape every voice within the song anew. I never worried about whether the sounds on the current song matched or were similar to the voices of the previous song I just attempted to shape each voice to what the part or song required, what I felt the song was calling for.

Third, these soundscapes represent universal musical aspects of sonic space and time. Music ultimately is dependent on relationships in space and in time. Musical space is represented by the distance between two or more pitches, we call these distances intervals, scales, triads, and chords. The relationship of musical time is what we commonly call rhythm, but this relationship goes way beyond what we usually associate with rhythm. Normally we might think of rhythm as being the domain of drums and percussion, or we might think of the single note melodies that are sung or played by other instruments. But this is just scratching the surface of the relationship of musical time. Each song on this album explores a different combination of time and space relationships within music.

Lastly this album is an exploration of Daoist philosophy. The eight songs on this album are named for the eight fundamental elements of the Bagua. Each of the eight tracks represents my attempt to explore the characteristics of these eight fundamental elements as I perceive them within a musical context. It is completely expected that when you listen to these songs you say “well that doesn’t sound like what I would expect fire, or water, to sound like. He’s got it wrong!” But in that, I fear you have missed the point. Unfortunately, there is so much baggage attached to words of our everyday speech that I struggled in deciding to use the most common names associated with the Bagua. What most people commonly associate with the attributes of fire or water, earth or (especially) heaven, are not always related to the Daoist attributes of the same name. Additionally, without understanding the musical elements I am attributing to the different aspects of the Bagua it would be impossible for you to decide whether the song accurately reflects these characteristics. It’s impossible to go into so much detail here, but I hope this music encourages you to explore more about the Bagua and Daoism in general.

In brief, you should know that the elements of the Bagua are cyclical, one aspect or element leads to or develops into the next. Additionally, there are numerous ways for one element to lead to the next. The music on this album can be listened to in two different orders. The order listed on the album is the “Before Heaven Arrangement,” and this is the order I composed the songs. This is a very cyclical order with the last song leading back to the first again. But there is a second song order that works just as nicely, the “After Heaven Arrangement”. The After Heaven Arrangement is the order that I recorded, mixed, and balanced each song. To me this order has a more linear quality to it because it begins with 1. Heaven and ends with its opposite 5. Earth. If you are interested in listening to the songs in the After Heaven Arrangement the order would be:
1. Heaven
2. Valley
3. Fire
4. Thunder
5. Wind
6. Water
7. Mountain
8. Earth

I truly hope you enjoy the journey through this musical soundscape.