There’s so much you can do with music and sound when you’re not hellbent on making a pop song or something people can dance to. There is so much a listener can experience with music and sound when they’re not desperate to escape into a pop song or something to dance to. This second offering here from ARCHAIC INVENTION is a good example of that premise. As the video title suggests this is much a sound collage as it is music. I can only liken it to standing in the middle of the city, not holding, but being a radio receiver not quite tuned into any particular wavelength and picking up everything that comes in through the ether. For those of us who were conscious in the 80s when this is recorded, there are echoes of what the world was then and what was going on. It’s like experiencing deja vu not from a single impulse but from a tsunami of bits and bytes of the past. There are bits of music. There are radio and tv broadcasts. There is the tidal wave of electric and mechanical sounds. It’s heavy.

This speaks a lot to how our brain works and how we must consciously choose what to hear and what to filter out. The other stimuli don’t cease to exist. We bury them purposely. They are still there doing their work though, imprinting in the subconscious. They all have their impact. They will resurface but will feel like undifferentiated feelings of nervousness or anxiety. We were not designed and wired to exist in the industrial and post-industrial, urbanized worlds. There are too many stimuli to process so we repress them. That doesn’t mean they go away. It doesn’t mean they don’t grind us down. That’s how we get through every day though. We choose by force of will what parts of the collage we will focus on.

I think that’s why I benefit so immensely from walking around by myself. It’s a time to let go of making choices and let everything wash over me and hit me at once. It’s relaxing, like being carried on a wave of sonic and visual debris, not being inundated by it, but riding it. Surfing…

That’s the plan for today. I’m going to wander.