»Holzwege« by Lomov

‘Holzwege’ (meaning wood-ways) is a topic of mine since I’ve studied philosophy. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger used this scene to describe the way man are used to percept reality. Imagine you awake within a dark forest. You can’t percept the whole forest, only the environment around you. To learn more about the forest, you cut down some trees and create some space. Now the light (symbol of thinking/logos) can illuminate the scene and you will see a little bit more. While cutting more trees in order to understand more you build a dead-end street into the forest, but the nature grows again behind you and closes the gap.Later you may use the things and thoughts you have acquired, but finally you will do not know exactly the being of a forest as a whole.

Older philosophers like Plato said that we can’t see the truth directly. We can only see the shadows of truth, of the ideas, which are placed in another world beyond our perceivable world. Younger philosophers negotiate this assumption of a ‘beyond world’. They affirm only one world, in which we are thrown. Existence is always temporal and there is no state beyond temporality. Our thinking about world and even our language is temporal as well. The problem of this approach is that the general assumption of the ‘beyond world’ requires a jump into this other thinking. But we can get closer, if we use poetry and other arts. The chance of music is that it is always temporal, so it seems to be the king’s way to express a new sight on world.

By transferring this philosophy into creating art or music I decided for me, that it isn’t possible to ‘make’ music in a closer sense, following a certain idea which will lead me to a certain result. But, thrown into ‘my’ musical environment I can take just those pieces I’ve recognized, play with them, let them guide me, react to them, bring them into new order, until something new grows up from the parts. Thus the working method merged with the theme (in this case).

‘Holzwege’ converges to the forest in an electronic manner. Instead of field-recordings I used the possibilities of actual music software to re- invent different audible perceptions of wood. The slight whispering of the greenery and the chirping of crickets in summer (‘Weidenfels’), the swoosh of rain in old firs and the cawing of the crows (‘Hochwaldregen’), the thousand little noises within the underwood (‘Unterholzland’), even the calmness of a nocturnal scene (‘Mondlaub’): in sum all the sounds you may hear if you close your eyes within a forest. But by doing this, emotions will appear. They belong to the perception as well and protect us from danger (‘Dolmen’) or make us longing while sitting in the top of a tree (‘Wipfelwiege’).

Its up to listener to form his option, if ‘Holzwege’ are a dead-end street of technology or a chance to realize a little bit more next time while walking into a forest.

Run time 63:45