Burned Oath by Milieu

"Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form - no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space - ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold - the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west
rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn."

-Walt Whitman, "Continuities"

'Burned Oath' is the eleventh overnight Broadcast to be mastered and released, selected from a steadily growing archive of Sleepbuilding sessions. It was generated by the R-EW Audioholistics modular system, using the voice of a 2HP Pluck Karplus-Strong paraphonic digital synthesizer playing the Locrian scale. It was originally broadcast on April 7th, 2023, following the listening party event celebrating the release of 'Ocean Lion IV' by Coppice Halifax. Owing to this earlier starting time, 'Burned Oath' runs even longer than the twelve-hour runtime that has come to be (more or less) the working standard for the Sleepbuilding releases.

Musically, this session exists somewhere between very formative Milieu recordings such as 'Beyond the Sea Lies the Stars' (which was semi-generative) and elements of the 'Sun-Day' series, evoking a sepia-tinted remembrance of a shoreline, a sea breeze, forestial islands scattered across a purple-orange horizon, held just above the surface as they allude to ruins and shipwrecks beneath the waves. A drowsy orange sun hovers overhead, warming the air into a blanket that compels us downward and reclining upon the soft sand, blinded in the radiance, until the starry firmament unfurls, inverting everything.

Considering how many sessions have already come to pass in this fashion, I've begun to play with how I even approach this now well-developed process, from selecting which broadcast to publish next, aligning it with a Kupka painting and a passage of poetry, and reassessing what the entire act even means to me. In order to arrive at 'Burned Oath' I decided to consult the void on the subject, and threw the I Ching, which I take quite seriously in the sense that I have no business asking the universe what it thinks if I am not willing to accept the answer. This is a wondrous method of deductive logic to use in the creative act, because if I realize that I am too afraid of getting an answer from the I Ching that I will not like, I have effectively determined what I desire the outcome to be, and have answered my own question.

In some situations, I prefer to embrace the chaos of this process, and so the I Ching suggested that I break with tradition a bit, and to not see anything before me as rigid or predetermined. It is for this reason I selected this broadcast, because it has been (to date) the only broadcast that came to pass without a given name, simply being labeled as "Sleepbuilding" in my haste of preparing the entire 'Ocean Lion IV' album, and its subsequent listening party and afterparty ambient patch all within two weeks. In mulling over what I could name this session for publication, I felt compelled to give the individual partitions of the work unique names, rather than labeling them all in deference to the overall session, but until the I Ching pointed out that this should be the way forward, I'd put it out of my mind as breaking with the format I'd come to enjoy with these broadcast releases.

And so, like all aspects of the Sleepbuilding sessions that seem to derive their idiosyncrasies from a deep well of my decisions, inspirations, experiences and desires, the titles chosen here have been plucked from a novel that affected me quite profoundly - themselves the name of a fictional philosophical lecture given within the story - and offered without any further contexts, despite their quite pointed relationships with either my own personal life at this moment, or some aspect of the creative process and the tools used that would be uninteresting or irrelevant to just about anyone else.

As the Whitman passage explains - "ample are time and space" - the void contains everything, and in doing so, remembers it for us, and this is functionally mirrored in the generative music I've been so enamored with this year; a prolific configuration of nesting dolls that each illustrate a specific law of their own universe, cascading and reflecting their incommensurable paths over and under one another, until the tangle of electricity and decisiveness accumulates a critical mass, and is vaporized in a single suspended moment of bliss.

Surely, somewhere within our universe, or any other, we can find the answers we are willing to accept, if we are bold enough to ask the questions. And, if we are not yet confident enough in our convictions to inquire, then we already know, and have already decided.

---

YouTube playlist of all Sleepbuilding broadcasts: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbcjgVJRSgeSHy00DZLB8zFFIJbIgcYjo

All prior Sleepbuilding releases to date (all FREE): https://campsite.bio/oscillog

For more generative ambient music delivered to your inbox automatically each month, please consider subscribing to my Vibratelepathos series: https://vibratelepathos.bandcamp.com

Tracklist

1.	The Forgotten	50:46

2.	The Liminal (Section 1)	143:48

3.	The Liminal (Section 2)	143:25

4.	The Liminal (Section 3)	143:12

5.	The Liminal (Section 4)	143:15

6.	The Liminal (Section 5)	141:17

7.	The Transgressive	122:51

8.	The Divine	98:50

Credits

released June 30, 2023

W/P by Brian Grainger. Generated and broadcast live from White Pillar on April 7th 2023, using the R-EW Audioholistics modular system. Mastered by The Analog Botanist, June 2023. Text by Brian. Design by ABM&D using visual sampling of 'Study for Verticals' by Frantisek Kupka. This is Milieu Music number MMD081. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2023. All nights preserved.

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