This video is part of the Emergence audio/visual project, where I explored the idea of natural laws and their creation of the world around us. The early chapters of the story focus on the fundamentals of natural laws themselves, the basic principles of nature which needed to be in place before the physical universe could come into being.
Luckily for me, working on an AV project, these basic building blocks of nature tended to yield beautiful results visually — symmetries, the distribution of the primes, dimensionality and hyper-dimensional forms, and here, waves. Perhaps this is because we have some subconscious appreciation for their importance, or maybe it’s just through social conditioning and the fact that they are usually common forms because of their irreducibility.
The idea seemed like a simple one visually, so I wanted to create a simple classic synth approach musically, and find a strong retro aesthetic visually to match. Tom Hodge added some Fender Rhodes noodling for extra retro feel, and Kevin McGloughlin nailed the visual approach with a great technique for presenting waves as the product of strong moving lines in a simple colour scheme. Some of the video work reminds me of 60’s or 70’s modernist imagery, which fit right in musically.
I chose the concept of waves for part of the Emergence story, because they are a very important idea in much of our understanding of the world around us, and within us. They form the basis of light and wireless communications, and our source of energy from the sun which creates almost all plant and animal life. Our best understanding of the fundamental nature of reality at the smallest scales is purely waves, apparently. And even the process of neuronal action that produces our awareness relies on waves of charge flow created by forces which are supposedly themselves mediated by waves — the virtual photon, a massless wave (i.e. light), being the force carrier of the electromagnetic charge which shunts particles around inside your neurones to make you think. And then there’s the more familiar waves that can dump you under and make you swallow some rank sea water.
In addition to all of that, waves are also the basis of music — waves in the air, that is, sound, structured with symmetries. Much the same as with thinking about symmetry for that chapter of the Emergence story, it turns out that music shares a lot in common with our visual aesthetic preferences, and both are deeply rooted in principles of nature illuminated by science.
There are different ways in which waves can operate, and what constitutes a wave at all, with or without a medium for example. But they all seem to involve energy transfer without needing the transfer of physical mass — like you can see in the video, the mass (each particle, or a charge) moves up and down on a single axis, and the wave, and energy, is propagated through the medium by these point oscillations.
— Max
This is a live recording of one of my favorite sets from the SunSet Cacao Dances I played this season in Guatemala at Eagles Nest. The journey starts with a cacao ceremony and then begins with slower, spacious music. The energy builds slowly through the mix and peaks followed by a cool down towards the end as the energy comes back down. These sorts of sets are some of my favorites to play. This set also contains some of my unreleased tunes.
Eagles Retreats: www.eaglesretreats.com (location of the event and where the photo was taken)
skeler. — N i g h t D r i v e スケラー is a mix by skeler of unreleased tracks.
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Tracklist:
0:00 Skeler — ID
2:39 Devilish Trio — Nose To The Grindstone (Skeler Remix)
5:45 Skeler — ID
7:35 Skeler — ID
9:40 DaniLeigh — No Limits (Skeler Remix)
11:50 Skeler — ID
13:00 Skeler — ID
14:46 Skeler — ID
17:17 Skeler — ID
19:50 Skeler — ID
22:25 Skeler — ID
24:15 Skeler — ID
25:45 LEA RUE — I Cant Say No (Skeler Remix)
28:14 Skeler — ID
30:38 Skeler — ID
34:05 Skeler — ID
36:37 Rihanna — Umbrella (Skeler Remix) (Ember Island Cover)
39:50 Skeler — Blue Foundation — Eyes On Fire (Skeler Remix)
43:08 Skeler — ID
47:50 Skeler — ID
51:06 Skeler — ID
52:56 Skeler — ID
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Support/Follow Skeler:
Bc — skelermusic.bandcamp.com
Fb — www.facebook.com/skelermusic/
Sc — soundcloud.com/skelermusic
Twitter — twitter.com/skelermusic
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Video By utitoyo: www.youtube.com/user/utitoyo
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I wanted to make something huge and intense for the new live show, so I went for a project attempting to visualise the infinite and its links to us in our everyday lives. For every chapter of the story I found a different technique to approach it, in this case, the simple idea of repetition. Apply it, and we have a form of infinity. This was also a natural fit for my music, where I had a nice excuse to push the repetitive boat out even more than usual. I kept it very stripped back to focus on the idea, with slow evolution and occasional variants to maintain some melodic engagement.
Visually, I was lucky to get to work with one of my favourite artists, Kevin McGlouglin, where we told the human side of the story, our endless pursuit of growth and «progress», our duplication of built form and expanding cities, looking to an unbounded future of urban sprawl. It was an audio-visualisation encompassing the project title «Yearning for the Infinite». But despite our society-endangering issues around human consumption and sustainability, it wasnt supposed to be a doom scenario. We tried that musically and it didnt seem to fit. There was a back and forth on the ideas and their musical and visual representation, and what worked was something that for me seems more focused on the worth of our endless striving than its possible role in our downfall.
— — — KEVIN MCGLOUGHLIN:
Repetition is an attempt to convey the importance of our endless endeavours toward human development and growth amidst a chaotic and disorienting landscape.
The struggle for a fruitful future is challenging with the distractions of everyday life alongside its ever-growing technological advancements.
The hope is for humanity to strive through all of this in a meaningful and positive way.
