"Upon the curvature of a hill
Grass to heel, ranges glimpsed
The glimmer of a sword like a noonday star
That guides the praying hands of a king"

'Like a Noonday Star That Guides the Praying Hands of a King' concludes the unanticipated polyptych of five loop studies, each meditating on an aspect of a poem that has been reproduced with each release.

These recordings have organically surfaced while working on other sessions, sections of modular improvisation, generative music and feedback that caught my ear in a certain noteworthy way, and were set aside to fulfill entirely different purposes.

In many ways, this is the core philosophical view that informs all five releases, the notion that entire worlds of sound always exist in the periphery of what may otherwise seem like a very focused creative vision, which both humbles and frustrates me, leaving me feeling as if I do not quite grasp the profundity of the sound being brought into existence by my own tools, and often makes me wonder how much has been lost in the act of throwing away so-called 'failed' work?

These five releases do not provide any real answer, beyond their self-evident nature, illustrating that the craftsman does not necessarily know what is best for his craft, that this is a realization of the human condition, at the mercy of estimation and imprecise prediction. Arthur Machen once prosaically described the creative act in this way: "One dreams in fire and works in clay."

So what remains here is one last recurrent structure - an isolated fragment of a larger session with a Karplus-Strong digital synthesizer and a digital reiteration of a four-head tape delay machine, which was initially recorded on June 18th, 2021, and subsequently also yielded three other expansive loop-based pieces for Milieu's 'River Ores IX' in the Vibratelepathos series. This piece is a more drone-oriented shadow of those three loop studies, which are more melodically informed, and I find myself beautifully lost within its drifting tone, waiting for and pleasantly re-experiencing the one broken moment in the wavering line, where the loop shifts and restarts, making the mathematical simplicity of the work's design apparent.

In the end, so much preparatory effort and sonic experimentation is broken down into the most earnest of parts, each one like a small gem through which we can see a small portion of the past, repeated ad infinitum - or ad nauseam, depending on your level of patience and expectation - and I am where I was always meant to be, again standing here where I started, considering the creative act, pondering my placement within it, left with more questions than answers as the loop drones on, ambivalent.

Catalog designate: UR-23/176a
Source sound: 2HP Pluck Karplus-Strong paraphonic digital synthesizer
Image: Luigi Mayer / Reprocessed by ABM&D