Nothing Works

Idiotsyncrasy

Connecticut

"Solitary seascape with abandoned concrete structure" is my new
instrumental concept album. Please close your eyes and listen carefully.  
Pre-released here and on Bandcamp on 02.02.2025.

SSWACS

Wrong Genre - Empty handed (demo version)

I have nothing to say
I have nothing to hide
I have nothing to fear
I have nothing to prove
I have nothing to gain
I have nothing to lose
So wrong
So bad
I have nothing to bring to the table
I have nothing to look forward to
I have nothing to ask for
I have nothing to worry about
I have nothing to give
I have nothing to realize
So wrong
So bad
I have nothing to add
I have nothing to take away

Artwork by Bea www.beapalatinus.com/

Wrong Genre -  Empty-handed

Harmonically symmetrical but not in any usual way.

Artwork by Bea https://www.beapalatinus.com/

Nothing Works - Odd symmetry

Our route bores deeper and deeper into the vertical, yellowish loess walls, the Szarvas-szurdik is one of the most spectacular examples of the deep roads typical of the Szekszárd hills. The loosened, sandy soil of the paths, which have been developed over the centuries and regularly used by horses and carriages, has been eroded by rainfall, causing them to become deeper and deeper, and to become veritable loess gullies as a result of increasing erosion. Locals call them "szurdik", and in recent times many of these deep roads have been concreted over, thus stopping the erosion, but fortunately the Szarvas szurdik have survived in their original form.

Nothing Works - Szurdik

The path that brought us here run out. We're off the track already. No reason to go back. No way to go further. Good. Somehow, it feels right. Impassable feels almost like home now.
Artwork by Bea www.beapalatinus.com/

Nothing Works - Impassable

Music for birds.
Artwork by Bea www.beapalatinus.com/

Nothing Works - For the birds

In memoriam Daniel C. Dennett (1942-2024)
"In Walt Disney's classic animated film Dumbo, about the little elephant who learns to spread his giant ears and fly, there is a pivotal scene in which a dubious—indeed terrified—Dumbo is being cajoled by his friends, the crows, to leap offa cliff into the air, proving to himself that he can fly. One of the crows has a bright idea. When Dumbo isn't looking he plucks a tail feather from one of his kind and then ceremonially hands it to Dumbo, announcing that it is a magic feather: So long as Dumbo clutches it in his trunk, he can fly! The scene is presented with masterful economy. No explanation is provided, since even small children get the point without being told: The feather isn't really magic; it's a prosthetic device, a belief-crutch of sorts that will get Dumbo off the ground by the power of positive thinking. Now imagine a variation on that scene. Imagine that one of the other crows, a 
village skeptic who is smart enough to see what trick is being played but not smart enough to see its virtue, starts trying to inform Dumbo of the truth as he perches on the cliff edge, feather held tightly. "Stop that crow!" the children would shriek. Stifle that smarty-pants, quick, before he ruins it for Dumbo!
 
In the eyes of some, I am that crow."
(Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 2003)

Artwork by Bea www.beapalatinus.com/

Connecticut - I am that crow

This idiom most likely developed from the practice of climbing trees, in which the farther away from the trunk (or, in other words, the further out on the limb) that a person went, the more dangerous it was. This explains why this idiom is associated with various types of risk taking, including risk by assuming something without all the facts or by...

Artwork by Bea www.beapalatinus.com/

Nothing Works - Out on a limb

Enceladus is the sixth-largest moon of Saturn and the 19th-largest in the Solar System. It is about 500 kilometers (310 miles) in diameter,about a tenth of that of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. It is mostly covered by fresh, clean ice, making it one of the most reflective bodies of the Solar System. Consequently, its surface temperature at noon reaches only −198 °C (75.1 K; −324.4 °F), far colder than a light-absorbing body would be. Despite its small size, Enceladus has a wide variety of surface features, ranging from old, heavily cratered regions to young, tectonically deformed terrain.

