Let's just say I'm bored. While I have an extensive background as a classically trained musician, I am totally bored with all that... But, all the years of absorbing anything from Miles Davis to Dmitri Shostakovich has served me well- as these sonic forms are burned in my psychic membrane like a tattoo of a warlock haven on my cerebral cortex.
Sometimes, EFFECTIVELY explaining the nature of my somewhat idiosyncratic approach to futuristic musical topics is thwarted by my abstract nature. Although contrary to my artistic predilection, I will attempt this exposition with a direct approach. One of my greatest personal challenges is communicating my wild ideas so that they are understandable to the hefty part of the bell curve. I natively like to provide the hole in the part of the loop, as I enjoy watching others stretch to etch their own interpretations and create their own significances… I learn and receive inspiration by watching this alchemical reaction in others. Often, the chain-reaction in others, of new and varied thought, is my crux. It is the sweet and temptuous spot where I gather true joy in my creative process. With this said, I will explain Rxsounik in a manner that pulls in meaning and identifies tangible understandings, yet leaves enough room for pondering and unknowns.
I use samples to create this kind of music. A sample in music terminology is a recording of a sound. I use around 70-80 % organic samples, which means I use sounds in my compositions that I have recorded in the natural environment. Whether it be a bird, a car horn, flapping of the tarp outside, random boring days at a bus stop with an old dude, crowded halls in church congregations or the sounds of a real heart beating, these natural sounds are my raw materials. I then tweak these sounds in my studio to create my own instruments. I use 20-30% ‘in-house’ synthesized sounds that have already been developed and engineered in a lab by a professional sample company. Now, among the organic samples, I inject some very interesting and rare sounds. I inject the sounds of atoms. Interesting? In further explanation, hydrogen, the actual atom of hydrogen, when sampled sounds like a pure, round, smooth pinging gong. The gas radon sounds like an electrified aardvark, or a wispy spinning runaway teen. Have I lost you yet? Perhaps I need to develop diagrams or do a lecture on YouTube with a laser pointer, props and some demonstrations, but hopefully you get the point. Perhaps I was an assistant or friend of Nicola Tesla in a past life, and I’m way ahead of myself, but I’ve had a fascination with the atomic structure of sounds.
Now, this is where I could go into a gigantic mystical excursion, so I will try to keep it short. I personally observe that if IT has a wave, emits a frequency, throws any particles off or pulls a particle in, IT is an animation of a living form. IT is alive. IT is being animated by a living force, however inconceivable that may be, to the current scientific model. Behind any motion is a “being” that is maintaining the form and moving the form. How do I classify “alive?” Alive equals thought. Thought is the ‘Prime Mover Unmoved’ as in Aristelian logic, the ‘Web that has No Weaver’ in Taoist, Buddhist philosophy or, the ‘Alpha and Omega’ in other Coptic and Orthodox viewpoints. Yes, the universe is alive--every nook and cranny. I started to see this connection as I was studying preliminary chemistry in junior high school. I was the weird kid in the corner staring out the window seeing these connections instead of staring at the book and the Bunsen burner. I translated the shapes of the atomic structures into what I thought would surely be the sound emission of these elements. And from this, I was able to see the creatures, the undulations of the “beingnesses” controlling the forms or elements. This is what made and makes sense to me. In fact, everything I interface with in this universe becomes a song to me in my mind. And the songs I hear, in this essence, are the abstract communication from the infinity of creation/creator. My songs/compositions are translations from the netherworld, so I can share what I see and hear, so you may take a peak and see what it looks like… or more accurately… so you may hear what it sounds like and imagine your own reality of IT.
Now, back to the story of Rxsounik. I followed this curiosity until I felt prepared to boldly investigate these potentials and many years later, I serendipitously located another mad-scientist-mirror-me and Professor of Physics that had my same obsession and penchant for interpreting the sonic-life musical-miracle connection. So, among other wacky ideas like translating our brainwaves into sonic form and creating symphonies with our minds, we sampled atoms. I’m not going to tell you how because it’s complicated, and confidential. Now as far as the basic form and structure of my compositions, I write music as if I am hearing what a certain thing is; whether it be a situation, an object, a person, an emotional climate, a transposition or teleportation of envisioning anything. I believe we call this raw imagination. For example; from my Album AceZhip, the track, ‘Changs Robo Bird, is a translation of a Sci-Fi imagining of what the various dramas of robot birds would/could sound like . This approach to composition isn’t new, nor is it different from the various expose’ of let us say, Stravinsky’s “Le Sacred du Printemps”-or "The Rite of Spring". You can really hear the drama, colors and emotional intensities Igor was attempting to communicate in his compositions. He happens to be my favorite composer because of his remarkable ability to describe life with sound…he translates life into music. This is what I do as well. This stuff I compose I have coined, “Rxsounik”. It is a new, cutting edge style, incorporating cosmological ideas and bizarre sound samples, however foreign it may be to the masses… and likened to the transcendental break-through genre of Avant-Garde Jazz, it may take a few decades before this style finds its place in the looking glass and compost pile accepted as genuine musical progress. And while Rxsounik is being received with a fair amount of apprehension and non-comprehension in the popular circles, at least the underground groups of renegade teenagers, noise freaks and long-time free-jazzers are diving into its invigoration and outlandishness. I dare to quest for the ethereal expansion with a resolute impetus to keep it real in our NEW unit of time. And as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, reality is how we decide to interpret it.