Samples: Glen Hadden electric and classical guitar, Dan Thorpe piano, Al Thumm synths, Sebastian Phlox pipe organ

Created in Prospect, South Australia

Software: Fields of Possibility

Controller: trackpad, Korg Nanokontrol

In his novel The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse puts forth the idea of a fictional game and an associated school of thought:

“To arrange and sum up all the knowledge of his time, symmetrically and synoptically, around a central idea…not just a juxtaposition of the fields of knowledge and research, but an interrelationship, an organic denominator.”

This interrelationship Hesse describes is much the same way I would describe synaesthesia in my creative disciplines. Taking anything as the zero-point, all else can be seen to ripple out from it, and so to have a connection to it in any particular realm, be that the realm of colour, taste, texture, smell, size, concept, complexity, and so on. Then if we change the lens through which we perceive these relationships - say we shift from focusing on relationships of colour instead of texture - then the configuration of these relationships changes (from our perceptual point of view). Then of course there is no end to how we may combine these lenses (as in a Venn diagram, but in infinite dimensions, and ideally with increasing clarity) - for instance, how would the information re-configure itself if we looked at the relationships of colour and smell at the same time? And then we could add other parameters, and so on, until we have an infinitely complex - but completely systematically ordered web of interrelationships.

Cross-relationships, when two parameters' matrices intersect in a seemingly impossible but logically necessary continuity, result in either a chaotic flickering exchange, or a smooth interweaving - even as the fabric of the matrices themselves ripple with life, these disturbances are sub-weavings or flashes of intensity within the rippling of that fabric. Sub-flows in the one great flow, sub-moments in the one still moment.

The question of chaos then, is also a matter of perceptual point of view.

So to my mind all wisdom is already arranged in this way that Hesse describes, and we can cultivate our recognition of that - which is what the glass bead game really seems to me to be. And that the central idea is in fact any idea, any point of departure, any zero - and the wisdom is thus not these things or ideas, but their relationships - the silence between them. And relationships radiate out in all dimensions from this zero. And if we trace from the outside-in, this shows us how any one thing can be the source – that all is music that leads us back to the silence.

And so it is with In Sound Surrounds - being this centre wherever one finds oneself:

“The Game as I conceive it…encompasses the player after the completion of meditation as the surface of a sphere encompasses its center, and leaves him with the feeling that he has extracted from the universe of accident and confusion a totally symmetrical and harmonious cosmos, and absorbed it into himself.”

            Hesse, The Glass Bead Game