In the summer, my Japanese doppelgänger, sporting a slightly different haircut and similar outfit to myself, is sitting in a forest drinking a glass bottle of pop and running his free hand through the grass in a steady rhythm. In the city, the rhythm is created for you and affects your heart rate. It affects the rate of your speech. You find yourself speeding up for no reason, he thinks. Out in the forest, you must create the rhythm yourself. Nature is infinitely random, but only up to a point where it is calculable, and then it is infinitely systematic. Before you find this point, he thinks, you must make sense of the randomness through rhythm. There are fireflies out — some seem very close, and he considers catching one in the now empty pop bottle, which the grass has furled around to clutch like a nest. Fireflies often appear close, but they are always far away. This is the way of all natural things: you can predict their position, and you can predict their momentum, but never both at the same time.
All things can be examined this way.
I have never been to Japan. I would accept an invitation to go without reticence. Japan seems like a country among few where intense, mindless consumption of the “hyperassimilation” way can co-exist with equally intense mindfulness.
Michiru Aoyama is a mindful experimental artist, and he takes into account the uncertainty — the unknowable-ness — of nature when composing. His graphical explanation of ambient music illustrates this perfectly. Some of his music seems frenetic, as simply a imperfect human reaction to the perfect stillness of nature. “ほたる” (“firefly”) is meditative, mindful ambient at its most calculated, with similar intentions of artists like Nicholas Szczepanick and Adam Worthan. Inspired by the patterned language of insects, the song transpires in quiet, slight movements, like the slow wave of a conductor’s hand.
• Michiru Aoyama: http://t.co/zpurmM5RRu
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