UP A TREE

BANSAI VS. ACCURACY

You are wondering why there are so many Bansai shops in Triodeville, and why all of the work rooms have these miniature trees? They are reminders about the audio artification process.

I use these trees in my campaign to liberate you from the obsolesence of using "accuracy" as the artistic high ground of the audio arts. I am using one of humankind’s most important dependency’s to persuade you.

What young boy doesn’t love climbing trees? We doesn’t love hanging out with trees. Their smell, the way light flows through them, the way they speak, and sway; treeness has become an essential inspirational force in my life, and therefor I am a very typical person. Let me say it again. Do you not remember the feelings you had as a boy about your favorite tree house? Or can you remember how it felt, on a warm summer’s day, when you were up a tree, and just leaning back and swaying with the trees. Can you remember the smell and tides of leaves rubbing against each other? Can you feel the passion that wants to save the old growth trees?

Human life is dependent on trees. Our species would disappear if trees disappear. Saving our forest means we are saving ourselves from extinction. Of course the fact is that our "species time line" of about twenty million years was spent was spent mostly in trees. With mankind having 99% of the DNA of the ape, it makes perfect sense that home sweet home is really a tree and not a cave or Trump Palace apartment. So trees may be the best way to explain the artification of the harmonic/space/time continuum in an expanded aural matrix, and why the term accuracy , in the audio arts, is very inaccurate.

Both in my books and articles for Positive Feedback I have been ranting from the Triode Pulpit that both the American high end audio press and consumer would greatly benefit from more fully exploring the world the Japanese audiomaniac. Their artistic sensibility implies that the audio arts are a deeply personal process.

I suggest that the Japanese audiomaniac’s advanced skill is related to Japanese’s long tradition, in creating art in their homes. Reading a few books on Japanese architecture will quickly instruct the novice in how differently they use space, emptiness and decoration to artify their living spaces. I am recommend that you buy a book about the art of Bonsai, which is the craft of creating an artful metaphor of a tree for the home. Bonsai makes the point about the Japanese audio culture so perfectly.

Having been inspired by the beauty of their ancient trees, Japanese artisans over one thousand years ago, created a sublime micro-living tree artification process so they could have their treeness in their homes and in their tiny gardens. Intrinsically Bonsai is an ongoing organic artistic process that is ongoing and evolving with each season. Bonsai is a process that matures in the tree lover over many years and compels creative interaction with their microtree. The microtree’s own organic development inspires the Japanese tree artist to experiment, to open to new ideas about his art, to seek more subtle ways of expressions.

Here we have a beautiful Bonsai tree in our garden. It is art we create, and art through which we express our inner treeness, and it is art for meditation, and it grows in beauty as we do.

True to its form there are thousands of different variations Bansai art, because there are so many different trees that may be transformed into Bansai. Each has it own unique power. When we examine different classical Bansai schools we see how refined the Japanese have become in exploring their treeness.

Now let us pause for a moment, and ask ourselves, "Is a Bansai tree an accurate reproduction of a live tree? To some experiencing a Bansai tree for the first time, like I did when my mother took me, at age ten, to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, which has one of the finest collection in America, I freaked out. This was pure science fiction a la Flash Gordon. Holy Cow, what kind of secret ray gun was able to microsize a tree?

But, we soon realize that Bansai doesn’t sway in the wind. It does not make tree music, and we hope no birds, snakes or insects live in them. They are not part of a dynamically changing eco-system. Most importantly Bonsai is not an accurate tree perspective because almost all of us look up at trees, and the most common perspective with Bonsai is to look from the top down, and all around; a perspective that is unavailable with a real tree.

Yet, it is the possibility of beholding the entirety, the essential wholeosity of a tree that inspires a unique set of emotions, which in turn explains the power of Bansai as art. Bansai offers us the possibility of a completely unique relationship to treeness. Because we take the tree and bring into our home and tower over it our sense of it changes. Because we can meditate on it and experience it from so many different points of view in our home our relationship to treeness is expanded and intensified. And because the beholder is also playing the role of God, The Creator, the entire artification process expands the essence of the tree’s beauty.

The Bansai book you buy will probably illustrate how the Bansai art process unfolds over time. Many books show the works of the great masters, and others show a fifty year span of pictures that depicts the evolution of the artification process from seedling to classic art. The beauty of the tree is the amalgam of two spirits, the tree and the tree artisan.

Twenty minutes from my office is very large Bansai nursery, and because Fairfield County Connecticut has the highest per family income in America, there are some very well developed and expensive Bansai trees for sale......the kind that are in the three to five thousand dollar range. They are breathe taking because they are such powerful images and to experience their emotional wonder you must be among one: it is as if all of the energy and beauty of the three has been compacted into a much smaller space. It is like a tiny bit of nuclear tree energy, very dense and very powerful, radiating gamma rays of sublime beauty.

There is a very subtle relationship between artist and tree, and this is real soul searching work, and all of what I just said, is exactly what I have been saying about the audio artification process. Creating Bansai is exactly the same type of process as creating music in our homes.

Here the paradoxes unfold...we miniaturize to expand. Both is the art of miniaturization. This is the enormous creative challenge of taking fundamental very large majestic realities, the tree or the live music event, and miniaturizing if. When music gets miniaturized it, like the Bonsai, looses its supporting eco-system, but it can gain enormous power. Here too the original musical event may be condense into its miniature home form, and gain enhanced intensity. Of course this is only accomplished if the rare and gifted are producing the recording. Even in a democracy we are not equally endowed with gifts, and there are many gifted Americans who are rethinking their modes of self-expression and self-reflection.

The Triode Revolution is intrinsically about a mind change about the artification of harmonic/space/time continuum in an expanded aural matrix. We are evolving from the need to create a live event in our home, to a need for the creation of the most sublime musical Bansai in our home. This Bansai tree is me; it expresses who I am. We have been patient sensitive lovers. Our audio systems are crafted to express, in our home aural matrix, our unique sense of musical wonder, whether it be pine, elm, juniper, it doesn’t matter, it only matters that is reflective of our unique vision.

Every tree is a unique work of art, as is you and your audio system.

Now, if any of you want to get on the mat with me....go ahead...make my day.

 

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