The Art of Self Help...Vilhelm NeinFreunde returns from his odyssey to the Outer Hebrides and releases 5 albums of Electronica in response to his journey...
February 11, 2020
The Art of Self Help – What's all this about then?
I have a severe hearing loss and I have lost my sense of smell. I have begun to wonder about how much information my brain is missing out on. A potential issue here aside from problems arising from the obvious conversational deficit is the possibility that these losses might be paving the way to dementia. Basically my neural pathways aren't getting enough informational foot traffic.
I have also noticed that my experiences of places, environments, landscapes, towns, cities, social interactions etc seem to be more and more detached. I am becoming more detached. Just a bit more of a shove and I might float away. It would also seem that my memories of such visits and experiences on reflection aren't as keen either. I don't seem able to get as 'into' a place so much any more. My connection with place feels abstract and I think it has a lot to do with my sensory losses.
I'll try to explain. You spend time in landscape. You see it. You hear it. You smell it. You feel it. These senses in turn, I think come together to enable you to sense it in another way too, as a whole. So I get the sense I am running on half a tank. Obviously you can't go all the way if you don't have a full tank. You aren't as replenished if you drink from a glass that's not got much in it. You won't see as much, you don't take as much in. You only have half the information. Ergo: I am a glass half full.
No bird song. Insect buzz and chatter. Spoken words register as though morse code, context lost. The subtleties of your personal experience, gone on a silent wind. Seaweed. The smell of the sea. Fragrance from flowers and trees. Cow dung. Pig muck. Horse shit. Salt laden wind. Dust on a tarmac road smelt after rain. Food aroma. The combined smell of soil, flora and fauna. Town smells. Some good, some bad. It's all information that helps you to build up a picture. And this picture, the one stored in your head, is made up of more than an image. The sensory memories that make up these in part, are triggered again at a later date by what you see, hear and smell and your brain refers back to them. And so I set out to develop other mechanisms that could perhaps help me to resharpen the focus of my depleted memory bank.
Music is a good trigger of memories. The good, the bad and the indifferent. Music provides the framework from which my memories hang. I have always loved music and I have dabbled in playing and creating it and got a lot of fun from doing so. But developing a severe hearing loss made playing live and with other people, however low key, almost impossible. I have found a few kindred spirits but geographical distance has meant that it has been impractical to develop that part of my creativity in a meaningful way. Over the last few years though I gradually have put together the basic means with which to develop my own music again. This is through the use of a DAW (digital audio workstation) and commonly available apps using various libraries of ready to mix samples. I don't consider myself to be a musician. But I am musical. Now after spending my life listening to and (mostly!) appreciating other people's music, I began to reconsider the possibilities that composing music has to offer to someone with sensory losses. This was specifically in the context of my concerns about how through a reduced stimulus to my neural pathways I might be more susceptible to early onset dementia and to initiate a process to circumvent that outcome. So to combine all these aspects of enquiry into one I decided to visit a landscape unknown to myself and explore that journey through musical composition. Compositions that would serve as definitive marker points that might enrich and trigger memories of such places and events.
I visited the outer Hebrides on 3 seasonal occasions spring, summer and autumn from August 2018 – October 2019. The responses to and outcome of those travels are summed up in the following 5 collections and presented in the traditional album format.
Vilhelm Nein Freunde.
Lands End.
February 2020.