13. "Waves" + "Six Symphonies"

2022, continued...

Slowly, little by little, but very definitely, I feel myself "getting better"...

Not only am I recovering from the breakup and the hurt, but I am actually becoming happier and more content with myself, my life, my place in the world. Loneliness, or the idea of it, no longer torments me, and I begin to enjoy being alone more and more when I am not teaching or doing live shows, which I do, from time to time. I continue making music, of course, recording new things, developing my style of playing the guitar, which has by now become more and more improvisatory, doing more talks for my YouTube page (I still do them when inspired to today, though not as frequently as before, and they tend to be shorter, as I've realized that most people don't stick around to watch them for more than a few minutes anyway; attention spans today have become like shriveled prunes, increasingly smaller and smaller by the day, the minute, the second)... 

I also participate in one or two cool collaborations, most notably as half of an improvisatory duo with -- I will call him "TN" here -- on guitar (we performed live together, twice, in this format last year, and he also performed with me at my 49th birthday show in February, both last year and this, both times accompanied by a young and very talented sax player, and both shows completely improvised, with no prior rehearsals).

Lowe + Tanao, Live at NEPO

I also collaborate via the computer with a guy who had weeks prior accepted my work for his COIL tribute (he is living in Europe, so it's all done remotely, via the computer) on a lengthy track that becomes the impetus for a new Bowie tribute LP. I ultimately end up entitling the tribute LP "Sane As We," a lyric from "All the Madmen," Bowie's 1970 song which was dedicated to his half-brother Terry, who had schizophrenia and eventually committed suicide (the song is on "The Man Who Sold the World"). The track we had collaborated on is itself an original, a rather abstract and somewhat noisy composition, really nothing like Bowie's music was, not even the more avant garde "Berlin Trilogy" stuff, but it is, nonetheless, definitely a tribute to Bowie's sound and vision.

There were other LPs/projects that followed as well.

"Waves Between Emptiness" is a mostly acoustic LP on which I play my new Guild acoustic for the first time "studio" and in my new "tapping" style on songs both old and new and/or radically rearranged. I also revived a cover of The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" for the LP, which was one of the first songs I ever learned to play on the acoustic, though here it is radically rearranged, with neck tapping and a looser vocal line. The title of the LP itself is a rough translation into English from the Chinese characters I started using around this time for my own name, a transliteration of "Marc Lowe." The characters I choose are intentionally meant to be a bit "Buddhistic" in flavor, as the title of the LP implies -- waves/between/emptiness, or 浪間空* (the final character, by the bye, which I translated here as "emptiness," can also be read as "sky" in some contexts). 

*This year, by the bye, I changed the way I write my last name, using characters that denote the original meaning of my full family name, i.e. "lion" and "stone" (獅石).

“Chaos” 2022 acoustic version from “Waves Between Emptiness”

Apart from the acoustic pieces on the LP, I also include two remixes of the title tracks, respectively, from the first two parts of 2021's Tetralogy: "Hope" and "The Sun Is Coming." I considered, and still consider, this album a sort of "footnote to" or "bridge between" both the Tetralogy of the previous year and the albums I'd recorded earlier in '22, or, to put it differently, it is yet another transition, another piece of the zigsaw puzzle, perhaps, a walkway or tunnel or electromagnetic current (?) that allows them to communicate with each other, while, at the same time, also opening the door rather welcomingly to whatever else may eventually flow in or through...

“Bodhidharma and the Frog” 2022 acoustic version. Video by Akiko Honda.

For my next major musical project after "Waves" -- apart from the compilations and tributes I had released and/or those I will later release in '22 -- I begin to create a series of, like the Tetralogy of '21, four releases (or at least it started as four, though I will end up doing a fifth part after releasing them as a set). Apart from the fact that there were initially four, these were really a different beast entirely from that sequence in many aspects. First, the "four albums" in fact consist of three full-length releases and an EP, rather than four full lengths. The first and third part in the series are only one track each, and both are very long tracks, indeed (the first over 50 minutes, the latter around one hour long), and the second part is three tracks in total. The final part of the four-part series is a single-track EP, which is in fact a remix/alternative version of the final track on the second release in the series, a piece entitled "Cauterize." The EP version includes samples and intense beats during the first half not found on the original version, and it is also different in various other respects (for instance, the first version emphasizes a long improvisation on the Telecaster, while the second part elides it completely and replaces it with sampled dialogue, etc.), which is why I consider it a unique, yet closely-related, part of the series, rather than a mere "remix version" of the track (which it also is, in some ways).

