Without Knowing

A short demonstration.

I was in Newark airport back in July of this year and there was a grand piano parked up in the middle of Terminal B. You know the ones donated by ‘Sing for Hope’ promoting their mission of “art for all”? I always notice a totally different energy in airports that have pianos. It’s like a little contract we made with one another that we’ll allow the possibility for the transcendent in a place often associated with copious amounts of stress and scheduling as we all try to organize ourselves under those harsh artificial lights.

The piano doesn’t even have to get played, it’s just knowing that its there provides a sense of respite and creativity. A call to remember that we’re not just bodies moving from place to place, we’re souls with the need for pause and expression. What a beautiful initiative.

I always work on music in airports, and if I can get access to a piano, well, even better!

It’s just an idea. No vocals yet, just some chords on the piano. Played to nobody, while everybody walks by. A bunch of distracted commuters in an airport actually might be the best environment you could ask for when working on a song. I want to be ignored but I also want the resonance of a mighty instrument in a huge space. I want the bulk of bodies to absorb the sound but I don’t want their feedback. Just their general physical presence. Perhaps the opposite of what I want in a live performance. But right now, in the midst of my processing, I don’t want to be listened to, I just want to be overheard and observed.

It’s like that double-slit experiment they conducted to show how matter changes under observation. The sound I make is changed by their witnessing, it’s hard to say how exactly but something shifts.

There’s a beautiful moment in this recording when an announcement comes over the speaker and the pitch of the woman’s voice is perfectly aligned harmonically with the chords I’m playing. An ordinary moment of everyday life is made extraordinary. It’s no longer an interruption or obnoxious intrusion, it’s an adornment in the symphony of sound.

It reminds me those moments when you hear the bleed of a siren in New York while you’re listening to music in your headphones and you think it’s a part of the song, as it fits into the key so seamlessly, sounding a single long drone in harmony with everything else.

I love when an abrasive sound we’re so used to rejecting becomes beautiful simply through a change in context. The other sounds hold it in a new reality and it seemed to happen completely outside of your doing.

A more intentional execution of this idea is Steve Reich’s Different Trains. One of my favourite peices ever. I adopt a posture of meditation listening to this album. It’s one thing to be still in the face of silence, but what a feat to be still and present to the sounds of distraction and experience the sounds as music rather than noise.

He samples various train announcements and weaves relentless motifs around them. It’s hypnotic and gives you a window into a completely different way of observing the world around you.

I think my little piano idea is going somewhere but the reason I like it, is that it doesn’t quite know yet.

Currently it’s aptly called Without Knowing.

I have a sketch of words I might try and weave into the music. But it’s too soon to say if they’ll like each other.

without knowing, where i’m going
hands out holding, onto nothing 
scenes surround me, without feeling
breath of jasmine ‘go before me’
lead me into the field of transcending 
longing like water, i move around everything
move around everything
without knowing
without knowing

I’ll keep you updated as things progress.

Till next time,