The Raven in mythology is the Trickster, a shape shifter, slipping into countless forms that he creates and discards. The Trickster knows who he is, feels himself regardless of whatever form he may assume. It may be that he has no form at all, that he appears as those who perceive him wish to see him, that an inability to accept something outside of definition compels us to impose form on what we fail to comprehend. The presence of a shape shifter is imperative if creative expression is to survive, much less flourish. This late in history, these communications which speak in subtle impressions between imaginations are increasingly running the risk of falling into a trap more common to language, specifically they are being used to pin an idea or action down when it finally stops moving, and finally being understood as property, not communication. Words work in reverse from the thing itself, categorizing in the service of pure function whereas art could function as a gift, the object being merely a pretext for the expansion and free exchange of ideas.
In regards to music we still see the insistence on imprisoning sounds into familiar shapes. When music is understood as jazz, rock, pop, classical or world beat it can be approached, trapped and sold as a form, what is ignored is both context and content. Unfortunately most musicians comply with this ghettoization, but now and again the Trickster will show up as this or that until our vision has cleared up just enough to think we know what it is we see, when he eludes us again, laughing his way into another space and time. It is the raven who is the vanguard of these sounds.
Yuragi
A very old Japanese word once referred to waterways and beaches as places of asylum where authority and law could not touch. This is where people could trade, sing or exchange ideas. Such a place near a body of water is significant. It exists upon a shifting border that constantly destroys and reshapes both the forms of the body of water and the shores it touches. The word is synonymous with fluctuation, and includes the notions of freedom and dissipation. What sort of people were attracted to such a geography and what songs would they sing?
The need to be outside, or at the fringes of society is telling, as is that this fringe was pushed to the limit of geographical fact. We tend to consider fringe today as confined to ideas being that rarely does a physical site any longer provide asylum from authority, particularly here in the United States where the military now conducts maneuvers on it's own coastal cities as recently happened in Oakland, CA. Perhaps the grudge that authority bears against shorelines and their rogue cultures will never be forgotten, but conversely the need and desire to evade form and authority will also continue.
The construction of identities and their maintenance is of great importance to authority and commerce to this day, whether these identities correspond to a group of people or the products and art forms said to be representative of them. Fixed identities are situated by their relationship to a dominant structure that controls them, while having them inventoried into neat categories of a more homogeneous whole. When an individual transgresses the borders of their own group it is perceived as betrayal, while the dominant group sees a provocation to it's own authority. In music we have seen this time and again from violence at the premier of certain classical works earlier in our century to the vilification of free jazz by critics and audiences of the mid 60's, and on into the well documented hostility that punk encountered.
These are the most obvious examples. The sound of songs sung, played or improvised on lawless shores could always be heard by those floating at sea or brave enough to leave the shelter of a well ordered town in search of community outside identity. The juke joint, the derelict punk club, tiny jazz bar, or deserted warehouse have all at one time or another places of ill repute, seen as dangerous to the larger population specifically because you never knew what would happen there, these places formed their own rules and developed their own languages independent of the common tongue, expressing ideas and emotions that the dominant culture cared not to hear. The accusation of these often fleeting, chimerical sounds not even being music seems to run deep in our world that insists upon proper identification. What Yuragi points to is the possibility of a community outside of identity, a nomadic community that refuses to build monuments or live by rules and governments, communities whose camps are washed away by the changing course of the river. In spite of the hostility to these gatherings and to the sounds of the songs improvised there, the fact remains that the lone traveler or outlaw can still find friendship on hidden shores.
Solvite Corpora et Coagulate Spiritum
In certain music now emerging we can detect trace evidence, residue of old arts and rites. A basic tenet of Alchemy was to dissolve form and coagulate spirit, to hide what was manifest and make visible what was not apparent. The emphasis was on the spirit, the fundamental nature of matter. One reason for their persecution at least by Christianity was in a perceived threat to a monopoly on the spiritual. In seeking their own answers, the Alchemists ran the risk of dissolving the very body of church authority. Forms remain necessary for control of them to exist, and this is why what evades form still elicits hostility. Regardless the Great Work has continued. In a way music could be said to have continued the aim of it by dissolving the strictures of form to refine expressions of soul into gold. Regarding decomposition, another principle of Alchemy, it is remembered that in the wake of punk early industrial music was at best an undefinable pulp, or fluid from the cadaver of rock music, the sound of decomposition, without which no regeneration is possible.
We can see the similarity of music to alchemy in the emergence of improvisation in the electro-acoustic field where often single sources for sound are exploded into kaleidoscopic sonic shards. The cross fertilization of imaginations and the affects on their expression on the border of form and identity is a cause for joy in our alienating culture. To this day in defiance of form and identity, temporary communities learn the discipline of seeing with sound to perceive kindred spirits, hearing songs of the outside on the shores of formlessness.
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