Artwork by Bea www.beapalatinus.com/

Nothing Works - Enceladus

At home in being lost is a track that came to be by me hitting the strings on my guitar with a thick reusable latex straw I borrowed from my daughter. The rest fell into place magically, just like when you get lost in a dense forest of everything that ever was.
Artwork by Bea www.beapalatinus.com/

Nothing Works - At home in being lost

Step by step, brick by brick we're gonna take it back!

Nothing works - Step by step

Idiotsyncrasy is trying everything to escape from my typical moves (phrases, harmony, structure) and still failing miserably. According to Einstein, insanity Is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. While I can certainly co-miserate with Albert's claim, I think creative idiocy is franctically trying to do something else all the time and ending up with the same result. There, I said it :)

Idiotsyncrasy - part one

Idiotsyncrasy - part two

Idiotsyncrasy - part three

Idiotsyncrasy - part four

Idiotsyncrasy - part five

Idiotsyncrasy - part six

Idiotsyncrasy - part seven

Idiotsyncrasy - part eight

Connecticut - Sixteen

I arrived in the evening hours after a long journey. Slept in Guilford hall in a single bed room that would be my accommodation for the next six months. During the night the campus got snowed in. In the morning I started to walk on Hillside road towards the southern edge. Hillside circle is a residential area that gave my first encounter with that New England style fairytale kind of homes in the woods. Later we got a chance to live in one like that for a couple of years. But that's another tune.

Connecticut - Hillside circle

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.
(Emily Dickinson)

with

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. (Franz Kafka)

solitary

In September 1890, Susan and John Dunham of Tolland sold “a piece of land on the north side of the highway known as Dog Lane” to the fourth district for a schoolhouse.  They were paid $50 for it. The Dog Lane School served the Storrs community until 1930 when the new Storrs Grammar School opened (now the Audrey Beck Municipal Center in Storrs, CT).

Connecticut - Dog lane

The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever. (Jacques Yves Cousteau)

seascape

"There is in certain living souls a quality of loneliness unspeakable, so great it must be shared as company is shared by lesser beings. Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this that in immensity there is one lonelier than you." Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985)

abandoned

Music has to do with sounds, so we need to find them somewhere and it is preferred to find musical ones. You have two sources for sounds: noises, which always tell you something — a door cracking, a dog barking, the thunder, the storm; and then you have instruments. An instrument tells you, 'la-la-la-la.' Music has to find a passage between noises and instruments. It has to escape. It has to find a compromise and an evasion at the same time; something that would not be dramatic because that has no interest to us, but something that would be more interesting than sounds like Do-Re-Mi-Fa...  (Pierre Schaeffer)

concrete

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality. (Martin Luther King. Jr.)

What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. (Erwin Schrödinger)

structure

At the original settlement of Hither Place (by 1833 called simply Windham, Windham Village, or sometimes Windham Green) two major turnpikes intersected, the east-west Windham Turnpike and the north-south Windham and Mansfield Turnpike. Scotland was still part of Windham, a rural neighborhood with a small village to the east, in the hills surrounding the Little River. The newly created borough of Willimantic lay in the west, in the Willmantic River Gorge. The secondary roads were narrow, winding, stony, and muddy, but the turnpikes  were straighter, wider, and more level. They were elevated in the miry places and chiseled into the hills in the elevated areas. It was to promote trade and commerce that, in the years following the Revolutionary War, the new State of Connecticut had granted certain private businesses the right to construct turnpikes and charge tolls.

Connecticut - Windham Tpke

In the American colonies, there was a shortage of labor, but hundreds of streams and rivers ripe for exploitation as power sources. In order to utilize the vast forests of the New World and supply the need for building materials in the growing country, sawmills (and other mills) were eventually built on nearly every source of moving water—by 1840 there were about 5,500 sawmills in New England, with nearly 700 in Connecticut alone.

Connecticut - Sawmill brook

Connecticut - Pleasant valley

Back in the late 1700s there were two main roads in Mansfield, both running North and South.  To go from one to the other, people had to go down to Windham or up to what is now known as the Storrs area.  So, some people in the south end of Mansfield got together for a road making bee to make a road that would go from the East bank of the Natchaug River to the road that went from Windham to Mansfield City.

