The HNW-Q No. 2: Joseph Gates

Dear Readers,

this is the second HNW-Questionary. I am proud, that Joseph Gates contributes to the HNW-Q, because he is one of the deepest, innovative, passionate, poetic and most versatile artist in the field of HNW and Sound-Art. He works in several different projects like Zionist, Vargrwulf, Peiiste (together with Bast), R.S.P. (together with Bast) or the deeply respected Noise-Art-Collective Black Leather Jesus to name only a few. But he also runs the best Noise-Art-Label on the planet called Human Ignorance (click here) well known for its beautiful designed, carefully chosen and deeply personal, challenging and always touching releases.

Gates was already featured on my blog with his groundbreaking HNW-composition Release (click here to read) in 2011. A review of his latest Zionist release entitled Hagalaz is in the works for 2012, because it is one of the best HNW releases this year. So don't miss this great composition, if you are a true HNW-enthusiast ! And please take a look at Joseph Gates' blog  !

The HNW-Questionary consists of 32 phrases to be completed in a playful, insightful, poetic, prolific and philosophical manner. The featured artist decides, which phrases he wants to accomplish. It is the task for the reader to perceive the voids and to think about the subtle interactions between Being and Nothingness, which are also important ingredients of the HNW-Artform. But, it is always important to see and hear, what someone is saying and what he is not saying.

The idea of the whole feature is to help the few real HNW-Artists to show and establish themselves as leading artists and to give them an encyclopedic space for their aesthetic and artistic convictions, conceptions and beliefs. It is a space to publish serious, original and important thoughts and ideas for the future of HNW as an important artform.

It is first of all exclusively for leading musicians, but in the future painters, writers and philosophers could also be invited to contribute to the seriousness of HNW and to the interrelatedness of HNW with other artforms. Maybe one day I will fill out this Questionary myself. I have several completed versions of it in the upper drawer of my mind. This HNW-Questionary was only conceived for the best. Consequently, my deliberately very elitist motto for this Questionary is: Light for the Best, Darkness over the Rest !

All lines in green ink are written and copyright by Joseph Gates (contact here and here  and here). All lines in italics and normal ink show you the HNW-Questionary written and copyright by me. This is the second HNW-Questionary brilliantly completed by Joseph Gates:

The HNW-Q No. 2:

[1] I discovered and invented HNW for myself, when I needed to create a sound that would provide me with solitude in my room, and push out any unwanted external influences on my personal space.

[2] The initial radicality of HNW would be preserved, if it was limited to a small run publication based out of California.

[3] HNW is a wide ranging and inclusive genre based around textural explorations within the electronic noise field, that has exploded with potential in the past ten years or so.

[4] HNW is not a secret club or fashionable trend.

[5] I embrace the acronym HNW, it is a symbol of personal progress and dedication in the face of an often uncaring world. Because it means different things to different people, it is something that endures beyond initial stereotypes and value judgements to provide an outlet for personalized and individual sonic expression.

[6] HNW is pure dedication to creating one's own personal space through sound.

[7] The sound of machines are heavily influential on the music that I make, as well as the sounds of natural phenomena.

[8] HNW helps the individual world to be revealed.

[9] Monolithic walls are nice to listen to, especially when coming out of an amplifier at full blast in the same room as you.

[10] The future of HNW would be up to the individuals who care enough to ensure that future.

[11] The death of HNW would be if it became a genre where everyone imitated exactly those who came before them.

[12] HNW should be related to the genre of expressionistic painting to understand it better.

[13] Singularity and originality in HNW are key to the creation of something worth listening to (both for yourself and others).

[14] HNW should be called Static Minimalism, because someone feels like it should be called that.

[15] HNW should not be called Static Minimalism, because someone does not feel like it should be called that.

[16] The permanent repetition of the HNW-Mantra (No ideas, no change, no dynamics, no development etc.) leads to nothing.

[17] Volume in HNW is a factor in the creation of HNW.

[18] Distortion in HNW is a factor in the creation of HNW.

[19] My Unconscious is immersed in HNW.

[20] Narratives, Analogies and Metaphors in HNW are a part of the act of creation.

[21] Time and Space in HNW are limiting aspects to the duration and location of a piece of music.

[22] HNW can create a sound that is close to absolute Nothingness.

[23] My HNW amplifies aspects of my own person that cannot be expressed in words.

[24] Minimal Music and Cosmic Drones are enjoyable to listen to.

[25] Conceptualism is the wellspring of influences that creates the most exciting new aspects of HNW.

[26] The main ingredient of brilliant HNW is personal dedication and a certain level of honesty that can be both expressed and obscured (to positive effect) through alias.

[27] The purpose and concept of my HNW is to adequately create through sound an environment that is conductive to the forces and energies that I invite into or enact in my life.

[28] The distinction between ANW/HNW is up to the observer.

[29] The philosophy of HNW can change as often as the seasons, because inherently HNW exists on a plane higher than philosophical conundrums, into the realm of the ecstatic.

[30] My first words about HNW were that I was excited to find others making sounds in the same directions that I had been exploring.

[31] My final words about HNW would be thank you for listening.

