for appropriate sound picture click here (the two of us in action) .ra file
Borut:
Lost in Space was a TV serial that I remember watching as a child in the Sixties. Lost in Web is the most common association when entering the seemingly unpenetrable mass of information stored in millions of computers around the globe. For the people with interests the enlightenment comes fast. One definitly finds individuals - kindred souls, rooted in far-away localities, yet in many ways very alike parallel realities. This is how Roger Hayes found me. But this is a story about Roger's reality!

Roger:
This is reality / non-reality , a non-sequential flickering like a faulty traffic light. Can we step across this entrance without
over-amplifying the tunes , I suggest a hearty token look to our own familiar yoke - ? - So , Borut and I can throw alot of colors in the lines , and happily we will all begin to agree in the face of this glimmering monitor canvas . Embelishment - yes - we together are each fairly well in agreement as to what can be achieved here .

Borut:
Just before we go into your activities (which we want to describe here) - a short look into seemingly banal things - like: after half a year of exchanging emails, letters I can imagine the circumstances that define your working situation - especially the necessity to take a number of jobs to somehow keep your artistic activities going. Astoria is a very small town and small towns don't find it necessary to have something radical artistic going. But it is known to have happened in the past elsewhere - non-sponsored/ out of true personal interest of couple of people.  There is a local radio station KMUN with at least one (David Blanchard's) broadcast which is maybe a meeting point for a couple of you radicals? You make these broadcasts together - does it have an impact on the audience/ did it manage to create a 'scene' ? Or at least the tolerance of the community to allow it?

Roger:
Equal Peace and Equal Librium allow us to stay afloat: that is the perverse irony that I enjoy here: Think of it as a sort of Frankenstein grafting on of an extension of false limbs onto a grass-roots independant community. The scene happens when the work happens - that's alright - eh? Given that condition, what we have creates the sense of ritual, scary at the initiation, every performance being new and inaugatory - that is the nature of this project - and given such, it seems that that is what is acceptable in this community. And as such that is what this community recognizes - call it the pioneer spirit - this is still the Wild West! Aside from that, we all flounder, not desperately, but almost as an aesthetic device, you know, and thank god we have that freedom, the old double edged sword paradigm.

Yes Borut, broadcast point is a meeting point, and I wonder about how many people around here really get that? Some of us indeed are lured over the edge of a magical transfixing burst of "otherness" and are training each other to respect that, but the radio-room too, hey, that is a special place, to me it gets more special when you know week after week year after year you sit in that same seat that a whole bunch of other individuals sit in, each presenting their view of what this "community radio" thing is addressing in their eyes.

Borut:
A nice thing with the media nowadays is probably exactly the 'double edged sword' position that it can have according to the context of its use. When 'mirroring' to the small scale level ('local/community') it may even happen to become the opposite to the 'global media' dreams from not so far ago. Marko Kosnik said some time ago something like: media is a clock (global, national, local) - for the people that consume it. It defines their everyday actions, the rhythm of their lives, defines and even fulfills their imaginary needs. What can be more fascistic? In this context the local media acts (when it does) as a mockery of the big media, defining its own 'topics of importance' - creating its own image of different_than_global reality. Didn't you use a word 'ethereality' in one email? Can this term by also applied to the physical world? For instance: people creating activities that are of 'undefinable' nature, especially not lucrative by its aims, also not easily definable as 'social', because they seem to be so 'individualistic'/un-necessary.

You all decided to create 'ethereal' events in real spaces (if you agree with the above) or (if you don't agree) - you all decided to turn 'ethereal' events into real events by showing your bodies, instruments,... by getting body-to-body with the audience. This is a deliberate decision. There is also a lot of punk philosophy in your roots, you say.
Also: MU is the name of the fictious 'lost civilization' (I checked it out: it is the philosophic circle around Mme. Blavatsky in New York at the end of 19th Century that created it). This is supposed to be one of the last movements of idealistic philosophy until it was overrun by materialistic principles. Are there any other than simbolic relations (lost civilization) - I did find David Blanchard's strong anti-church/anti-ideological stand. If I'm not very clear: what are the values that you reach to by the use of music (and painting, of course).

