The Rube Goldberg Machine of Semiotics and Symbols Podcast presents Episode 4: Music as the Dialectical Synthesis, in a series of explorations into music and its relationship to meaning.
Sean Kiley and Ben Kinsinger discuss music as the dialectical synthesis between the archetypal energies of Soul and Spirit in the context of transpersonal psychology. This episode is a continued exegesis into the RGMS publication The Way of Apollo and Dionysus in the RGMS.
Music and ritual have long been intertwined on that same golden thread of transcendence running all throughout time. Their dynamic is eternal, but our perception of their interconnectivity ebbs and flows, consciously or unconsciously navigating the space of their association.
Here, in Ritual Engagement with Music RGMS proposes a revitalization of our efforts to heighten the depths of experience by devising and excavating ways to bring the conscious participation of these two domains into an alchemical marriage.
From the Visionary Commonwealth, RGMS presents a deep symbolic reflection on the experience of the album ‘morning bells’. Ewan Jenkins explores the significance of the bell as it relates to awakening, offering a profoundly personal, yet transcendent perspective on his engagement with the music.
To further understand and dialogue with the nature of music, RGMS presents a model of theoretical analysis, which strives to engage directly with the empirical perception of a work of art. Archetypes of Musicaims to navigate the most distilled polar fields within the realm of both immediate and linear awareness, and thus achieve a more accessible and discernible understanding of the musical process.
The Rube Goldberg Machine of Semiotics and Symbols Podcast presents Episode 3: Mythology in the RGMS, in a series of explorations into music and its relationship to meaning.
Sean Kiley and Iminah Kani discuss the role of myth in the RGMS, including the Greek tragedies Oedipus Rex by Sophocles and The Bacchae by Euripides, as well as the underlying mythos of the RGMS as outlined in the research publication The Way of Apollo and Dionysus in the RGMS.
The Rube Goldberg Machine of Semiotics and Symbols Podcast presents Episode 2: Empircism of Music, in a series of explorations into music and its relationship to meaning.
Founder of the Visionary Commonwealth, Ewan Jenkins discusses with RGMS co-founder Sean Kiley the project of cultivating a both meaningful and beneficial relationship with music by analyzing our modes of engagement and empirical understanding of sound.
RGMS presents the first episode in a series of explorations into music and its relationship to meaning.
Co-founders Sean Kiley and Davis Connors discuss the first RGMS research publication The Meaning Behind RGMS, which dives into the philosophical underpinnings of the rather mysterious name of the music collective and research journal.
The rgms mission statement proclaims: "By cultivating a heuristic to retroactively assess the unconscious workings of music making, the rgms aims to excavate what lingers in the unconscious and bring it forth in the form of a conscious framework, from which new works may be born." But just what does this mean? And, why, you might ask, shall we strive to excavate the Unconscious into the Conscious domain? Still - how does assessing the processes of music making achieve this?
On this day, the Epiphany, just as the Magi come bearing gifts, so too do those obscured forces, which underpin the celestial manuscript gifted to Bobby Goldberg, issue forth. Manifest, in this gift of insight, wherein those mysteries take repose, just beyond the peripherals of perception. The quest for the proverbial Grail asks: "Will this traveling in circles eventually cede, and open the lips of mystery?" A path as such, which may become clear in this far-reaching research publication.
From The Visionary Commonwealth, a bourgeoning new music blog, here we have the foundations of a nascent heuristic of music derived from an intuitive sense.
Over the course of the next months, albums by members of the rgms collective will be released.
These include collaborations and solo projects; however, all albums will be released under the name 'rgms'.
In the nature of the collective, identity is formed from a dynamic relationship with the parts that make up the whole.
These albums releases will begin to emerge in discrete pairs whose relationship will be either dialectically opposed or directly related. They will be issued either simultaneously or a week apart.
Release series #1 is comprised of albums born to the minds of all current rgms artists before the inception of the collective itself. It may be considered the 'Primum Mobile' of the unspoken centre.
The reason for this unspoken centre is that we do not wish to precipitatley impose an aesthetic or meaning upon the rgms. Instead, the rgms must be approached as a symbol with its own desires, allowing it to flower by its own volition.
By nature, creation is limitation, consciously or unconsciously we create a structure within which a symbol may begin to take shape. Without this form, a symbol (or an idea) escapes back to the realm of pure abstraction. This limitation (or structure) of the rgms is that of the Apollonian and Dionysian dialectic. (more on this)
With this in mind, the rgms has devised a heuristic to begin to understand the desires of itself.
This method of self-reflection makes use of a Release Code Chart consigned to a Cartesian plane:
RGMS Release Code In-Depth
Due to the nature of the collective, there will be a wide range of aesthetic output within the rgms.
Despite this variance, each artist strives to remain true to the unspoken centre between that of Apollo and Dionysus.
Every release will therefore be labeled with coordinates from the essential rgms Cartesian plane.
The two poles of identifiability within rgms releases thus include, density (x) and anticipatability (y).
The latter pole concerns not only density of the occupied spectral band, but also that of the sonic and structural complexity.
The former pole of anticipatability, which also may be considered 'convention', is far more nebulous.
This is due to the fact that each individual possess a distinct and highly personal set of protentions when engaging in a music.
The artist places their respective brainchild on this graph then in accordance with their own predispositions balanced with that of pre-existing content relative to the collective itself.
Our four cardinal directions may be further classified as the following:
maximal immersions
minimal deserts
avante-garde tessellations
traditional re-workings.
And at the center, meditative canopies attempt to delicately straddle the four directions.
Note that all coordinates must be integers, and may not include a zero.
All zero coordinates are reserved for collective wide collaborative efforts, which focus on cultivating a meditative landscape.