The four releases, together, I come to refer to as "Six Symphonies for the End of the World," six because, when combined, there are in fact six very long tracks between them, and I release this (after releasing all four separately as LPs) as a single compilation LP via all major streaming services through my distributor. This compilation would likely need to be a "boxed set" if sold in CD format, but, as it's online, the length here really was not an issue at all. The compilation, its cover displaying all four of the original jackets from the LPs in a grid, each with a roman numeral on it (I-IV), runs for a total of 3 hours and 3 minutes. 

The tracks found in this sequence of lengthy compositions are mostly instrumental, experimental, improvisatory, at turns noisy and ambient, soundtrack-like, with organic samples (the sound of wind, trains thumping across train tracks, my footsteps accompanying the sound of my own voice as I talk about, in Japanese, the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was killed in broad daylight earlier that very same day, as well as about various other disturbing things happening in the world at large that I am concerned about...). 

The first part of the series, "Bodhidharma's Awakening," includes a sequence of "indoor sounds," all taken at home in my apartment, such as running water from the faucet, the fan in my shower room, the washing machine as it churns about, the sound of me crumpling scraps of paper or plastic in the palm of my hand, etc. The album also includes full original songs, or fragments of songs, performed on the Guild acoustic, both with and without vocals (some of which I excerpted and remixed for "Waves Between Emptiness") against the 50 minute-long, ever-morphing "organic sounds" dark ambient backing. This distinguishes it from the releases that follow, which are fully instrumental, with sound created via the keyboard/Midi. Thematically, all six compositions in the series deal in some way with the problems of our time: tensions around the world between the West and China, especially after Pelosi's (in my opinion) unwise and extremely selfish visit to Taiwan, the ongoing war in Ukraine, rising prices/cost) of living globally, nuclear missile proliferation and the threat of nuclear armageddon from various corners of the world, climate change, etc...

The title of the first part in the series, "Bodhidharma's Awakening," at least implies a sense that there may be a "way out" from the troubles of the external world/external reality (i.e. turning "inward," which is, in Hindu and Buddhist thought, the way to enlightenment or "awakening," and which was also the theme of my earlier LP "The Way Out Is In"). The parts in the series that follow, however, have rather darker implications writ between the lines of their respective titles. The second part is entitled "Kaliyug," a term used to reference, metaphorically, the dark ages that the Hindus now believe we are living in/through, with "Kali" being the name of the deity that represents this "yug," or era (the Sanscrit term can also be written as "yuga" in English), a fierce, blue-skinned female deity with multiple arms and hands holding weapons dripping with blood and severed heads. 

"13 Minutes" short film by Marc Lowe

"100 Seconds" is a direct reference to the so-called "Doomsday Clock," published by the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists," which this year (2023), unfortunately, has again inched ten seconds closer to midnight, currently standing at "90 seconds," with thanks to the Ukraine war and repeated threats of nuclear war from Russia and North Korea, tensions with China, etc. (In fact, I felt that I had to do a follow-up this year, so I created a dark ambient track that runs for 9 minutes and called it "90 Seconds [A Corrective]").

The final part, an EP entitled "Cauterize," has a title that implies excessive heat/scorch: in this case, what is happening to the earth, but the term could also represent the heat that soldiers fighting for "freedom" in Bakhmut or Crimea had been feeling, as well as those still fighting so many other nameless wars elsewhere, places that aren't spoken about so much on the news programs we so casually watch on our smartphones or on a television monitor at the doctor's office whilst waiting for our number to be displayed.

The final album I came to consider as a part of the series, though it was more of an "afterthought" in some ways, as it was completed after the first four were compiled, is entitled "Transition." This LP deals thematically, on two of its three lengthy tracks, with the issue of climate change and its consequences. The title track is a bit different in terms of theme, mainly concerned as it is with the topic of life and death, about the "transition" a person's soul undergoes (heavily influenced by Hindu and Buddhist thought) when moving from this world into the next, or moving from one state of being or consciousness over to another one (i.e. "the beyond/the other side")...

"Transition" (full LP audio-only)

Although I hadn't really been considering recording another LP to add to the already-completed four-part series I'd released only a few months prior, after composing these two new lengthy dark ambient tracks for the LP I realized that they fit the sound/style of the series too perfectly to be ignored, so I added a separate mix of "Cauterize" as the third and final track of the LP, one I had earlier done but decided not to publish as part of the first four-part series (thinking it would be overkill to have three versions of "Cauterize" between four LPs) and then added the Roman Numeral "V" to the corner of the album's jacket before releasing it...