DEUTSCH, ANDREW - Electronic Garden

In his assessment of music, philosopher and mystic Rudolf Stiener attributes a major part of human perception to the experience of the ethereal body. The ethereal body is a form unknown to (so called) normal consciousness. It is obscured by worldly tasks and the experiences of everyday life. The ethereal body is only fully experienced during sleep, where it emerges slowly in stages over the course of the evening. Once awakened, the ethereal bodies primary experiences is of light and tone and of being engulfed by a shimmering delicate tonal atmosphere. When the worldly body awakens the ethereal body returns again to obscurity, diminished by daily routine. However, when in our daily routine and if we give time to it, we come in contact with music, or certain kinds of images or art, the ethereal body is touched, awakened inside the worldly body. This is why we are sometimes moved to emotion by music or images. The ethereal body is awakened within us and experienced by our worldly body. Flowers open within us, a garden of experiences and emotion emerge and we can not help but yield to the needs of the ethereal body and its sensations. Stiener proposes that a well balanced person is one who experiences the worldly body and ethereal body at the same time on a daily basis. Listening to music and an involvement with art may be the only ways to establish this balance and unity, therefore, as suggested by Joseph Beuys we must expand the practice of art into every aspect of culture - especially daily routine. Electronic Garden is a series of sound works constructed using broken music boxes, ring modulators and frequency shifters, I call these electro-mechanical loops. My interest in these works first developed out of early experiments with analog and digital tape loops and later extended into music boxes. Music boxes are mechanical loops set into motion via spring compression and consequently have the character of winding down as they play. This compositional unfolding is most delightful as it destroys the often gebrauchsmusik quality of music box melodies. To further destroy this music of the home I explored the possibilities of working exclusively with broken music boxes as their melodic structures would be readymade destroyed. Further, they often squeaked, squabbled, and burped as they played. Additional deconstructions were performed with electronics. I have made hundreds of these little compositions and the practice of making them occupies the greatest degree of my free time. Electronic Garden contains a special contribution by Sawako Kato of Japan. Exchanging files via mail and conversing through e-mail, Sawako reconstructed parts of Electronic Garden resulting in 2 new tracks which Deutsch later combined for release on Electronic Garden. the cover images for this CD were inspired by the notebooks and field drawings of book artist John Wood. Each CD of this edition contains a hand made watercolor accented with gold leaf and his hand signed along with a photographic fragment verso. - Andrew Deutsch.