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David Jackman/Organum: Discards 10 full albums, finishes "Holy" trilogy

  Tobias

Public response to the work has been mixed, as David Jackman admitted in a short interview conducted by Kevin Spencer: „Those works have got me into a bit of trouble. Some critics have inferred irony or game-playing where there is none.“, Jackman said, „Perhaps those folks are stuck in a frame of reference which says that an artist should never, ever say anything which he actually means. Others, not constrained by such fetters, sit easy with the work.“

This perceptional gap has been somewhat of a constant in the Organum catalogue, simply because Jackman is one of the artists enjoying the process of creation for its own worth alone, instead of consciously trying to „achieve“ something. And it has made things slightly more complex that many of his inspirations for the „holy“ trology stem from architecture and the visual arts: „For this set I am thinking about the big slow shapes in time and about structure, proportion, deliberate design. Those sorts of consideration are, I suppose, rooted in my far-away background in the visual. Works of visual art and of architectural engineering are of more inspiration than most pieces of music could ever be; I mean with regard to the shapes for each composition.“ David Jackman also quoted bridges and great cathedrals as sources of influences. So, too, have been the notions of symmetry (which is mirrored by the almost exact same length of pieces on each disc) and near-repetition.

David Jackman described „Omega“ as „a scattering of dissonance across a consonant sea“ and explained that it, just like the other parts of the trilogy, contained elements of „Christian chant, some number systems from Flavin“ as well as „the Golden Section from Newman“. With regards to the bipolar reaction to the previous releases, he announced his critics might get even harder stuff to chew on, as he thought about working with „the decorative“comparable to Satie's „Furniture Music“.

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