Synergy and Chronoception

The flow of sand in an hourglass can be used to measure the perception of time passing amidst the swirl of experience going on all around. Jourdan Laik and Philip Wilkerson inspire a deep fascination about time and how we experience it, and the present is always located between the past and the future, with their new album An Ocean of Time. This metaphor is further complicated by enlarging the scope from an hourglass to a vast ocean. Ever evolving and unfolding, consistently relaxing and engaging, without requiring your constantly focused attention, the music both rewards focused listening and at the same time allows the listener to float in their own inner worlds without external drama. The synergy of Wilkerson and Laik together forms the creative musical entity known as Time Being.

The sound of Time Being sometimes portrays forms in fog that offers suggestions without always simply resolving. To further illuminate what I hear on the album, I have reached out to both musicians to discuss their process and to bring their electronic art into a more crisp context. What you will read here are many short ideas that resemble a stream, flowing past bits of quartz and gold, containing bountiful plant life and an amazing range of small living creatures; life is raging all around, and every moment is magical, forming an interplay of the eternal, unchanging consciousness and the temporary, material world.

The conversation begins with the topic of making music. How would you describe your methods for inventing your sounds?

Phillip: I’ve had a lifelong interest in the creative process and discovered that creativity is more of an opening to the experience rather than trying so hard to capture the experience. Opening to the creative process sets vibrations in motion that are expressed as sounds or words. Capturing the vibrations (recording sounds) is just a mechanical set up--a recorder, a pen, etc. Getting stuck in the mechanicals is easy to do and sometimes, even results in new forms of creativity. So balancing both aspects is necessary, but for me, the mechanics are always secondary.

Jourdan: Layers. You cannot sit down and create an intricate soundscape in one fell swoop no more than you can create a flower with just carbon.

Robin: How did your parents prepare you for your journey? What do you remember about discovering music? How does that allow you to create now?

Jourdan: I couldn’t have been more than 8. I was with my parents at a record shop. My mom asked me which I would like; she held out a few cassettes for me to choose. I picked one that was all black - I thought it looked cool. It was Mozart. We listened to it all the way back home. Once home I listened to it till bedtime. It wasn’t my first time hearing classical music. Maybe it was because the tape was mine but this was likely the first time I actually listened to music. I liked picking out all the instruments and following them up, down, in and out. I would even wave my hands around to the beat pretending I was a conductor.

Phillip: Most recently, I’ve discovered that the music primarily creates itself and the mechanics take care of themselves. Music channels through me and gets recorded. I don’t always “make it happen” It often happens spontaneously and without intent. Again, it’s setting up creative opportunities and then letting whatever happens next happen.

Jourdan: I want to make music and sounds that take people to a different place. Each composition means something to me personally - but I’m not interested in forcing you there. I want you to go where the music takes you. So as long as the music allows you to disconnect from where you are now, and go to a different place, then I have achieved my task as a composer.

Phillip: My task as a composer is primarily to create music that listeners enjoy returning to again and again--not necessarily on repeat, but over a number of years, revisiting like an old friend. To create ambient music that is evergreen and timeless. I wouldn’t call composing a task, but rather an opportunity.

Robin: What is music?

Phillip: Music is setting vibrations in motion in the form of sound. Sound is primordial and is a two-way manifestation that we can all participate in--as sound creators and sound listeners--neither is merely passive.

Jourdan: Everything is vibrating. The frequency of these vibrations define the different things we see. Humans love to experience beautiful things. When the vibrations are just right - they please us. Music is vibration organized into patterns and harmonies. But so is a flower. You can see a flower. But you can only really appreciate it when you look closer. Understanding everything about even one flower requires more than just a glance. Listening is the aural version of visual exploration.

Robin (to Phillip): What is listening?

Phillip: Listening is Awareness, being aware of what is happening in the imminent moment. We can listen with our whole body to what is happening all around us and within us as a field of our immediate presence--locally, globally, and as a universal presence. And maybe simply because there is no definitive answer, it becomes apparent, if you ponder long enough, that life calls upon each of us, individually, to create a reality for ourselves and to take responsibility for creating an existence, within our sphere of influence, that is meaningful and beautiful. I think that might be what ‘waking up’ is really all about--taking personal responsibility for making our brief, fragile lives as beautiful and meaningful as we can.

Jourdan: Our reality is now. Dreams are a part of that reality because we experience them. If we were to “wake up” to something else, the same questions would persist. There’s a lot of conjecture and speculation about what’s out, up, outside of here. I think that’s a result of people wanting to escape the many unfortunate realities that befall us in the now. The best way to be more awake is to love.

Robin: What would you tell a youngster about getting ideas for composing and about the process of creating music?

Phillip: Don’t follow anyone’s rules or try to imitate other artists. Discover your own processes and let the music make itself.

Jourdan: Learn everything you can about music. Train your ears. Learn the rules so you know what to break and when. Learn the piano. You will wish you had these skills only a few years from now; and it won’t be long before you realize that you should’ve started earlier.

