This whole site is a rather intense aesthetic statement, and perhaps not even (at time of writing) the aesthetic which is dearest to my heart. I talk about (or hint at) a lot of aesthetic things in the pages here, and I am sure that will continue and expand over time.
If I know anything of the joy of flitting between directness and indirectness, it comes from Kurt Vonnegut. What I know about the importance of grey is rooted in my experience growing up in the Rust Belt; what seemed like an endless winter that would some day give way to the cyberpunk.
I think that I am a goth, but I don't know how well I commit to that. I find the goth ethos so much in the first church I called home, the unintentional brutalism of St. Mark's Cathedral in Seattle. There was something of the goth and the grey in my first visit to Seattle, going along the now deceased Viaduct after feeling like I was skimming across the tops of a great evergreen forest. It felt so familiar and so foreign. I like that.
Perhaps my home is also in the vapourwave aesthetic, with my VHS memories of malls that no longer exist; piles of Silicon Graphics computers and the wow and flutter of tapes.
I think whatever my real aesthetic is, it must include something of the darkness and the light. It must be at least a litle disorienting, shading slightly into disturbing. The awe of Let all mortal flesh keep silence, the melancholy of This must be the place I waited years to leave, the hope of Dove's Sanctus from his Missa brevis or the loving, defiant transcendence of Lang Kontakion of the Departed.
I should very much like to be found in the natural, with little glimmers of the tidiness of the technological; and I would rather be a hopeful goth who speaks directly and in parables than ever simply be an optimist.
There is a lot more I need to say here about music, and perhaps even about my own music-making, but not just yet. I would very much like to actualy finish some of my music at some point, and offer it up as a completed thought. I owe myself a commitment to perform my music live some day, which I failed to do in the time I lived in Olympia, Washington.
Then there's art. Then there's the abstract things. There's the feeling of entering a new town on a rainy day, of finding somewhere you didn't know existed, or didn't know could exist. There's the memory of the first time I walked across Honolulu, of little footbridges over canals and shady yards. There's the aesthetics of the transcendent and the sublime, of the universe. There's the aesthetics of love.
So much.