Together with Ezekiel Honig, Morgan Packard released on acclaimed Microcosm Music NY (alongside Miskate et al. taking a naturalist, or corporeal turn towards sampling in electronic (dance) music), later on Anticipate Recordings which through his album “Airships Fill The Sky” and releases by Ezekiel Honig, Mark Templeton, Klimek, and Sawako became co-defining for contemporary music – don’t miss the freely downloadable Summer Tour Remixes!

Airships Fill The Sky, by employing instrumental elements, sampling and synthesis – i.e. representation, performance and simulation – poses questions about relations between sound, music, nature, motion, feeling, technology and mind. Packard plays the accordion in a way that investigates material properties of the instrument in an expressive context – the instrument not mainly as a tool to express artistic or musical concepts, but as a body expressive of itself, of its physical properties and meanings, which cannot just be infererred by myself and applied to an otherwise dead matter, but are in direct relation to this thing, and of homologous properties of a human body – the instrument breathes, feels, as I synchronise my breath, my feeling.

Here, already, simulation takes place: Myself as a mind–body, capable of conveying a universal connection between sense and matter, cannot only acknowledge the expressiveness of the instrument and the processes that surround it, but I can reflect and describe all this (what I maybe need representational power to) in order to communicate. This becomes possible as feeling is in all things, and breathing in it’s meaningful, expressive aspects relies on my knowing about how it feels to have a body which breathes.

Thus, the instrument becomes part of myself in a twofold sense: its breathing as breathing is simulated in my capability to abstract from my own concrete bodily states and draw the meaning of a thing breathing from my own breathing (it breathes through myself, or technically: I run a simulation of it breathing on my hardware, which is not all that ‘hard’, as it/myself knows about breathing); and my own breathing as breathing becomes realised in the instrument, i.e. the instrument is an integral part of my conception of breathing, of its meaning, of what it is for myself.

Sure, there’s a stricter way to grasp simulation, which we encounter when we meet the natural beauty of the simulacrum. To make it clear, hearing the sound of SuperCollider determining the synthetic aspects of Packard’s music is bliss. But apart from this production esthetics, the simulational power of SC presents us a dynamic representation which is becoming natural – it’s arguable whether this would be representational at all, and also, whether I assume too much about the actual simulational effects here. What I hear is the following: imagine a field of hollow bamboo canes as they could be used to build panpipes. Some of them touch one another, others stand apart from one another, imagine now a process that partially blows, partially shakes these, namely with a dynamic that reminds of unsteady, but strong and playful wind rattling at your door, shaking the bamboo façade of your cozy shed.

Again we are confronted with a very much material, dynamical and sounding process, but this time probably without a body proper in the first place. Again, we do not seem to deal with an absolute disembodiment here, but with a simulation which does not consist in an irreality or disembodied virtuality, but in a virtuality consisting in ourselves which can be realised though this very simulational process.

Luckily, as I am not capable of giving a complete account for what makes me appraise Airships Fill The Sky in this manner, I will stop here. Hope to see you on Friday!

Thanks to cramo for making this happen!!

See Morgan Packard’s webpage, where you can also download the SuperCollider instrument – thanks, Morgan!