A day was chosen and the men worked on the new road while the women prepared dinner.  One of the foods was a large kettle of Indian Puddin (spelled as pronounced) which was corn meal that was cooked over an open wood fire.  The kettle was hung over the fire on a three legged tripod.  There were, of course, a large number of children present.  One of them, a boy, tripped over one leg of the tripod and the whole thing, kettle and contents, spilled over him.  He was quite badly burned as the pudding was boiling. After the road was finished, no name was given to it, but whenever anyone spoke of the new road, they identified it as the road “where the boy was burned by the Indian Puddin.”  Gradually it became known as “Puddin Lane” and Puddin was spelled as it was pronounced then – dropping the g.”

Connecticut - Puddin lane

"Christmas Time Is Here" was composed by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi to accompany the opening of the 1965 television special A Charlie Brown Christmas. It was originally written as an instrumental, but producer Lee Mendelson decided that the song needed lyrics. Mendelson recalled, "When we looked at the show about a month before it was to go on the air, I said, 'That's such a pretty melody; maybe we should try and find some people to put some lyrics to it.' In the end it was Mendelson himself putting the words to it. The rest is history.

Christmas time is here (Guaraldi/Mendelson)

Connecticut - Sumpin sumpin

Connecticut - Hartford rain

Wangumbaug Lake, also known as Coventry Lake, is a natural lake located in Coventry, Connecticut. It covers 378 acres (1.53 km ) and is about 35 feet (11 m) deep and 1.8 miles (2.9 km) long with a circumference of 5 miles (8.0 km). It is fed by springs and has one natural outlet, Coventry Lake Brook, which flows southeast into the Willimantic River. Melt from a retreating glacier formed the lake 13,000 years ago. Wangumbaug means "Crooked Pond" in Algonquian. It was likely named by the Nipmuc, who settled the area before European contact.

Connecticut - Wangumbaug

I make noise. No matter what.
To complicate matters mentioned above, I make concept albums of mostly instrumental music. It is kind of stupid, if you think about it. Why? I tell you why. When I am working on these albums I imagine the person I am making the album for. I imagine the listener. I imagine someone sitting in their home or traveling on a bus. This person searches for my album on her or his favorite streaming service and plays it from beginning to end. That takes about 40 minutes of unbroken attention. But perhaps it is not even enough for the effect to fully take place. Maybe the listener (God bless her heart) has to repeat that whole process a couple of times before the THING starts taking shape for them - how the whole is different form the sum of its parts. Anyway, I work and I imagine the listener. My hero, my heroine.

So what is stupid about making concept albums? I think you can see where the story goes. What do you think, where are these listeners who take the time and listen and repeat the process of actively engaging? For an entire album of an obscure, unknown, unestablished bum kind of composer? Where are these people that I am working for relentlessly for decades? Probably nowhere. There are no such listeners. Put your hand to your heart and tell me, how often does it happen that you listen to a whole album? And I mean listen, not just let it roll and engage in other activities that require your attention to some degree. How often do you do that? The person I imagined, the person the whole work is dedicated to - may not even exist. 

And it does not hinder me much. I keep working on concept albums as if there were people who had the time and experience and interest and intention and stamina and whatever else does it take to listen that way.

There is nothing new in this for me. As of profession, I am a university professor and I write and publish scientific papers about the psychology of action, perception and cognition. I have to tell you, that is also a lot of work for an extremely narrow audience. In principle, there is nothing wrong with serving a very specific and narrow need, I guess. 

Also, the way I define art and science to myself includes that you do it, and just do it, irrespective of reward, affirmation and you do it without even looking at the demand landscape. Why? Precisely because the expectation of being rewarded and adjusting your work to demands is a recipe for not finding anything interesting, anything new. Serve demands - make no discoveries. And that is basically why I am doing this relentlessly. I work, finish and publish my things. Into the dark. Hoping that it finds you.

Palatinus

Pinned to spotlight

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