I'm America's favorite mystic prophet philosopher artist, don't cha know? What that mean, pragmatically speaking, is I claim to understand the various systemic forces of our society, and how they work together to create our modern situation, from a perspective that is perhaps best spoken of as "a synthasis of Jungian Psychology, American Pragmatisim, and Hegel," with perhaps there's a little Foucault sprinkled in there for good measure...
So magically I'm able to see in space time flux what you might call "the expression of eternal forms," and understand the evolution of there expression in such a way as to kind of "know what time it is." My blogs and podcasts should hopefully testify to this.. So come join the adventure.
Matt Searles is, among other things, a visionary avant guard electronic musician, composer, producer, heavy metal virtueoso guitarist, a poet, a multimedia artist, and you know the list goes on. His work explores the inner most terrain's of the personal and collective psyche. "Aesthic experiance is a cognative event and so is subject to not only the pragmatic limitations of the audiances place in time and space but also the psychological situation of that momment in time and space."
My formative years, artistically speaking, where spent in the Studio of Interrelated Media ( SIM ) program at the Massachusetts College of Art. It was here where my "Greenbergian Anti-Christ" tendency first took hold.. Nothing like a heretical mixing of the mediums to bring a little life to the party. At any rate.. it was starting at this point where I began to recognize the phantasmal in that which differentiates the mediums in our thinking. Intellectually we could talk about the Jungian love for transcending Kantian metaphysical categories of thought or we can do Jackson Pollack style multimedia drip paintings with the blood of Greenberg; I mean, after all, isn't Christ in Urine just so yesterday? ;-)
In a certain way I reject causality, and prefer to talk about meaningful coincidences; because reality is a complicated subject. I mean reality is a psychological event, and so how, without an in depth study of complex psychology, can one really come to grips with the interface between reality and our concepts there of? At any rate it's funny how multimedia and electronic music have come together, isn't it?
I started exploring electronic music in 94. Of primary interest to me, at the time, was to explore composition in a manner emancipated from the strengths and weaknesses of my musicianship. As a guitarist, it gave me a way to explore composition with multiple insturments.. in a way where you can hear immediately how something sounds without having to wait till you are able to get a band together.. which is especially nice for someone of a somewhat introverted personality type. It didn't really occur to me to think of myself as an electronic musician or sound artist till I finished Viveka in 2003. At that point the writing was on the wall and thus I began to explore, through listening's and readings, modern electronic music. Prior to that my electronic influences where more that of the Iannis Xenokis, Frank Zappa, John Cage, Sun Ra, Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno, Edgard Varèse, and Marilyn Manson, sorta thing. This begun an era in my music where I began to put more of an emphasis on timber, tone, and generally speaking.. my sound pallet.
Right now, and perhaps in my larger picture, my favorite sound artists/biggest Influences are probably Ozzy Osbourne (and Black Sabbath), Frank Zappa, John Cage, and John Zorn. Out side of that I love the usual; Sonic Youth, Sun Ra, Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Laurie Anderson, Louie Armstrong, Miles Davis, etc... And of course I can't help but love Marilyn Manson. Lyrically I find inspiration in the Beat folks; Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, etc... In terms of painting I love Klimnt, Max Ernst, and various 'wild and crazy' moderns. For film my favorites are Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurassawa, Copela, Igmare Bergman, David Lynch, Woody Allen, Jean-Luc Godard, and Clinton Tarinteno, among others..
"72 notes to the octave microtonal music for 6 times the tonal fidelity of conventional western music (not including auxiliary notes): My Microtonalism comes in a variety of "flavors." My flavors included: #1 Music written in an equal tempered 72 tone scale. #2 Faux atonal serialisim where, instead of going through 12 tone rows, I simply maximize the time before I repeat a note (because "I'm too lazy to deal with 72 tone series"), and # 3 I'll create a composition via traditional diatonic type precepts, and then subvert that through the magic of microtonalisim.
If all this sounds like Greek to you... what I should say is that most conventional music exists inside of an arbitrary musical system.. devotes of this system believe they're conceptions are built on, if not bed rock, then at least solid ground. What my work does is to demonstrate that there "solid ground" is pudding.
A lot of people associate psychedelic art and music with drug use. As an
artist I associate it more with the transcendent. What's the transcendent?
Basically 'that which is to be found in heaven and earth that isn't dreamed
of (too much) in your philosophy and science.' What I mean is that most
religious folk worship there idea of God. The trouble with the worships
of one's idea of God is that God exists beyond our ideas of God.. I mean
that's part of the definition of God.. and as with God so truth lives
beyond philosophies' or science's conception of truth. So in a sense my music
is about humility. I present abstract musical structures in ways that are
suggestive of something beyond them selves. Some of my work is like a sonic
cubism in the sense that you can interpret it from multiple perspectives.
Carl Jung used to say "Religion is a defense against religious experience." According
to him religious rituals where a process of reliving the patterns by which
the original numinous experience. came forth... Orthodoxy is a defense
against original experiences... In so doing it makes experience a good
deal safer.
As an artist it's my job to pitch myself out into said cosmic void ...
risk all the dangers (of the less safe experience) and report back to you,
my audience, on what is discovered.