Roger:
Positioning bodies in this situation creates a rational wall : am I up to scaling this height? I must first thank you for laying out this tasty meal, and then take the first big bite! Yeah, I find it very handy and necessary to fall into Romantic Ideals, the problem is the inflictions of self also come with this territory. David has very strong values, and a measure of content which I also recognize as the markings of a stance impassioned by youthful ruminations: Youth in its' passions is a bloodbath of carnage: things matter too much! Right now I'm getting used to the junk of settling into my age ( I just turned 36!). Wow!, but, esoteric philosphy . . . here in this place . . . it seems hard to marry into Life, however, successsfully cementing it into the StoneMasonry of the daily foundation creates a beautiful Passion . . . Borut, I think there is alot to say about undefinability . Speaking about it will be my best opportunity to reveal my thoughts about aesthetic proceesses, too often raveled in connotations of destructiveness! Better, I push it, ironically into a tangible realm, and call it elusiveness. You know, maybe the best analogy is to think of the Roots of a tree, and even better a dikaryatic digestive mulching symbiatic system of invisible mycelium weaving all of these functioning realms together sucking in through the roots, and somehow, unseen have their effect on the Photosynthetic Consensus Reality.

As far as the applications of philosophies goes, in the present tense, I feel that I threw all of those worn and text-book shorn familiar philosophies into a tightly welded can, and I'm having a hard time reminescing on the turn of those fat worms . . . but I know that you have a way of hitting the pyschic nail on the head . . .

Other motivations: the sheer frustration/artistic compulsion/frustration as creative catalyst that drives one on and creates a common identifiable tag by which us of this breed recognize and associate with each other, an outsiders family, an interior language . . . basically, I guess, the big issue that we are discussing here is the advantages of creating from/into a place that is not definable,  and this usually turns out to be the jist of exactly what I want to discuss!

To observe from the exterior of this stance: how is it then that we recognize/intuit the semaphores,
glyphs, tangents, and lines that indicate that ours is a dialog defined by a continuum?!-if it is not a consensus continuum? god!, and this is where I start to have fun! And believe me - I am not one to withdraw into Castles in the Sky - I always made a point of backing up everything I claim to be mine - isn't THIS all a razed torched strewn chaotic jambles of inconsonances thrown everywhere about and we, you and I, are architects hired to assemble the pieces we've laid our hands on?

No wonder no one else can see what's going on.

I'm fond of saying that to have truely plumbed the depth of this artistic device would be enough to dissuade anyone from assuming its' mantle - why is it that those who call themselves "artist" seem to evoke an air of naivte with this self-appointed appellation? - I refer instead to an aesthetic propsed by Jean Dubuffet, finding expression in COBRA, outsider art, "art brut", neuve invention,
and other affiliates who work out of sheer dementia - and even here I am at a loss for a pure defintion - seems to me that I run into too many people for whom dementia is just that . . . rather,
follow me here to uncover a few self determined individuals who DRONE and work the air and earth with small tracing spirals which they enact and plummet themselves into, scratching and etching diagrams of invisible lines over an illusory vellum, until something catches fire and thought combusts, and there is fission, and then a fusion - and really, who wants to take up THAT responsibility, unless compelled to it! - after that fact, and beside it, - I start to ask myself from time to time, and especially at this point in time, with our counterpoint discussion of things ethereal - are WE starting to gain a higher optimum of consensus reality?!

Let me attempt a certain degree of conciseness, a description of the conditions that create or have created some of my activities. After a long span of time I gradually picked out a simultaneity in my expressions that I had not perceived due to the constant active engagement that I tried to passionately bring to my degree of commitment in practicing ' arts ' daily. I sort of 'emerged' as a consciousness, as an entity of dedication to a discipline around 1974 and the most immediately accessable vessel that I could model was painting . . . being too intimidated by the illusion of a hierarchy constructed around the modes of aural self-genrefication . . .how to selectively
compose a rational order to/of sound(s).

