Interview:

ON MUSIC AND SPIRITUALITY

We adopted the name Clairaudient to reference characteristics of our sound, not as an explanation for it. Close, active listening involves rates and types of activity that are outside those characteristics of our normal, language-mediated perception. They are perhaps the closest we come to a direct experience of our being as pattern, as generators of pattern, as transient systems of patterns. Ordinary experience is mediated linguistically. However, we know that these mediations neither contain nor provide the basis for a compelling account of what we are. Grammar reconfigures process, rearranges it. Think about how you would account for the processes involved with the production of a sentence in terms shaped by the sentence produced. Naming or describing the rearranged sensory hierarchies or particular types of focus that one works with and on in an improvisational context does not result in designations of what is: they express only your relation to them. The name used is an aesthetic matter. Once you decide on a name, what you subsequently see or find is a function of the name, an extension of its structure and networks of referrals.

“Close, active listening involves rates and types of activity that are outside those characteristics of our normal, language-mediated perception.”
– Stephen Hastings-King, pianist in Clairaudient