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War and Peace is a State of Mind

from Music for Liminal Times by Vivi-Mari Carpelan

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"War and Peace is a State of Mind" is about the eternal recurrence of conflict and harmony, and how the murky recesses of the individual and collective consciousness reflect the state of the world. According to a Taoist way of looking at reality, polarities are fundamentally interconnected and not in conflict with each other - the conflict lies within the human mind. Life has a cyclical quality, as polarities (yin and yang) shift from one to another. One can't exist without the other. War can only exist as a counterpart to peace, and vice versa.

We think of war as liminal, i.e. “out of the ordinary”, but this is not quite true if we look at war and conflict in its broadest sense. Conflict/chaos/instability is as frequent as the lack of these. This is as much an external reality, as an internal one. To realise the nature of the semantic tension in our minds and thus transcend it, is surely a way of dealing with the urge to exert aggression towards one another.

The way the world runs the conflicts at present is patriarchal (note the lack of women in the piece), but thanks to evolution, expressions of disagreement and power eventually change over time. In the end, the concept "war and peace" is no doubt less about what it represents to us in our minds than how we may reinvent these concepts and seek less destructive ways of dealing with challenges within ourselves and in relation to the rest of the world.

The theme in the beginning is not from an ice cream van, but a theme (the Swedish Rapsodhy) that is said to have been used as the interval signal for a German language numbers station during the Cold War. The idea of weird codes being transmitted through the air is somehow alluring and creepy, but also quite a strong metaphor for the secret world of the collective unconsciousness.

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from Music for Liminal Times, released June 4, 2014

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Vivi-Mari Carpelan image

Vivi-Mari Carpelan Wales, UK

A visual artist who has plumbed the emotional depths of expressive sound. At the intersection of music and sound art, the process of re-imagining classical music is that of the deconstruction and reconstruction of recordings of the public domain, with the addition of other found sounds. Originally from Finland, now resident in Mid-Wales, UK. ... more

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