Author
3D1on
Prism - original album
321123321
Prism - the album
March/April 2001 (leading up to J21 and Indymedia)
electronica
Hardware: 1997 soundblaster sound card on wintel pc
Prism is musical medicine. It begins with three distinct practices, Flow, Stability, and Control, after which the rest of the process of healing is exercised with the associated term. (Imagination, Love and Dream seem to stand out the most in musical form, which should be all pretty self-explanitory)
The Prism itself is purely medicinal, not musical - kind of a long meditation album I guess q-:, and was born out of a response in my shamanistic pursuits to some of the bad medicine that would apply itself to crystals more as a form of sales and consumerism than any sort of practice (whatever that might be). Crystals have the unique property on the molecular level of having each mole or atom equidistant from each neighbouring mole or atom. But this is not high order, it is chaotic, with entropic qualities that contrast intelligence and life in the universe - much as you would not want to be for very long inside of a plasmatic nebula of nothing but gaseous hydrogen, you would not want to have your body crystalized! Thus the responsive healing process is born here... Additionally, a crystal prism is often associated with its optical properties of splitting white light into a rainbow of colours.
Each group of simple disciplines has three, two, or just one focal point. Think of it like a triangular-shaped house with three floors but only one or two doors per room and no hallways. Thus, one room can only lead over or up/down to the next room or back to the previous room. There are also three sections to the house: front, middle, and back. As you enter the first floor of the front section, you proceed to the next floor and eventually the top floor, which would take you to the top floor of the middle section where you make your way down, and so forth. There are eighteen rooms, thus eighteen songs! (3-2-1-1-2-3-3-2-1 are each the number of rooms per 'floor' in sequence through the Prism, the first "3" being the 'rooms' Flow, Stability, and Control, for instance)
Although I used General MIDI (GM), this is actually electronica. To explain, GM contains, amongst an array of other things, a set of 128 or so preset instruments. Using musical notation, called "events", the composer, yours truly, instructs the computer soundcard to play something on a particular instrument. Instruments are in various families: keyboards, strings, brass instruments, and so on. There is one group that I focused on in 321123321, the electronic group. These are classic Ensoniq/Roland type factory sounds that were actually some of the most commonly available on early digital keyboards (you might have to hack the Wintel system to get them functioning, but they reside on the soundcard itself)! Having never used these sounds (I am a Yamaha boy), using the Soundblaster (manufactured by Creative Labs, but I believe bought out the Ensoniq brand (?) and easily one of the most widely distributed soundcards on Wintel PC's) was a lot of fun - even if it is boring automated electronic music.
kicking the ass out of elevator music,
£awrence