Lived In explores similar themes that I worked on with Protector’s Tea: resting within the discomfort and uncertainty of time as it moves. This new work is less about spiritual survival instincts and more about acceptance. I often find solace in the notion that time will inevitably pass, but I also find anxiety. To me, these experiences arise in the same instant. My intention was to create a kind of natural rhythm as each side of the tape progressed: a sense of waking in the beginning and of laying down at the end.

I created each piece slowly, day-by-day, and proceeded to live within them. Cooking with them, walking, reading, resting… slowly making alterations and decisions with each day. Much of what is on this tape consists of hidden, yet unfolding personal sound images and self-secret diary entries.  The communications expressed were revealed slowly to me and I look to share that experience with the listener. The buried sub-harmonic rhythms, beckoning dislocated voices, incidental melodies and saturated layers of field recordings are all part of an attempt to communicate brief moments of non-conceptual heartbreak.

Inspired and yet repelled by new age music, I endeavored to create something with a sense of relaxation; not avoiding the heaviness of life, but engaging with its textures and naturalness, so that the listener might feel that relaxation is an appropriate rather than a conditioned or forced response.  For example, many of the ocean-like environmental sounds are not those of natural seashores but recordings of two continuously rushing freeways outside my window in the industrial outskirts of Seoul. The sounds that consistently frazzled my nerves, my sleep and daily life for 12 months, I layered and manipulated to create something beautiful to hear through my headphones.

To some, these are troubling times, but all time is troubling.  These are not hopeful songs, but are also not intended to be fearful songs. My aspiration is that this recording expresses something beyond those two extremes.  I wanted to bring together expressions of bliss and rest with those of weariness and anxiety. Not to meld these two experiences into one, but to watch how they might occupy the same space.

I hope that when the tape ends, the listener might hear the buzz of household appliances even clearer, and in turn see how to rest within the noise, how the uncertainty of time passing can indeed be Lived In.

Stay Based,

Gabriel Celestino H

This cassette package features a four-panel offset printed j card and professionally dubbed chrome tape.
Also includes a high quality digital download.
Edition of 100.