Auroral Pageant by Milieu

"... the pure clear song of that meadowlark perch’d on a fence-stake, with glad notes of daybreak, two or three liquid-simple notes, repeated at intervals, full of careless happiness and hope.

Fresh and rosy red the sun is mounting high, The flashing sun bursts through in unlooked-for directions, silently mounts in the broad clear sky."

-Walt Whitman, excerpt from 'Morning'

---

"Auroral Pageant" is the 35th Sleepbuilding broadcast to be mastered and published for free. It runs for just over fourteen hours, and was originally streamed live overnight at YouTube on 6th March 2024 - a year ago, almost to the day. It consists of two Doepfer A-188 feedback units exploring two different (though very similar) scales in two different keys - one plays Mixolydian in F sharp, the other plays Dorian in B.

"Pageant" is somewhat unremarkable in its topicality - it is a pleasant and operatively endless landscape of peaks and valleys, one that I have likely visited and logged before, but given the tumultuous nature of the landscape around me, outside of my studio, I feel that now is the time for familiarity and validation. My music has performed many different roles, both utilitarian and aesthetic, throughout the last twenty years, for me and for you, but sometimes it is necessary to not move the needle with each peak of a waveform, but instead soften the momentary uncertainties with predictable comfort.

In this way, "Auroral Pageant" is closer to what brilliant minds like JS Bach may have described as "absolute music" - that is to say, music without a subject, simply written for the joy of having done so. This wouldn't be entirely true, as I most definitely had a subject in mind while patching it - easy to guess - but again, returning to a source as fundamental and omnipresent as the sun for compositional direction doesn't contradict my feeling that this is meant to merely be more of what I've already done many times over in the past, albeit in a gracious and joyful way.

The idea of the novel being superior to the perennial is something that is perhaps deceptive - no doubt an idea that has been reinforced throughout our lives by capitalism, even if and when it may ring incidentally true - and I feel that thinking only seeks to further distance us from the recognition of our deeper and "truer" selves, not as humans in the intelligent design sense, but as biological organisms who enjoy vibrations, temperatures and other stimulating physical and chemical sensations over and over again for no other reason besides that they make sense to some distant and primordial part of our brains and bodies.

I often wonder about this, about how full-circle certain things seem to become, when centuries of compositional and artistic progress become simple colored shapes and textures like Rothko, Mondrian, Pollock, echoing more of the natural world than they do not, or JS Bach's ornate arrangements eventually give way to Autechre and Merzbow, themselves closer in feel and shape to a crackling fire or a rushing river. These observations hopefully reinforce my notion that we have, whether we are consciously aware of it or not, sought out the same sensory experiences over and over, and with that in mind, here is another pleasant dream of the sun that you and I have had a thousand times over, offered to you at a time when too many things around us are no longer the same has they have been.

---

ALL 35 SLEEPBUILDING RELEASES ARE FREE HERE: https://campsite.bio/oscillog

Psychedelic electronic music, sun-warmed analog ambient and sci-fi braindance, for cats, aliens and epicureans alike.

I also release music as Coppice Halifax: coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com

milieu-music.com
patreon.com
YouTube
Tumblr
bsky.app