Music and Musings: "Colors"
The first post in my musical series
If you’ve read my introduction post, you may remember that I mentioned that one of my goals for this Substack is to share my music. And if you read that, you may have noticed that there is currently no music on this Substack.
I’ve been a bit iffy about how to go about this for two reasons. For one, Substack is a text-focused platform, and music is not text. Secondly, music is decidedly non-renunciate, and it’s hard to see how it fits into a publication called Renunciant Writings. In combination, those two points have made me hesitant to pull the trigger on the musical part of this Substack.
But as chance would have it, I recently found myself particularly inspired to work on a new piece of music, and it ended up taking up all the time I had set aside for writing. I found myself with two options: either try to quickly write a new text post and sacrifice quality, or use this as an opportunity to make good on my goal and breathe some sound into this publication.
If it’s not obvious already, I decided to go with option two. I see all my creative endeavors as part of a unified whole — my writing influences the music I write, and the music I write influences the text I write. And after all, I’m Otto the Renunciant, derived from the French progressive participle (-ant), not Otto the Renunciate, derived from the Latin past participle (-atus). My practice of letting go is ongoing, not a done deal. I have let go of a lot of things, and my desire to listen to music has almost entirely extinguished, but the desire to write music is not something that has faded away to the same extent.
This post will serve as something of a test. If I’m happy with how it turns out, I may make “Music and Musings” an intermittent series that will shed some new light on what I write about on here and provide a new way to connect with you all. In each of these posts, I’ll share a new piece of music, some art I made for it,1 talk a bit about the idea behind the music, and explain how it connects to the rest of my work.
So, without further ado, here’s the first entry in “Music and Musings”.
Colors
(I recommend listening to this with headphones on and eyes closed, for reasons I’ll explain soon. If you have a good sound system, feel free to use that instead. But the key here is to create a dedicated listening environment and let go of the eye for a few minutes.)
When I write music, I tend to find that I’m equally guided by visuals as I am by sound. I often think to myself that a section is getting too blue or green, or that it needs a splash of a purple synth or a little dab of yellow guitar.
Although I usually write vocal music, I’ve often thought that lyrics and singing tend to diminish the focus on the colors and the abstract space that the music creates, bringing it instead into something more concrete, human, and bodily. I always want my music to be about music, but when I write vocal music, I feel it almost inevitably becomes about me. I don’t like that.
This piece started out as a song, but at a certain point, I started to think that it would do better as an instrumental, and I changed course. Doing so prompted a mental shift that I hadn’t engaged in a while. With my lungs, mouth, and vocal cords out of the sonic space, I had an unrestricted sonic canvas to paint on in ways that I normally wouldn’t have thought to pursue.2
Hence the name of this piece: “Colors”. I figured that if I relate to music through color, then the best way to connect with listeners is to put the thing that I am expressing front and center. This piece isn’t about me or my emotions, it’s about colors — nothing more, and nothing less. When writing something like this, my intention is to create a musical “object”: something that feels like it exists in space. A sort of musical sculpture, or an environment that you can step into for a few minutes.
I have often thought of music as the last step before spirituality, as it’s still sensual, but if you close your eyes and listen, you’re getting close to meditation. And if you do so habitually, you get used to renouncing vision and letting go of the eye for a short period of time — which is surprisingly hard to get yourself to do, even with the music’s stimulation. Over time, I like to think that might incline one further and further towards meditation, as if the music itself is beckoning the listener to let it go. I tend to think that the most important part of music is the silence that comes after it stops, and that the purpose of the music itself is just to get the listener ready to experience the following silence in its fullest beauty. Music allows one to see the beauty of silence in relief — to make seen what is normally unseen.
Interestingly enough, the text piece that I had originally had planned for this week was about what it means for something to be “sacred”. In brief, I take the stance that something is sacred when it can’t be pinned down to one aspect of experience — it’s not a feeling or a sight or a sound, but some context that contextualizes those. I planned to talk about how our current on-demand culture has eroded the sense of the sacred: when we watch a movie, instead of cultivating a context of respect for the art by sitting in a dark theater (and making sure we show up on time), we pull up a movie on Netflix on command and only pay it half of our attention as we scroll through Instagram (this is so common that Netflix is planning to make new shows that are more easily understandable for distracted viewers). When we do so, we get rid of the context, the “sacred” space that we previously afforded to art.
I’ll expand on these ideas more fully in my upcoming post. But for now, I’d like to invite you into this context, this “sacred” space. I encourage you to put on some headphones (or whatever your preferred listening device is), close your eyes, listen to the music, and then remain there for at least a few seconds afterwards. Experience the silence that comes after the music — that is far more important than the mere sounds that come before it.
Quick note on the art for this week’s post: this is mainly a collage of Creative Commons images that I found on Pexels. The only exceptions are the clouds, which were generated with Flux Schnell.1. All the images were (as you can probably tell) highly manipulated. Interestingly, the use of these clouds for a background texture means the image seems to qualify as AI art and can’t be posted on any art subreddits that I’ve found so far. This seems strange to me, as if I had just taken a cloud from Pexels (which also wouldn’t be my own creation), it would qualify as my own art. For my thoughts on the AI art debate, take a look at my post Are AI images art? We're asking the wrong question.
There is one vestige of the original vocals, however. I left in a few lyrics on a vocoder:
Do you?
Do you?
Do you?
Yeah, the world don’t stop,
But do you?
When I write lyrics, I always sing whatever words come to me in the moment, and then the meaning comes later as I refine them and try to figure out what drove me to say those words. As I’ve tried to decode what these words mean, I’ve returned to the famous Angulimala Sutta, in which Angulimala, the notorious serial killer, is running after the Buddha. Despite the Buddha walking slowly and Angulimala sprinting towards him, he is unable to catch up to him. Angulimala yells at him “Stop, contemplative! Stop!” And the Buddha responds, “I have stopped, Angulimala. You stop.”
This world will continue forever in cycles of creation and destruction, but will you go with it? Or will you stop?