It's often hard to say where the creation of a track begins. Emotional Triggers Pulled is an exception. The cut had its genesis in Roland's Virtual Analog synthesizer, the JP-8000. Fiddling with knobs in a wide-open exploration of the keyboard's sounds, Marsden programmed a pad that ended up providing the foundation for the rest of the track. It survives as almost an underscore--an element of the mix that is felt more than it is heard. Once it was in place, the rest of the track took shape along lines that seem, in retrospect, almost inevitable, from the delicacy of the introductory arpeggiation to the emphatic piano hook that becomes the piece's calling card. It's as if the music sprang, full bodied, from a moment in which the meaning of a sound was suddenly heard and apprehended. The rest was simply an unpacking of the implicit.

This is the limbic logic that overwhelms the rational world. That moment of understanding---not of the mind, but of the gut---has all the violent clarity of a gun shot. Perhaps this is why we speak of emotional triggers. And perhaps this is why the creative process is so draining and demands that we access places beyond the ratiocinative mind. These limbic explosions are destructive. They upend the order of the world. But in that upending is a new order, implicit and existing in a state of potentiality. Everyone who has ever felt any strong emotion knows something of that clairvoyant certainty, of seeing the world to come in the moment of succumbing.

Emotional Triggers Pulled

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Emotional Triggers Pulled

Marsden Meyer