FLOAT by Illusion of Safety

Concept:
Like our bodies and our planet this composition is made up of mostly water. An appreciation of water in all its forms liquid, vapor, & solid. An homage to the magic stuff that makes us and makes our imperiled garden planet. Pure form sounds: water only as source material transformed via sampling, granular synthesis, & processing eventually becoming less pure, with additional sound sources, in a program that seeks to both transcend & immerse in the moment while bathing in the source material of our being. Additionally it is also more apparent than ever that our mishandling of this beautiful unique planetary mother is responsible for the multiple current examples of the potential destructive power of this essential element. We reap what we sow, and even though one of the things Earth does is "people", we are only along for the bigger ride. All we can do now is FLOAT.

The process:
I had been imagining this piece for many years, using my own water recordings exclusively to compose a tribute of sorts to this essential ingredient in life. Something I have had an ongoing personal relationship outside my body since I was very young, always in water, swimming and later scuba diving. Always fascinated by not only the feel of it, moving through it, floating in it, but also the sound of it: wave, flow, bubble, crackle, & hiss. Much later I learned to love drinking it.

Once into the process of creating the piece I opened up to using additional sound sources, synthesis, and Instruments to complete & round out the adventure.

Composed during the summer & fall of 2023 specifically for the premier at Elastic Arts Chicago using the CLEAT 16 channel system. I spent 6 months working the sounds in that space and the composition took its time to form organically at the same time as mastering the technical aspects of multichannel sound design while keeping an ear on the narrative. Most of my music composed or spontaneous likes to form some kind of narrative and I like to control it or get out of the way when I become aware that is the best course to take.

The Video: After the composition was completed I spent a few weeks compiling the video to work in sync with the soundtrack. The images are all water or water related, about 40% of the footage is mine and the rest sourced from Creative Commons material from Pexels, NASA, & the Prelinger Archives. A few excerpts are available on our youtube, & I hope to continue performing this piece wherever possible. Watch for it, in the meantime keep floating….

If you have purchased FLOAT and would like access to the private full lengthvideo please message me.

LINER NOTES:

Flux Us
By Marc Weidenbaum

It is somewhat ironic that the piece of music perhaps most immediately associated with water — no, not that hit by Deep Purple, nor the one Ringo sings as if from the bottom of the sea — is not really about (or "about") the water at all. 

That piece is Handel's Water Music (1717), which was named so not because it is a through-composed work of synesthetic and metaphoric exploration, but because it was simply intended to be played for the then king of England, George I, on a barge afloat on the river Thames. (Admittedly, "Barge Music" is not catchy or immediately appealing.) The title Water Music, in other words, is just the setting — much as Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik (1787) is not "about" the night, but merely intended as a piece for an evening event. 

That scenario is quite different from, say, how Debussy would later depict the roiling majesty of the ocean in the orchestration of La Mer (1905). Or how John Luther Adams, a century on, with Become Ocean (2013), the title borrowed from a poem by John Cage, in its program sought to connect the listener, made of water and having emerged from water, with the consequences of climate change — a different scale of environmental threat than summoned even by Debussy. Or how Jana Winderen, with The Blue Beyond (2023), intimately combined instrumentation with field recordings, creating fictional aquatic environments in the process.

Now that is true water music — as is Float by Daniel Burke, who recently marked the milestone of 40 years under the name Illusion of Safety. Like Winderen, Burke has recorded something here that is as much audio installation as musical composition, a work that creates a sonic setting in which listeners find themselves situated. Like Adams, Burke was drawn in his musical image-painting to the thematic concept of humans' innate watery physical make-up. And like Debussy, he moves here repeatedly from quiet to rough passages and back again, leaving no doubt who has the power in the relationship when humankind comes into conflict with nature.

Float, however, embraces more varieties of watery consideration than all three of them together. It is noisy and crackling, soft and poetic, brash and explosive, lulling and peaceful, shifting and changing. It mixes bits of everyday sound with melodic synthesis, deeply reverberating spaces with digital non-places, rough textures with gentle tonalities.

In other words, Float can be considered as a slowly morphing sequence of phase-shifting, of flux, from one form to the next. Float is Burke's expression of water in all its gaseous, liquid, and solid forms — as well as those forms in their most fragile, potent, and transitional states. 

Listen for the seesawing that suggests boats at rest in harbor, and the dank dripping that transports the listener to distressed warehouses of the mind, and fierce white noise that summons up the force of a summer storm. Those recognizable moments provide points of focus for when Burke inevitably pushes things further through processing sounds and collage-making — they are a kind of imagistic safe harbor, as it were.

In a manner of speaking, the title Float is not that far off from Handel’s Water Music. It is, in other words, the preferred setting for its listener: sit back, give in to the patiently fluid nature of Burke’s music, and float through it.


Review: Dusted: 12-13-24
Water is the canvas on which life scatters its myriad forms. It’s also the vehicle for nature’s wrath. Within water’s covalent structure, placidity and chaos swirl in a perpetual duel. For the 40th anniversary of his ineffable Illusion of Safety project, Daniel Burke wanted to demonstrate his reverence for this mercurial substance. “I was always in water,” he says, “swimming and later scuba diving, always fascinated not only by the feel of it…but also the sound of it: wave, flow, bubble, crackle, and hiss.” His awe is matched by his realization that climate change begets extreme weather events, and he wanted to represent this powerful but deadly aspect of water in his work: bomb cyclones, storm surges, record-breaking rainfalls, intense blizzards. Float is how Burke reconciles water’s many temperaments. He conjures its calm mirrored surface, the hypnotic splattering of its droplets, its rage-filled violent surges, and the melancholy dance of its foggy vapor across a single extended soundscape.

The initial incarnation of Float was an immersive 16-channel audio experience with video accompaniment. To witness it must have been like being copilot to Mother Nature, as the audio-only stereo mixdown is indelible and haunting on its own. Its fluid frequencies seep between the synapses to secure a home in our collective amygdalae. Burke has woven a multi-hued tapestry from water recordings spanning the spectrum of hydro-human experience: raindrops, thunderclaps, waves, drips, gurgles, and misty sprays. Environmental field recordings add a sense of immediacy and immersion. Burke places us amid the storm, he submerges us in the stream, and he dips our toes into the ocean’s salty waves. His own instrumental recordings, primarily electronics and piano, tie the narrative together. Ambient and noise music conjure a host of water metaphors; Float rises above metaphor; it tells the story of water and the asymmetrical nature of our relationship with the substance. Our survival depends on it, but we don’t appreciate it. We exploit it, and it can destroy us.

Illusion of Safety has taken many forms over the decades Burke’s been active. His list of collaborators is lengthy. For Float, he’s acting solo, harmonizing with the water itself. This is a personal relationship for him, one that becomes more important as the impact of climate change becomes ever more apparent. As the music reaches its noisiest point and electronic clouds beget distorted peals of thunder and static, Burke is appealing to our lizard brains. We should respect water’s power, even fear it. He punctuates this thought with the title of the piece. What happens when we don’t float in water? We don’t survive.

Bryon Hayes

https://dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/post/769776982029402112/illusion-of-safety-float-full-spectrum

Since 1983, Burke and his many conspirators under the IOS banner have over the course of 40+ releases traversed most every facet of the avant sound plane, from early industrial pop deconstruction to blindingly minimal sound art to densely surreal found-sound collage, creating uneasy music that is dense and dystopian and yet also beautiful.

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