Theme and Variation
Listening to the Foundry's new collaborative CD Sub.terra this morning and thinking about the idea of "theme and variation." Sub.terra is a collection of tracks based around one source material. This isn't a Chinese Whispers style of collaborations where each artist remixes the previous artist's interpretation, but rather each of the five on the disc re-imagine the long tone trumpet work of the first fellow, Interstitial. What you get is five variations of the same journey. It's the same, but it's not.
We bought a new car over the weekend and, as I'm driving to work this morning, I'm considering the whole "it's the same, it's not" phenomenon. I take the same route I do every day, but everything else has changed: I'm higher off the ground, I've got fog lights running, my coffee cup is in a completely different position, Peter Gabriel's Up record is getting pumped through a system that has more high-end available than before, and the noise of the car beneath me is a different purr altogether.
Theme and variation.
I sit in the same seat on the train every day -- to and from work -- and I know that I sit on the west side of the train in the afternoon so that the sun doesn't make it impossible to read the laptop screen. Yet, in the morning, I'm on the sunny side. What's the difference between the light in the morning and the afternoon glow that makes me gravitate towards it in the morning? Or is it just habit that puts me on this seat every day? I look around me and see the same four or five faces that I see every day on the ride in. We're all creatures of habit.
When theme become all-pervasive, do you stop listening or looking because you've heard/seen it all before?
Listening to: Institial "Solitude" Sub.terra [2003]