Artist in Residence 2017: Aaron Beaumont

For the past week, the maintenance crew has been replacing the heating system in my apartment building. I've been subjected to an extensive palette of clatters, buzzes, thumps, pounds, hisses, and every manner of aural assault (incidentally, I could not resist including a few samples in the third movement of my piece - an apt demonstration of the sinister, untold horrors that familiar objects like toys and seashells take on when wrenched from their harmless contexts). We've had no hot water over the weekend, and today, after vacating the premises completely from 9 to 3 while drywall dust settled on every surface of my apartment, I've spent the last two hours being shuffled from room to room, tragically and callously displaced from my disheveled home studio workspace, currently seeking refuge in the kitchen, the tapping on my iPhone-linked Bluetooth keyboard hopelessly drowned out by drilling and welding in two other rooms. Oh, the humanity.

This tongue-in-cheek lament of my current status in no way means to make light of any actual suffering in the world. Rather, it shows how easily our comforts and physical state can be thrown into seemingly irrevocable disorder - where something as simple as lack of hot water for a day or two (a comfort I admittedly take for granted) can produce existential anxiety and spotlight the roving line between security and destitution. Few things make us as cognizant of the tenuous nature of our place in the universe as being forced to prop one's iPhone perilously against a toaster oven simply to send an email.

Daniel 4 serves up perhaps the most spectacular Biblical example of existential upheaval. On first glance, it would seem tricky for plebs like me to empathize with Nebuchadnezzar and his "emperor problems." Here is a man painted as a megalomaniac, narcissist, and authoritarian; in the dramatic psychological mutation of his fall from grace, we are, perhaps, meant to believe he's gotten his comeuppance. As all ancient myths agree, hubris must be chastened. Indeed, the powerful-powerless, authoritarian-benevolent ruler, and God-human binaries initially attracted me the most in the early days of this project. But Daniel 4 turned out to be less tidy and more challenging than that. For starters, we see a man who, in some respects, is not inaccurate in his boasts - Neb did accomplish some of the most spectacular feats in recorded history, as the provider-tree of his community depicted in the vision. Daniel seems to sincerely lament the judgment pronounced on the king in his dream. If justice is served here, it is at the very least a complicated one.

In my last post, I offered one possible reason for my vague unease with Neb's plight. The king found himself swiftly bereft of a past, abruptly wrenched from his previous exalted state. We don't know the extent to which Neb was self-conscious

of or able to contextualize the amplitude of this fall. But regardless of the specifics of his madness (subject to considerable discussion - lycanthropy is one potential analogue in modern medicine), it would have been a precipitous and disorienting transformation, and the suffering therein is sure. The sudden absence of my own

history, of memories of any kind, would for me represent the purest kind of madness, perhaps the worst kind of hell. Uprooted, and thrown into a completely foreign state, Neb would have no context from which to derive a sense of identity. Deeper than simply losing a few physical artifacts of one's own personal narrative (e.g. the beloved 90s era DVDs I mentioned in post #3), my empathy with Neb's plight stems from this: his sudden reappearance as a brand new creature in a foreign state is analogous to the experience of every human at birth. At some point, we all "wake up," born with consciousness in a physical body. Our only context is some vague subconscious genetic hangover, a cellular knowledge of things, a sensation almost like trying to remember something you just dreamed, but can't quite pinpoint.

We acquire an operating manual bit by bit, get busy trimming back the weeds of the absurd and the surreal from the manicured lawns of culture and civilization, and do our level best to organize our home within a cosmos in which our position is ultimately uncertain. In my work, I extend Nebuchadnezzar's story as a metaphor for the universal human experience, ruminating on the idea of birth as a plunge into a surreal, dreamlike state as we undergo the halting, erratic process of forging our own identity and bringing into focus a personal narrative.

My work draws heavily on the most potent purveyor of identity and culture - the family. The arc of my piece, entitled "The Strangest Thing" (unfortunately in no way affiliated with or inspired by the celebrated Netflix series) seeks to represent the dynamic, fragmentary way our own personal narratives and identities develop and persist, as we navigate uncertain circumstances and unfamiliar contexts, wading through all the wonder, confusion, and occasional terror that accompanies growth.

"Sampling" seemed an especially well suited vehicle to this exploration of memory, permanence, and personal history. Our very identities are derived from prismatic "samples" of our accumulated stories as creatures. As such, the connecting tissue between the five movements of my piece is a musical mosaic taken from dozens of samples from my own existing musical catalogue, including my very earliest recordings of the first songs I ever wrote - artifacts of a previous state, if you will, recontextualized (sometimes wildly) here. Similarly, I've used field recordings and audio samples from my own life - playing with my nieces, chatting with my parents, sitting by a lake in the Midwest, shaking a handful of seashells in a beach in Maine. Many of these field recordings did not originate for this project, but rather out of my own simple desire to remember and somehow preserve what's most important to me, and in so doing, document and cultivate my own sense of identity. I used my great uncle's guitar and my grandma's mandolin, heirlooms that are bound up in my own origin story as a music maker. I tried to select from all these raw materials samples that could relate the very human experiences of birth, self-discovery, evolution, decline, and redemption, to the surreal arc of Daniel 4.

Appropriately the medium itself recreated a sense of nascence and even discomfort for me, in that I was artistically off the map - I'd never tried my hand at an electronic, ambient, through-composed soundscape (see Narwhal and Ocelot, my decidedly more "pop" Spark & Echo tune from last year). The piece closes in familiar territory though, with a pop song that ruminates on the thread tying every participant in this narrative together - we all wake up as creatures, bound together by our shared experience of wonder and newness, terror and tenuousness, and exuberance in our creature-ness, revelling as simultaneous minds and bodies. Neb's experience is bizarre no doubt - but the weirdest part of his story is still the part it has in common with our own - the simple, wild fact of waking up as a conscious corporeal creature, whose very composition - whose very cells - herald toward the future aeons of seismic victories and instructive failures.

It's an experience that, if we give ourselves enough pause from the comforts we seek to shore up around it, is altogether strange. The strangest thing, you might say.

The Strangest Thing

I had a dream, what a strange thing -

I became a creature with a beating heart.

It had a body that kept changing -

Sure felt like the same thing even as it fell apart.

And that’s when I woke up

I had a dream I was the falling snow

Learning everything about the ground.

But any pretty thing that’s ever fallen knows

You can never quite forget the clouds,

And you never quite wake up

No, you never quite wake up.

I could be a king again

If only I could just go back to sleep, back to sleep.

Every Body understands

That a body is no kinda place for a mind to be.

God has never learned a thing,

While my holy brain bursts at the seams

Seems life is just remembering

What you saw in a dream -

It’s the strangest thing, it’s the strangest thing.

I dreamed about a dark room in my mind

Where I woke up just as something left

And life was just the time I spent

Trying to paint the scent they left behind.

My brain is clenched, it can forget

My bones still blindly carry it

My blood will be a chariot and I’ll find that

I could be a king again

If only I could just go back to sleep, back to sleep.

Every Body understands

That a body is no kinda place for a mind to be.

God never learns a thing,

While my holy brain bursts at the seams

Yeah, it seems life is just remembering

What you saw in a dream -

It’s the strangest thing, it’s the strangest thing.

I heard my name on the whistling wind

It passed right through me like a shiver in

An old man with old eyes glistenin,’

Spittin’ fireside yarns like they’re listenin.’

But who’s got time for reminiscin’ when

A fresh snow’s fallin.’ So kissing him

On sandpaper whiskers, God slips in

To a loud snow suit,

Laces little winter boots

And races outside to play.