Synchronicity is something that may or may not truly exist, but as someone who finds that there can be creative enrichment in seemingly inert information like numbers, dates, symbols and letters, I continually find connections and relationships within otherwise unrelated things. At times, it is something topical and obvious - such as the fiftieth numbered release at Psoma being represented simply as the letter L in Roman numerals - but in other times, it reaches past the surface and communicates with something deeper, which arouses a sense of meaning and purpose, predestination even, beneath the things that I think, say and do.

There are two ways to respond to these moments of lucid awareness when and where they occur: The first is to simply shrug it off, and file it away as nothing more than a coincidence, in a sometimes vain effort to convince myself that I am truly in control of my life and situation, that I am not merely following a path set before me by some invisible directive. The second view is that, in a cosmic sense, the universe does not care what I feel about how it operates, that my growth as a human and my explorations as a curious mind both exist in a fixed direction as well as many possible directions, and so there is nothing left to do about it besides trying to rest on a plateau of contented submission.

It is through the latter perspective that I often work as a creative person, where my wondering/wandering is able to follow a thread of inquisitive fantasy, so long as I am more or less willing to accept whatever awaits me at the end of this process. These moments of concision, where I am able to draw easy lines from many disparate points to reveal a singular and cogent idea, are made possible by being receptive to the manifestation of a kind of "push and pull," a staircase of steps lit by the occasional number, word or visual symbol that allow me to navigate this apparently endless house.

And so here we are, together again at a junction point where you and I may meet, and I can discuss with you all of the disconnected things that have led me here, feeling as I explain that they are not quite as disconnected as my rational mind would have me believe. I think both the rational and logical side of me can coexist with the side of me that chooses to indulge in the "What if?" of tangential creative thinking, that I can simultaneously acknowledge a universe's will guiding me forward, or perhaps "through" is a more accurate descriptor, and that I can do so without deifying some aspect of this coming to pass, I can consult the abyss and its so-called randomness as I would use a tool of measurement, a barometer to determine the possible details of a given atmosphere that I find myself approaching.

As I understand it, true randomness cannot exist, but instead, systems that are so chaotic that they only appear to be random, because our ape-brains just cannot comprehend math, time, elements or physical spaces at that scale. My work as an artist has reiterated this reality to me again and again, and I am thankful for it, because it has only reinforced the outlook that I suspected much earlier on to be closer to a truth, and at least for myself alone, it is more functionally a truth that I can comprehend and accept: The knowing that life is a state of constant change and learning and forgetting, the acceptance that I will never know everything, and the very outwardly paradoxical observation that the more I learn, the less things I thought I knew make complete sense. I am forever coming from somewhere, on the way to somewhere else, but I am only ever to be where I already am.

'The Sun' is the first of an open-ended catalogue of work that I conceived in 2021, in the early moments of Limestone Ziggurat's gestation as an idea and functional process. It was the reason, when I opened a Bandcamp page for Limestone Ziggurat, I chose the word 'weltlandschaft' to govern the archive of work that would inevitably fill the digital space, rather than the name of the project itself. This is a German term, which translates to 'world landscape,' and has been a vital part of art and art history for a very long time. Taken historically, it refers to the fantasist landscapes you find behind portraits and central subject matter, artificial but beautiful depth applied to a canvas, until eventually it became a form all on its own, wide frames of impossible perspectives, showing a deeply detailed landscape, the horizon line, perhaps even the sea and the sky and the heavens above it. These works were sometimes created in order to facilitate an escapist moment for the viewer, a massive prosaic scale of the world itself that could rival the plain views offered by windows, even those high up in castle walls.

'The Sun' is the first of my attempt to align sound - that is, vibration and texture, not specifically musical sound - with any and all elements, locations and events that exist in (or in the view of) our natural world. This is, like the paintings of the old world, a completely prosaic fantasist exercise, and one that (thanks to the modernity of modular synthesis and generative composition) I am able to accomplish without putting myself in the center of. It is the music of the world, as I hear and feel it, my own understanding of the world landscape, which will accumulate over years and eventually become a sort of sonic codex, a map of emotions and frequencies filled in with colors made of shaped and channeled electricity.

I'd recorded it quite early on in the conception of Limestone Ziggurat, and felt, by way of that gentle nudging from the universe telling me that this thing was not yet ready for publishing, that I should put it aside and explore Limestone Ziggurat in other ways before trying to quantify just what 'The Sun' really meant. Sitting here now, thinking of alignment and synchronicity, seeing connections between this fiftieth Roman numeral and the fact that 'The Sun' consists of exactly fifty oscillators all tuned in perfect overwhelming harmony, I feel somewhat validated in my waiting, knowing now that I have come to the end of this particular path, and all that remains is for me to offer this surreal object to you, and although I can attempt to explain what it has meant to me, and where and how I conceived of excavating it from raw voltages in a cold basement, its identity is justifiably obliterated by its material presence, and whatever 'The Sun' means to you is correct and complete - whether it is merely a painted orange circle on a claustrophobically detailed canvas window, or a doorway to escape from the very real world, when it becomes perhaps too real to bear anymore.

---

For more Limestone Ziggurat recordings, please visit: weltlandschaft.bandcamp.com