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 to improvise and Steve’ll edit it, with everyone providing suggestions for changes. Atm everything is done only once, so we've not attempted to play anything again. Our music doesn’t really fit into one genre, but we experiment to go further and expand our sense of what is possible. All stages in the music making process are about getting into "the zone". Intuition is used to guide action as well as the application of any ideas.
Steve says: “It’s acknowledged that human beings are the beneficiaries (and sometimes victims) of the process of biological evolution. According to new psychological constructivism the past experience of our ancestors has constructed a large part of our rich and complex emotional/intuitional capacity with the rest of the construction happening during our lifetime (here, emotion refers to the broad Spinozian concept of emotion, i.e., that which drives our motion through spacetime). It is thought that this happens through “situated conceptualisations” (e.g., Barsalou, 2008) - 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 our 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 make 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.