[32] The phrase I would like to add to this Questionary is that self-awareness and personal responsibility are significant goals in life to strive for.

Cordial thanks to Joseph for the HNW-Questionary
and for creating his unique soundworlds !

SKG.

(Photos by SKG)

Sounds Reviewed #2/2011: Vargrwulf - Release

Sounds Reviewed #2/2011

VARGRWULF - Release

(Sweet Solitude 2011, Infinity Project 1)

(10/10 Admiration-Points)



Minimalism in Art is the attempt to achieve the most intense artistical results with the most minimal artistical means. Joseph Gates' work on the important UK based label Sweet Solitude should be seen in this tradition, since "Release" presents the most minimal and at the same time most beautiful music you can imagine. John Cage would have loved it, because the sounds are nearly inexistant. They constantly oscillate between Being and Nothingness. This constant oscillation makes "Release" to a really great work of cosmic noise, since our cosmos is also always incipient and never ever ending.  Something or maybe nothing of this cosmic oscillation between Nothingness and Being seems to be preserved on "Release".

On "Release" there is almost nothing to listen to. But this almost nothing is so intense, bright and pure, that I got the impression, that the whole spectrum of light was refracted through the prism of sound. The splendor of the sun also becomes only visible through the fact, that it is refracted by the layers of the atmosphere of our planet Earth. The internal flickering of the sounds dissolves over 75 Minutes into a vibrant haze, which produces a hypnotic luminosity and an almost tactile immediacy. The sounds seem almost like painted with the subtlest shades of desert sand or ice and snow.  Joseph Gates seems to be the Robert Ryman of sound when he makes all shades of white audible for us.

Ecstatic tranquility would be the most appropriate name for the state, in which the mind of the listener dives in. This music is a Dive-Through and not a Drive-Through. This music provides a stairway to your inner and outer galaxies. Its inward aesthetic opens your senses up to the cerebral pleasures of proportion, of light, of touch, of colour, of sound, of light and of silence. The radiance of the sounds releases the spirit, but the spirit always remembers the body. It almost feels like lying on a very sunny location on the beach, watching with half open eyes into the blue nothingness called sky, only slightly blinded by the sunlight. And in the end, everything will dissolve itself into a mirage and a deep slumber. Sounds will appear and disappear like cloud formations on the deep blue canvas of your innermost sensorium.

Hardness and softness, stasis and movement are in a constant but always surprising tension. An inattentive listeners would integrate the sounds into one wall, but you have to listen to this record more than once, to perceive what is going on here. Where the classical monolithic HNW-Sound tries to eliminate the time-axis of a composition by shockfrosting time to an eternal now or by stretching time almost like a balloon to produce some kind of time-bubble (or a nunc stans - if you like latin terms), Gates delivers a strange stasis in horizontal motion. He is extending the time-axis or to use another picture: he stretches a time-atom until it explodes or bursts into pieces to produce a HNW-wall fractured by light. So you can prepare yourself to listen to the most lucid, translucent and transparent HNW-sounds ever.

If you are willing to let yourself fall into a dreamlike mindstate you will be rewarded with evocation of the flickering beauty of a landscape. All of a sudden a landscape seems to appear before the eyes of your imagination.This must be the grandeur of an american landscape: from a promontory to a rock to a grain of sand. You can almost feel the inscription of a sonic microclimate of a landscape with the most elementary sound like: water, wind, fire. Or to say it simpler: you can listen to inhuman sounds, sounds that were produced by our cosmic machine called Earth. It's like the modulation of wind and the sound of the land full of the same wind that is blowing in the same bare place. One should speak of an almost geological stratification of sound. Robert Smithson wrote somewhere about the co-implication of earth, mind and thinking: "one's mind and the earth are in constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart tiny deposits of gritty reason"

When you take off your headphones after 75 minutes of pure nothingness, it seems as if all of your senses have become a lot more attentive to the sounds, which are around you all of the time. You will be surprised by the richness of these sounds. You will maybe try to listen to the "music" of your daily surroundings more closely. The sounds of cars, trains, birds, bees, dogs, cats, trees, the wind, the rain, the ringing telephone, the noise of a building site and maybe church bells will probably mix up to a very unique HNW-composition. What more can and should music achieve than sharpening our senses to listen to the human and inhuman sounds of our cosmic machine called EARTH ? 

To say it with a poem by Allan Afterman called "The Desire for White":

The shell

is form -

is the dome

the skull

is the density of nothingness, 

its intensity

is this thought 

a wind hiding silence. 

(written by S.K.G. in April/May 2011)

Since this is one of the most unique releases in HNW this year, I can only give the highest possible recommendation for Vargrwulf's "Release". I hope, that Joseph Gates will "release" a very large Multi-CD or Multi-Tape-collection full of these wonderful minimal sounds really soon. After 75 beautiful minutes and repeated listening I will need a lot more of it.

(10/10 Admiration-Points)

Vargrwulf - Release

(Sweet Solitude 2011, Infinity Series 1)

Support one of the most remarkable artists
in the HNW/PE/N-scene HERE.

Thanks for reading my blog !

Have a nice day !

Stay tuned and expect the unexpected!