Follow the Sound

I had a long drive and put on Elliot Cole's new album Left Hand Path. I listened from start to finish. Ever played one of those trust exercises where you fall back and let a partner catch you? Ever done contact improv? I let the synth waves wound me, heal me, teach me to love the brain in the person and that person is Elliot and that person is me and that person is all of us. Halfway through the first track, I decide that Elliot is trustworthy. There is no attempt to sabotage my experience. There is a clever avoidance of capriciousness. There is gift after gift and there are musical handrails for accessibility. This is a guided meditation, a class from a kind instructor. My consciousness is stretching, warming up and down, and the entire time I am grateful.

Pattern from chaos. Organized and surprising. The harnessing of paradox recalls the decomposition of trees, formation of mountains, proteins coordinated in a cell, a child at play. It reminds me of my own childhood. I was 8 when I got my Tandy TRS-80 "Color Computer 2". It was a remarkable device that came loaded with the BASIC programming language built-in. BASIC uses normal English words to instruct the computer to perform some task. There were two commands that I loved as a kid:

play "O2 C#" sound 440, 91

With these commands I could play sounds and musical notes from my television speakers. I had a black-and-white CRT tv at the time, and had been in guitar lessons, but the idea that I could code music was beyond fascinating to me.

Scientists and musicians have figured out a few things about sound, and we've been living in the mindspace created by those discoveries ever since. In Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, written 45 years ago, he makes the case for self-referential paradox as a connected thread between the mathematics of Kurt Gödel, the art of Escher, and the music of Bach. In many places in the book, Hofstadter invites the reader to engage with impossible logic and math problems (impossible for me, anyway) involving sets and set theory. Over and over again, Gödel's incompleteness theorem is illustrated: no system can be simultaneously complete (all truths can be expressed), and consistent (no falsehoods can be expressed).

When I listen to a harmony or a musical theme, I am hearing the infinite gradations of air pressure modulation on my ear drum become limited to a recognizable pattern that defines a system. This system is created by the composer's choices. Pop music is a system. It is remarkably consistent. It also tends to be remarkably lacking in the truth department. And here is the paradox of Left Hand Path: that Elliot has to make a choice in construction. He can go a certain number of levels deep into self-reference by choosing from the infinite pool of options, and then choosing again, and choosing again. Random choices would sound like noise and feel like pain. Artful choices, like choosing the Frost-esque left hand path can help you escape the maze. And Elliot chooses artfully.

I used this maze metaphor recently with my wife. I said, "yes, our lives are super tough right now, and yes it feels like we're in a a giant labyrinth, and we keep hitting dead ends." She looked at me as if to say, this is not inspiring. I continued, "but if I imagine I know the solution to all mazes is that by following the wall I'll eventually hit the exit, I can just put out my hand and feel the textures of the hedges, and enjoy every step."

I'm sure my bullshit advice isn't always appreciated, but there was a gem in there for me, at least. Enjoy now, and the ever-present series of surprises my brain is hell-bent on ignoring when I'm stressed. Every time I sigh and look at the sky, I'm choosing the left hand path. Every time my hand touches the earth, I'm choosing it. When I write lines of code that produce a result (even a stream of errors), I've done it.

There are a lot of complicated elements to synthesized sounds, but the envelope of a sound combined with its wave shape (sawtooth, square, sine) determine the majority of the quality of the sound. Soft and warm, or harsh and brittle... for the electronic musician, all of these controllable elements become a part of the composition choices. In Left Hand Path, Elliot weaves all of these elements in simultaneously, but always as guide, friend, and with care.

And so it's no surprise that I am able, while listening, to smile, cry, to feel energized, to recall the hopefulness of my youth sitting in front of the blinking cursor on the screen from my TRS-80.

Amid life's volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA), learning to rely on the choices are available in the present moment can lead to remarkable resilience and transformative outcomes. The gift that Elliot Cole has given us is diving through the void and bringing back a treasure. Left Hand Path is a roadmap. Put it on next time you need to find a way out.