Phillip: Life calls upon each of us, individually, to create a reality for ourselves and to take responsibility for creating an existence, within our sphere of influence, that is meaningful and beautiful. I think that might be what ‘waking up’ is really all about--taking personal responsibility for making our brief, fragile lives as beautiful and meaningful as we can. Meditation is just a way to access and open our inherent powers of Awareness into spontaneous Being and Presence.

Robin: Are you able to bring music back from your nocturnal dreams?

Jourdan: I can lucid dream and have full control over making music. I seem to have the ability to create almost anything I want. I can’t seem to bring anything back with me though. When I wake, it’s all gone - only the memory that I could do it remains.

Phillip: Dreams are just another form (vibration) of Awareness. I would not make a distinction as to “where” music comes from. Recorded music is just an incident in Awareness that was captured.

Jourdan: We can be surrounded by a lot of info all the time. You can soon feel like all things are known. Where we’re from and where we’re going. The fact is that we know so little. There’s so much to discover.

Phillip: Life isn’t a passive process. It’s a creative opportunity. In many ways, I feel like I do live my dream, without being in an actual dream. My life is good. Which is not to say that I don’t have challenges. I just let whatever happens next happen and meet it with a welcoming attitude to see what unfolds.

Robin: The music of Time Being allows listeners to consider many impossible things. When listening I find myself exploring strange new oceans and vast alien summits. What are the most beautiful places you have ever experienced music in?

Jourdan: We don’t have any noteworthy mountains or seas in Wisconsin. But in the early summer, when it’s warm and the corn is still short - there are places where the vista goes on and on. With not a sound in the air - it is as tranquil as can be; you can float.

Phillip: I live in the land of magnificent sunrises and sunsets, Florida, with vast skies and magnificent clouds. We don’t have mountainscapes in Florida, we have sunscapes and cloudscapes. I’m being inspired constantly, just looking out my window.

Jourdan: Sometimes I want to be in a dark huge forest. Other times, someplace warm. I’d love a chance to photograph the upper midwest, Oregon etc.

Robin: What would you like to share about yoga and meditation, and your personal methods for experiencing a good life?

Jourdan: If you have a hard time with the kind of meditation where you’re alone with your thoughts, try meditation with music. Listen to it and try to visualize where your brain takes you. Don’t try to think about what the artist wants you to see - just let it happen. I have found that this is an incredibly easy way to quiet the mind.

Robin: Time is "what a clock reads" or a certain number of repetitions of one or another standard cyclical event, the motion of the sun across the sky, the phases of the moon, the swing of a pendulum, the pulse of the surf on the shore, or the beat of a heart. What if our clocks were to Stop?

Jourdan: We’d need to change the batteries in our clocks.

Phillip: In a sense, the clocks can stop if you move your Awareness outside the paradigm of time and deeper into Awareness. Again, this is pretty close to a definition of meditation.

Robin: What would you like explorers of the ever expanding universe of music to know about An Ocean of Time?

Jourdan: Just to listen and go where it may lead.

Phillip: The artwork for An Ocean of Time reflects the expansive, boundless, spaciousness that the music opens up for the listener. It also hints at that balance / interplay between dark / light and time / being. I don’t necessarily equate the word “ocean” with the actual body of water we call the ocean, but more like the “face of the deep” primordial ocean or void (although I really don’t prefer that word if we can “avoid” it).

“An Ocean” is a play on “A Notion” as in the first and last title tracks. Time and Being first and last in titles to tracks 1 and 8. Time “seems” to Be endless (a notion). And Being (in the truest sense) is Timelessness. So we are Beings, experiencing “being” (awareness), in the infinite oceanic void of perceived Time, yet we’re always in this moment, in the now, where living and experiencing life really takes place. Sure, we have memories and expectations. They are just part of the play. All the titles of the tracks reflect these basic questions and themes: Awareness, presence, infinity, the essence of Being, timelessness--it’s all ultimately illusory, yet it is also fully and imminently experienced by our senses and our Presence in the eternal Now.

Robin: Your new album is a moving mirage of strings and particles touched and reverberating, patterns form in the haze, this one might be called substance and that one might be called serendipity, life understood as life is lived. Thank you for all of your fantastic work and for sharing your perspectives on the creative way of life!

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Time is sometimes described as a simple linear event, the past and future flow in one direction and the two ends are sort of balanced evenly on the focus of the now, the metaphor of an ocean invites a more complicated mental image…

We write our own lives, the self is made over time through experience, and physical matter is a sort of test for our willingness to live in good faith, to exert our freedom. Perhaps life is all about dreaming, and how we can sometimes lucidly control our dreams. The brain's perception of time is known to be a highly distributed system, distances in space can be measured by how long light takes to travel that distance, and yet music can somehow bring about the perception of slowing and expanding a moment of time.

Time travel is the concept of moving backwards or forwards to different points in time, and people travelling at different speeds, while agreeing on cause and effect, measure different time separations between events, the past lies behind, fixed and immutable, while the future lies ahead and is not necessarily fixed. Music such as this investigates being as being, often transforming our concepts of both personal and universal existence. The only questions that matter: does it sound pleasing and will you play it again?