lightswitch ghost
Psychedelic, Neo-Psychedelic, Psych, Neo-Psych, Outsider, Cosmic, Motorik (England)
We’re from Manchester, UK. Currently our process is: Steve’ll make some parts, FX routings and mappings that might get used; Tom, Cliff, G Man and others will come over for a jam and then Steve’ll edit it; everyone will also give comments on edits, say what they like, what might be emphasised, criticise/provide suggestions for any additions/overdubs.
The idea is to use: the jam part to find paths, ensure dynamism, and bring chaos; and the edit part to find/cement paths, push composition further, and bring order. Atm everything is done only once so we've not attempted to play anything again.
The music is created by intuition rather than thinking much about the intended result. To make it we need to get into "the zone", i.e., a metaphysical plain separate from the physical realm of the players, and always, to some extent, mysterious to them. This is the same for both jamming and editing. As regards the intuition that is used to guide action as well as application of ideas, it is acknowledged that human beings are the beneficiaries (and sometimes victims) of the process of biological evolution. We agree with (our interpretation of) new psychological constructivism that the past experience of our ancestors has constructed a large part of our rich and complex emotional/intuitional capacity (here, emotion refers to the broad Spinozian concept of emotion, i.e. that which drives our motion through spacetime), with the rest of the construction happening during our lifetime. We agree that this happens through “situated conceptualisations” (e.g., Barsalou, 2008), which are memories of situations that are stored in the brain as abstract patterns. Such patterns, being similar in various abstract ways, reinforce each other to form the basis of our emotions.
In the context of a strong coupling between brain, body and environment, it’s commensurate with the above that music can evoke more than just emotions. It can also evoke the body's experience of situations physical, psychological, social, and the many dreamt up paths between these, from the behaviour of people in an environment to that of bacteria, from boredom to intense experience, to relief, to wonder. The configuration of sound in a particular zone can, then, produce numerous abstract evocations of previous past experience, that are recognised and responded to variously by our individual and collective unconscious(es) during play. As such, our experience of sound, music and our own play is inevitably influenced by ancestral and living memories. Though we don’t set out to communicate anything specific, the feelings/ideas the work produces/evokes during its production are respected such that an attempt is made to allow the music to more fully become what it “should” be. As we become absorbed in the process we disappear. When this happens, it feels like magic to us. It is this magic that we seek to both conjure and convey.
