The official solo debut recording by Miles Cooper Seaton (of Akron/Family).
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(inner text of CD):
on functional music:
I have always been drawn to what I have started to delineate as "functional music". Whether this is Satie's "Musiques d'Ameublement" or the ritual music of religious sects or cults, music or sound that is free of an impassioned personal narrative has made up the bulk of my listening for much of my life. There is something perfect about the sound that serves a specific divine mission or carries and feeds and nurtures any narrative or purpose that may be assigned to it; something perfect about the sound that asks nothing and exists only to give. This music's potency is derived from the fact that it is made for others rather than it's maker. Without a doubt, the cathartic expression in Bob Dylan's songs have their power and place, (the personal always has the potential to be a more pure reflection of the universal) but there is a kind of purity to music that wants to do something for the listener – that wishes only to be of use. These pieces are music for relaxing, for expanding, for wandering, for unfurling. They are music to breathe to.
I had been writing and performing music primarily for a single voice and processed electric guitar, merging a minimalist, landscape-oriented method of composition with something very up-front and lyrical. Images of the western American desert were at the forefront of my mind. Just before I laid down the sketches of some new songs, I spent 7 days driving from Los Angeles to North Carolina, stopping at the Grand Canyon, and crossing the Navajo reservation to Monument Valley in Arizona, visiting family in the mountains of New Mexico and endlessly traversing Texas. Over the years I have made this drive several times, sometimes with a work agenda plotting the route, sometimes just in search of a clearer mind.
In the process of orchestrating this music back home in Los Angeles the notion of landscape music or functional music kept surfacing as I went further and further into the details and the layers of the space surrounding the voice. There was a sense of constructing some place real for the narrative to play out in. And as I kept listening to the space between words, between melody, around the story, without the voice, I recognized that abstract language, wordless and patient that I had been searching for.
While traveling through that same desert, my partner and I kept picking up rocks, petrified clay among the million year old spires of Cathedral Gorge, iron ore in New Mexico, and fire agates in Southeastern Arizona. In the agate I found a mirrored image not only of the endless sky of the desert I'd been trying to conjure sonically and thematically, but also the process I'd been using to make sound. Something more akin to painting or sculpting, adding and subtracting layer after layer but primarily abiding in the space created, a practice of seeing the piece (in this case listening) more clearly, allowing it to take shape almost of it's own accord. A geological grade of patience, truly allowing time to have it's way, layer by layer to beautiful, unpredictable and endlessly varied ends. So when Bobby Kittleman approached me about performing music for yoga, I saw another parallel. An ancient process and a tradition of practice. A methodology that, when patiently and persistently applied to the practitioner in their infinite variations, could layer-by-layer create a beautifully reflective vessel for the display of light and awareness.
- Miles Cooper Seaton
credits
released August 24, 2022
Written, Performed & Recorded by Miles Cooper Seaton
Yoga Sequence by Meredith Corvette Carter
Mastered by Miles Senzaki at Grandma's Dojo
Optimized for SubPac
Design by Leanne Pedante
Originally sung by Holocaust survivors in Yiddish, Polish and French, this moving album is now available in a gorgeous LP package. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 11, 2022
