RE: zen and the fluent music

["Kris Hartung" <khartung@cableone.net>]

> by coincience I am just half throug listening to your CD off internet 
and I love it!

> Matthias

Excellent. Glad you are liking it!  That CD is packed full of songs, 17.
I worried initially that I might wear listeners out with amost 80
minutes of music, but I like to give people more music for their money,
and folks can always listen to the CD in segments.  My next solo CD will
be much, much more experimental and from all live performances. This CD
was recorded in my studio.

What do you think of the CD theme, which is on the web page for the CD?
I copied it below.

CD Themes 

Krispen Hartung establishes an intriguing array of conceptual and deeply
personal connections between his CD art, song titles, and overall feel
of his compositions. For instance, the front CD cover image is a retinal
scan of his own eye (windows to his psychological self?), and the CD
label image is of his own cells and nuclei (the genetic code or
blueprint of his biological self). The CD sleeve contains a poem that
depicts Krispen's childhood metaphysical nightmare about a strange and
primordial feeling of having his mind compress infinitely unto itself.
The song title "Ataraxia," also written in Greek on the back and inside
of the CD tray insert, means "tranquility of the soul" in ancient Greek
skepticism, which is attained by epoche or "suspension of belief", also
written in Greek on the CD tray insert. As a philosophy graduate,
Hartung has studied Greek and modern skepticism, and in many respects
these systems of thought become apparent and have an impact on his
personal life and way of viewing the world. 

Finally, what is this "descent to self? Is the self down, as in
something to which one can descend? Not literally in this context, but
metaphorically in that the self here is portrayed as something
abstractly inward, yet also downward (as in down to the depths of that
which defines one's identity) regardless of the point of departure.
Think of a star that has collapsed on to itself and is about to turn
into a black hole. Anything that is caught within the gravitational pull
of the imploding star literally falls toward its surface, much in the
same way that a anything caught by the gravitational pull of our earth
can potentially break through the atmosphere and fall (relatively
speaking) to the earth's surface; yet in the sense of the imploding
star, that which is falling is also being pulled inward, where the
center of the black hole is the point of reference. Moreover, this is
not meant to be a philosophical explanation of the psyche, but only a
metaphorical comparison of a black hole, the descent to self depicted by
the CD, and the metaphysical nightmare described in the poem inside the
CD sleeve.



Kris