For my two pieces for my portfolio, I know that I want one of the pieces to be an album. The idea is based on my appreciations of labels like Warp Records that manage to have a unique label sound whilst still having a large variety of music from all sides of the musical spectrum of heavy/ soft, complex/ minimal. This is something I admire about this label, and something I aim to also achieve with the label I co-manage called Everything is Perfect Records (it is also something that the label name is representative of of everything having its own perfection in a sense in its existence).
The idea of musical taste being a space that we explore and find new points in when we hear new things/ ideas/ sounds is a thought that was sparked in me when I heard Brian Eno talk about trying to find far out edges of his musical taste. He spoke of using randomness in the context of generative music as a method of finding points in the area of his taste that he might not have found otherwise. I found this very interesting to think of taste as a space, and wondered what the edges of my taste sound like, and I started to think about what an axis of the dimension of this space could be. One axis I thought of was minimalism vs complexity relative to dissonance and chaos vs harmony and order.
I wanted to represent this through two albums that I would make and release under two alias’s on the label to diversify the label and represent the two opposite border points of my taste, while still being true to the ideas and sound of the label, since they would be brainchildren of mine I feel they would still align with the Everything is Perfect sound.
However, after a conversation with my tutor Milo, we spoke about the appeal of music that can cut between two opposite points of order & chaos, and the enjoyment of listening to music that manages to go between these points cohesively. This made me think of the idea to have these two imaginary characters make a collaborative album that I will be the A&R & executive producer for, and find a way for these two artists to make an album that cuts between these two points of extreme chaos, dissonance & disorder (yet still within the confinements of my personal taste), and the other point being harmony, minimalism, ambiance and order (whilst not being so simple or basic that its outside of my taste). This concept of exploring the space of my taste through characters is very interesting to me, and a good way to diversify the label in exactly the way I want.
I think I will call the project tàijítú, as the idea of opposites represented in the project is representative of the meaning of the tàijítú/ yinyang in Chinese Philosophy, with its three main principles being: (1) yinyang as the coherent fabric of nature and mind, exhibited in all existence, (2) yinyang as jiao (interaction) between the waxing and waning of the cosmic and human realms, and (3) yinyang as a process of harmonization ensuring a constant, dynamic balance of all things. (https://iep.utm.edu/yinyang/)