A Drift (adrift)

<2010>Sleepwalking Into The Underworld, The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep, Highpoint Lowlife, Broken20, n_ilk, more artschool business, moving house, Dundee, Peter Christopherson (rip), Morrison, Moore, Sinclair, Keiller, Petit, Bill Drummond, Invisible Cities, Ballard, Batman & Robin, Lend Me Your Ears, Mapsadaisiacal, Que Belle Epoque, Always Everything, Alastair Cook, Ruaridh, Dave, Thorsten Sideb0ard, Sietse, Clark, Aitken, Gordon, Louise, Mandelbrot, The Feral Orchestra, Paris Texas, Skeletons, Down Terrace, Another Year, The White Ribbon Ivor Cutler, Philip Jeck, Mark Vernon, Improvising, The Elements, writing, questioning things, circular activities, banjo, apophenia, mysticism, subconscious interventions</2010>

Sleepwalking Into The Underworld (no really!!!!!!)

It has finally escaped from liminal space and you can buy it. Limited to a run of 100 DVDs for just ¬£6 including P&P or available as a high quality mp3 download. Get yourself over to¬†http://highpointlowlife.com/ to make it happen. It’s also available from Norman Records.

Erstlaub – Sleepwalking Into The Underworld from thorsten sideb0ard on Vimeo.

Erstlaub – Sleepwalking Into The Underworld by sideb0ard

Here’s a little bit of conjecture about it by me.

The piece is based around the concept of being drawn to places of resonance where the separation between different time periods are thin, specifically areas of historic spiritual importance, the title refers to the theme of ancestor worship and the idea of bodies of water being portals to the underworld. Visually the piece calls back the recurring themes of isolation within the vastness of the universe and stillness as a measure of time.

The piece is an expanded hypersigil created as a response to real world ideas and emotions but the space that exists between this inspiration and the final output is more than just a straight “musical” process. Elements of music theory, physics, maths play a part, as do the deeper concepts of chaos/pop magic, dimensionality within the universe and non-linear time.

This type of creative process involves taking an idea, feeling or element of will or intent and translating into sound by means of taking individual modular elements and focusing, refining and condensing them into self contained, autonomous systems, usually with an inbuilt “fail” system removing the technical purity and adding a more organic edge. Larger pieces are then constructed out of a series of these small systems and again, several of these will be combined in sequence to create a narrative in the same way that sigils are formed and sequenced into more complex hypersigils.

The real power lies in the charging of these hypersigil constructs, when performed/captured, this series of slightly chaotic systems, each built with very specific intent, start to resonate with the others, waves stack or phase, things start to beat against each other or harmonise. The construct becomes one solid, vibrating, continuous piece of energy – there are ebbs and flows, things come into focus before pulling away again, fire, water, earth and air elements shift against each other, ghosts, memories, feelings, secrets, doubts, all hang there in space, imprinted onto time, burning, a perpetual motion engine of pure crystalised will.

The sound is pure synthesis with no samples or field recordings used and was recorded in one take with no post editing or overdubs using a Nord Modular G2, Behringer BCR2000 Controller along with boss re201 and dd20 delay units.

The video was shot on a Nikon D90 and edited in Final Cut.

Thanks.

D