Music Mosaic

The Slayer

The accompanying music piece from American Horror Story, composed by César Dávila-Irizarry and Charlie Clouser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY_htwAmBOQ

Horror is not a consistent release of shock. It is the seemingly mundane drenched in mystery, waiting to unleash the shock upon you. While the title sequence of American Horor Story sells this effectively, listening to the music without the images evokes this idea further. Something about listening to the soft instrumental tune struggling against the chaos of the white noise sparked my imagination on what horror really is. I visualized my apartment at night, seemingly safe in my own confines. Then I considered the sudden contrast of the out of place and unknown horrors that can appear. This became the motif for my music mosaic, with the mundane drenched in a soft mysterious lighting and the unknown distinctly standing out.

            To support this idea of the unexpected, I decided to not arrange the images in a particular narrative order. Why tell the viewer what the progression of images is supposed to be when they are capable of deciding themselves? That is for them to piece together themselves. When does the unknown interrupt the mundane? Which is the mundane and which is the unknown? Do the images tell stories themselves or does going from one to the other tell a clearer picture? Does specific parts of the music influence how to perceive the images? They are free to test all of these thoughts and more.

To paraphrase Peter Forbes from our reading, anything new we present will be challenged and change constantly until it is our own story. A narrative can be tweaked and changed until it is something completely unlike the artist’s original conceit. I simply decided to eliminate the middleman and invite the change immediately. I present them the parts and they in turn participate in creating art with me rather than presenting my view of art alone.

             We have seen this done before. Godfrey Reggio's 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance was a film compiled of a variety of slow motion and time-lapse footage of cities and scenery. There was no dialogue, narration or pointed direction to stick with. All that was present was images and music. We could take the film as a straightforward narrative. We could dissect specific sequences to determine a story. We could watch sequences out of order to make our own story. It was left to us. The themes of relationships between humans, nature and technology were still intact either way. Likewise, both the themes and arrangement of my mosaic are meant to express a similar goal.