Punk rock hadn't yet culminated in its' full impact, but when its' true expression was perceived it finally ingrained in many artists minds collectively the as yet clandestine machinations of DADA . . . or why 'culture' in so many of its' vast sprawling tenuous fibers of expression drew manifold layers of impact from its' aesthetics . . .

However, I, like other individuals I have since met, begin to internalize a dichotomy between media-istic tendrils of extenuating forms of 'acoustic' expression, and began to realize that there were elements of varying, differing, (opposing - (no) ) voices in whether I picked up a classical guitar, or an electric guitar . . . . and, and, and . . . here is the trick, the clue, the key, . . . since that original inception, because of electronic 'media', electronic 'representation', I knew that a point existed at which the two were inseperable . . .  I think that that is the path that those of us who are aware of what we are about have taken . . . and so simultaneously, for clarities sake I chose and mined two forms of expression, the physical and the ethereal, and I engaged the physical passionately, (the Plastic arts: so fickle, ephemeral, translucent and self-dating, so materialistic and physical) and sought to wring and extract every last nuance that I could muster from the tip of a brush............. and then as incorporation followed (a perceived attempt at incorporating mySELF to the tribal ring), and the desire for the pursuance of such, acclaim, recognition, criticism, the impetus began to die, because I saw how false it was to desire the acclaim of as an as yet unobtained audience . . . . it was too self-congratulatory and bombastic . . . I felt that the need to move underground (from underground!) was necessary to reinstae the astringency of sound expression . . . and what I chose was by its' nature self replicating like a mold or bacteria . . .
My expressions froze after ultimate expression . . . ultimate expression meaning that I had finally found my way to incorporating the use of psychedelics in the solitary 'ritual' of visionary painting . . . and from here so many sounds wanted to offer their novel route 'in' . . . . .

I started practising 'music' with Robert Clutter in 1990 . . . he came from a true vital punk rock background,  I came from an irreverant etherealization of sound conductivities . . . after awhile it became far too necessary to take sound far beyond the 'studio' ( isn't the studio that fine thin quarter inch piece of tape that runs between two winding reels ?) . . . . a lot of this forms itself . . . Rob and I started working with samples, tape loops, reprocessed tape, in what I began to conceive of as in a truely acoustic channeling . . . all sessions were recorded as live performances . . . the context often became to play 'to' a piece of tape . . . I still find it interesting that we continue to influence each other and grow together . . . it is a time investment, gradually huge manifold investments come back to you richly, irrevocably changed and altered . . .

I guess that out of this spirit came the original intention to create an entity by which this form of expression may be identified 'verbally' within the community that we live . . .  (it is sort of a trick that I play on unwilling participants . . .),  give it a name and it will exist . . .  so I found that, compellingly, there was a huge need for the North Coast Noise Coalition. Because, in my subjective experience I had charted things within my experience that without me dually, within two very diferent branches . . . One is the simple elementary magic that is engaged in this intercourse with another being . . . and I was compelling convinced of this in the place to which I would travel in this transcendant journey which was engaged through a common voice/creation . . . Tenuous wafting fibers of the Sir/Real . . . And like anything, it is a position through which much may be extracted. Although perhaps I am a little shy of over tapping anything . . .why, then 'perfect' anything, I hope you see my point. Perfection rigidifies, and looses the supple flowing aspect . . .it seems that aesthetically we need more rawness . . . but of course not as an 'art-form' . . . that already exists . . . and of course I know, and respect that nothing is original, yet there are so many 'chtonic' forms that we are beginning to mine out of the universe . . . . is it really all to end just yet? . . . I hope not, yet for the first time in history we are finally conscious of how much we have lost, . . . how much is being lost, how much is irrevocably gone. . .

Roger Hayes & Borut Savski

For a better quality & larger format of some other Roger Hayes' paintings go to http://ic.net/~stone/jacques/stable/hayes/index.html
and click on corresponding small images to get a larger version.