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Life's a bitch and then you reincarnate

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Mixed wisdom traditions inspired by recent travels. My photos below were taken last month at the Theravada Buddhist temple of Wat Khongkha Kha Phimuk in a very hot Thailand. Then a repeat of my 2020 post about the Mahayana Buddhist view of what happens between bitching and reincarnating. Music from between heaven and hell   Why is the between so underrated? We live in a binary age which is defined by 0 or 1, and anything in between is dead meat. So we think only in terms of good or bad , right or wrong, masterpiece or minor-piece , and black or white . One of the main drivers of this dualism is social media where narratives are defined by like or dislike, friend or unfriend, and the ultimate sanction of follow or block . But life is not defined by absolutes. We actually live in an infinitely nuanced analogue world which digital technologies compress to just two binary options. Which obliterates the priceless legacy of the between created in the millennia before we became ad...
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On my travels

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A massive hope for the future

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I am one of those boring old farts who laments the demise of the CD and its eclipse by ephemeral streaming . So it is very pleasing to report that one of the major players in the media industry has found a valid and valuable strategy for prolonging the life of the venerable CD format.  Warner Classics are remastering and reissuing CDs of classic recordings in massive 'binge boxes'. Latest release is the 79 CD box of Sir Adrian Boult's complete EMI stereo recordings . (Perversely, the box is titled 'Complete Warner Recordings', because although Warner acquired the EMI classical catalogue, competitor Universal Music owns the EMI trade mark.) The legendary team of producer Christopher Bishop and engineer Christopher Parker produced the majority of the recordings in the box, and the original mostly analogue master tapes set a benchmark in sound quality. However many of EMI's original first generation CD transfers in the 1980s compromised the reproduced sound. So ...
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Those who we lost

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That is harpsichord legend Scott Ross in the photo above, and Saville Rowe legend Tommy Nutter in the photo below. A post here years ago recounted how in 1984 rumours that Scott Ross had contracted Aids were spreading, and, tragically, both he and Tommy Nutter became Aids victims. Since the start of the epidemic more than 44 million people have died of Aids related illnesses. To put those deaths into perspective, around 16 million combatants and civilians died in World War 1 , approximately 6 million Jews and Romany died in the Holocaust , and   14.9 million deaths were linked to COVID-19 pandemic  in 2020 and 2021.   Tommy Nutter and his photographer brother David were both gay and lived in New York at the peak of the Aids epidemic. The creative community was particularly badly hit by the deadly virus, and Tommy died in 1992. His brother lived through that tragic time, and in the Epilogue to his moving biography of the Nutter brothers , its author Lan...
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Great composer who comes with a parental advisory

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Enfant terrible Claude Vivier 's transcendent but overlooked Siddhartha  for orchestra in eight groups is probably the outstanding achievement  - listen  here  - of his too short life, and was inspired by Herman Hesse's eponymous novel . In 1983 Claude Vivier, who is seen above , was murdered in Paris by a male prostitute he had met in a bar; he died aged 34.  Musicologist and performer Bob Gilmore  wrote the definitive biography of Vivier . Here, unedited, without apology but with a parental advisory, is Bob Gilmore on Vivier's life in Paris. Indeed, he was more sexually active now than ever. "Claude would boast about fucking nine guys in a sauna, but you never knew where his deep feelings were," says [Walter] Boudreau . "He drew a line that none of us managed to cross, and we can only cross it now listening to his music".  A quote from Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf provides an appropriate epitaph for Claude Vivier: The way to innoc...
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Some music should be as boring as posible

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Éliane Radigue - seen above - has died at the age of 94. Writing in 2014 I explained how her Trilogie de la Mort is an intense exploration of the ragged edge of classical music that questions spatial conventions with its immersive sound, and which reaches beyond music into infrasound. At almost three hours duration and with extended periods of virtual stasis,  Trilogie de la Mort  challenges accepted concepts of musical development.  The huge influence of Éliane Radigue is shown by the breadth of the tributes, from DJ Mag , through the Guardian , to the usual lazy and accentless  Slipped Disc acknowledgement . Éliane Radigue's transcendent, unique and fearless music means a lot to me. So, as my tribute, I am republishing some of the Overgrown Path posts that over the years featured this fearless music innovator.                                     Some music should ...
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Something weird for the weekend

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Developing my riff on AI and the role of weirdness in creativity , there is further remarkable congruence emerging between what many consider weird wisdom traditions and modern technologies. After the celebrated parallels between the Buddhist teaching of interconnectedness and quantum physics' non-locality , there are now striking similarities between the metaphor of Indra's net found in Buddhist cosmology, and the mutation of the world wide web into a playground for AI. The image above is from visual artist and Vajrayana practitioner Alex Grey 's book Net of Being . This description from his book resonates with the infinitely-dimensional data sets of AI. For centuries, Hua-yen Buddhist sages have used the mythic concept of Indra's net to describe total interconnectedness of all phenomena. In the visionary Heavens, Indra's net stretches out infinitely in all directions. A Jewel hangs in each vertex reflecting every other Jewel in the Net. Symbolically, the Jewel...
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