Tim Oseckas
I’m a big fan of Zapffe and I’m glad to have found your Zapffe inspired album. Thanks for sharing your existential soundscapes!
And I recently discovered that Zapffe’s major philosophical text Om Det Tragiske has been translated into English by Philosopher Ryan Showler and is due for publication in March 2024 by Peter Lang.
Favorite track: Dissonance in Dogma.
jpcardielos
This album was the first ambient music album I had to buy. It's just fantastic in the way it tells a story. Thank you Emil Zapffe.
Favorite track: Fragmented Anchors.
Nearly a century ago the Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer, Peter Wessel Zapffe, stated on his essay "The Last Messiah" that the human condition suffers from a primordial paradox: an overdeveloped consciousness.
This condition, our need for meaning, and the inability to find any answers to the fundamental existential questions brings existential dread and a “feeling of cosmic pain”.
“Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfill. We have expectations of a just and moral world.
Man requires meaning in a meaningless world.
The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by over evolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns.”
In order to cope with this condition humans have developed four main strategies: isolation, anchoring, distraction and sublimation.
The ebb and flow of this album is inspired by these ideas, freely exploring these existential projections from a personal point of view, without a clear meaning or intention.
Through the making of this album, some sounds began to interact with each other in unintended ways, much like the conflicting thoughts of a conscious mind, and rather than choking in its vertigo,
I’ve tried to embody its cathartic power of transformation, releasing me from dogmas that imprisoned my vision of what life and art can be.
As a result of this process, these thoughts became imagined landscapes where the mind dwells aimlessly, trying to overcome the need for meaning and searching for the acceptance of the natural processes of life and death.
This is also an attempt at sublimation much like the essay written by Zapffe long ago.
So there is no meaning in climbing the mountain, but we must climb it to overcome the vertigo and for once enjoy the view of the abyss as it really is: meaningless and peaceful.
credits
released November 6, 2020
Composed, produced, mixed and mastered by João Guimarães
between 2018 and 2020.
Artwork by João Guimarães.
Available in 24 Bit.
The album is available as "name-your-price".
If you appreciate the music and can afford it, please consider a donation. Every donation is appreciated.
supported by 5 fans who also own “The View From Mount Zapffe”
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