Taj

Taj. The quintessential symbol of love.

In many ways, the Taj Mahal captures the essence of love in its pristine marble, its subtle ornamentation, its stability and its mythical lore.

Early one morning, as I was reading the preface to Giordano Bruno’s dialogues on “Cause, Principle and Unity”, I stumbled upon the idea of the Coincidence of Opposites, a philological idea developed by the theologian Nicolas of Cusa. Very simply, this idea states that two objects that are opposites of each other begin to acquire aspects of the nature of the other, given sufficient exposure to one another. While Nicolas of Cusa was most definitely speaking of the reconciliation of the two natures of Christ - the human and the divine, I decided to use this concept as a metaphor for love.

The track is arranged to indicate two characters that journey through the harmonies and tumult of love. They begin as individuals and through coming in contact with one another, they begin to absorb attributes of each other and are unified by the emotion of love, signified by rhythm in this track. Each character is a distinct sound characterised by texture, timbre and character.

The piece begins with a stuttering atmospheric pad with subtle undertones of a Rhodes piano. Supporting this are some ambient glitch samples that are constructed from a highly processed combination of percussive sounds from a Cr-78 drum machine and field recordings of a stream gargling, two pairs of feet treading on dried autumn leaves and the crackle of a campfire.

This continues into a contrasting soundscape of a Native American flute arpeggiating notes in a random flurry accompanied by a marimba that is struck with a loose hand, merely accenting the character of this second sound. The glitch samples continue along with some erratic rolls on a Japanese Taiko drum set.

After the pleasantries have been observed with the audience and introductions have been made, the two characters turn towards each other and are brought closer by the emotion that we refer to as love, a simple bass loop that begins to give way to a random hi-hat pattern played acoustically on a drum kit.

Just as the two sounds begin to adopt attributes of each other while still maintaining a great deal of individuality, the groove kicks in… generated by a Roland TR-808 drum machine and some textural percussive elements.

The audience is then forced, like our individual characters to be aware not just of the externally harmonious “love” that exists between these two characters but of their individuality as well. Observing this and being aware of it throughout the track is the only way we can appreciate the harmony that would otherwise become too mundane and monotonous. The track finishes signifying the emergence of the two characters affected by this relationship yet unscathed. Alternatively, they perish and all that remains of them is that very symbol of love… much like the Taj itself.

The Taj is the ultimate symbol of love because it presents an undiluted and unromantic idea. It consumes a visitor with as much melancholy as it does awe. The beauty is as striking as the morose thought that it holds the mortal remains of two lovers. Finally, it represents as much regalia and excess as it does the void, the absence of “the other” and emptiness.

This track, is a homage to that archetypical symbol and a sonic meditative ode to that which we each love.

Production Notes:

While the piece involves a lot of instrumentation, it is electronically composed. A variety of scripts written in Javascript add humanising elements. For instance, the erratic and loose striking of the marimba uses a script that generates a random value between 0 and 1, multiplies this value by 10 and then multiplies the result of that by the Feigenbaum constant (a constant of nature that denotes the common ratio of bifurcation in non-linear maps). The velocity (loudness) of the notes is randomly generated through a series of numbers between 0 and 127. Each note that is read through MIDI into the script is echoed 4 times based on the random Feigenbaum values generated.

The music video also plays with the idea of opposites. While the amplitudinal variations of the track change the way particles move in a Perlin Noise flow field, the frequency variations map to a series of tiles. While both parts are creating maps of the music, in some sense, they do it in totally different ways coming together and complementing each other at the end.