The music industry today, and with it the art industry in general, focuses on the finished product. This focus is unfounded. Art is not an object, either sound, image, or thing. Art is a process, a happening. When we focus on the finished product we miss the 'happening' itself. Releasing an album is akin to giving it its funeral; a farewell. The music happens in the process, and if we're lucky the fruits of that process are captured within the music and are there for the listener to experience; like a memorial at a funeral.

With my next E.P 'A Man on His Tornado Learns the Importance of Space' scheduled for release over the next few months through iH! Audio﻿, I have decided to show you some of the 'becoming' of that release, not with songs from the E.P. itself, but with music I both worked and collaborated on in the interim that developed, changed, and evolved my approach to creating music allowing for the becoming within the E.P, and with it furthering the becoming of Gregory the Asshole.

The first of which I will share is a collaboration project with Jeshua. Where as my approach to music was always adding as much sound in as I could, Jeshua functions in the reverse. If I were a gangster from Brooklyn spitting fierce rhymes down the mic, Jeshua would be a poet, sensitively shaping each words. Both forms have their merits, but working with him thought me the value of subtraction rather then addition. 

Finally, this song is not a finished piece of music. Alas our different approaches rendered our collaboration impossible to finish, but the process itself was truly beautiful. Here's one of the songs we worked on; 'Now I Know How to Care'.

Vocals: Gregory and Jeshua
Guitar: Jeshua
Synths: Gregory 
Produced, mixed and mastered by Gregory and Jeshua
Artwork by Cristina Stoica

Now I Know How to Care (with Jeshua)

Life Is Eternal Only In Pointlesness

Dear Heidegger, I Am Not Good At Sex. Sorry.

Being Dispensable

You do not see my broken face,
And my silly little smile.

You taste the chocolate chip in vanilla ice cream.

I am boring, and I fear the day when you will know.
The evidence is piling up, no longer can I bestow my charm upon your fairy face.

See what you must, use me as you want,
Take me as your own, mould me to your subjective will.
Leave me moulded moldy, mauled
I can be your manikin on the sidewalk.

Kick me in my broken face.
And let the next do the rest.




Being Dispensable

Rest In Death, John

The overlord dances on a million turtles squealing,
And bless the best for dark nights are growing,
Terrible turmoil, 
Tyrannical tycoon,
Technology encloses its collective grasp And language
Language is the dwelling place for all our saintly singing, 
It seeks to be all revealing,
No sign just signified
A lamppost lights up and suddenly we can see again Fat chance
All is dark and grows ever darker
The darkest is yet to come
Like a spoiling; 
to corrupt over time, render inept
We’ve never asked the proper questions
Our lips are sealed shut
But 7 marching men seek refuge in my foreign tongue

And put parcels in our hearts,
There is no such thing as magic,
Only the undisclosed,
And when the flowers blooms the bee makes its precious honey But all the bees are dying And the hunger in our bellies won’t match the emptiness of our minds
Anxiety is too much to ask
Abyss goes deeper then any slippery surface

But slip we will
And slip down 
And when there is no floor from which our heads wont bang
We will be lost
And we will wait
But no help will come

Because how can holy haunt us if there is no holy healing sources
The water dried up And we forgot to refill the bucket
What else to expect from vulnerable vertigo
Whats to happen left in trace


A leap is needed,

Abyss awaits,
Tomorrow perhaps Tomorrow never comes,
All there is is now, 
and now is yesterday, now is tomorrow and then again today
Like a spider caught in its own web
The eternal does not exist 
And neither do you really
Trample
You can see the future On the surface of a glass Lie a million pieces otherwise
The circle encloses inwards and outwards we all dance and sing
Within trance we linger, 
And the centre pulls us down

To risk all for freedom
We breath in
But breath we must
For sense is, everywhere and nowhere
You can see the future

the end


Seven Marching Men Seek Refuge In My Foreign Tongue

Another end and a new beginning.
A circle.
A road to nowhere and nothing.
A fatal bluff,
Honesty doesn’t come easily but soon you’ll see.
You get what you want in the end.
You just don’t want what you want and the circle continues.

Life is the hard place between nothing and a cold shoulder,
All the bolder:

Life is no where.
Life is misery
Life is apathy.

And life is happening so brace yourself

But also embrace yourself.

Your misery is yours, 
Cradle it,
Nurse it,

Because the gods will not reimburse you
And your statutory rights do not apply

So get by by escaping 
Because as Heraclitus said nature loves to hide,

And so the best of life grows in those darkened places

And on the faces that are worn out, and grey and old, 
The wretchedness and the stink
On the brink of giving up
Hot coals and cold suns
The suffering

___________________________________________________________


I am unable to carry this weight on my own

A bashful admission but a truthful position

the fable of our constitution came clear in times apart 

I know where I am unwanted.
I know when I am unwanted.

And in this deceitful disconnect the gifts I lay at your feet grew of mould and decay

I was wasted and wasting and now I am wasten

But the circle doesn’t care anyway, it just continues.

___________________________________________________________

This is not to say that thing are unfair. The measuring stick just doesn’t fit.

So get used to it.

And get used to it again. 

And again.

And again.


Circle

"When we write or when we read, it is easy to forget that the beginning is not the word, but the scream. Faced with the mutilation of human lives by capitalism, a scream of sadness, a scream of horror, a scream of anger, a scream of refusal: NO.
The starting point of theoretical reflection is opposition, negativity, struggle. It is from rage that thought is born, not from the pose of reason, not from the reasoned-sitting-back-and-reflecting-on-the-mysteries-of-existence that is the conventional image of 'the thinker'.
We start from negation, from dissonance.
[...]
In the beginning is the scream. We scream."

 - John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power.

War ))) Waged

This is a remix of a song by the very talented Sive called 'If I Had a Home to Go to'. When I first heard the song its haunting beauty really stuck with me, and she was kind enough to let me remix it. 

You can hear the original here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fctzr5_Lujk
and also check out her soundcloud page: https://soundcloud.com/sivemusic
                                       Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/siveband?fref=ts
                            or her Bandcamp page: http://sivemusic.bandcamp.com/ where you can buy her debut album!

If I Had A Home to Go to Remix

Gregory Jackson is a musician, poet and performance artist who is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy. His research topic engages Heidegger in the 1930’s, on his quest toward inciting a creative revolution that would found a new form of poetic thinking. Although their disagreements are endless, Gregory finds Heidegger’s vision inspirational and their eyes are set on similar horizons. Gregory seeks to stumble his way into the place where the distinction between art and thought is yet to arise, and has been seen wandering about the marketplace asking for directions. With a torch in one hand and a bell in the other, he tries to think both about and with his art. On the weekends he makes coffee at the Dublin Food Co-Op, and one day hopes to include this passion for coffee in his over all life pro-ject. 

Gregory the Asshole is a fiction of Gregory Jackson’s imagination but this doesn’t make him any less real. He is a submarine in the vast oceans of the Thinking Art experiment. He claims to create what he rather pretentiously calls Music for an Absent Cinema, where the participants’ meditative engagement with the work is said to hold the potential to briefly fulfil the pieces’ immanent directedness. Such resonance harbours the possibility of a momentary thinking-space, where creative de-cision can seize an arriving future. 

More theory to come:
https://may.academia.edu/GregoryJackson

Gregory The Asshole

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