One view of the brain is that it is simulates our experience. Our mind is not a read-out of the world as it is. Instead, the brain takes input from the world to create its own version for our mind, like an ongoing hallucination. Similarly, each listen of two recently improvised albums by Burial Grid – Shores of Quiddity and Waves of Quietus – induces its own simulated experience for the listener.
Burial Grid is Adam Kozak who resides in Massachusetts. His initial interest in making music was in genres such as punk, metal, and hardcore to have fun with friends. Eventually, he said, “I moved onto loftier, weirder things and took myself way too seriously for a good couple of decades, feeling worse and worse about myself. I’m now just another middle-aged dude with walls of synths and gear trying to learn something new about myself each time I press record, write, act, or whatever it is that I’m doing at the time.”
Beginning in 2018, Adam began releasing albums as Burial Grid and now has a catalogue of albums that include Where We Go, We’ve Come for Your Flesh, Music For No Tomorrow, and Negative Space, the latter a soundtrack to the horror novel written by B.R. Yeager. Burial Grid’s sound is entirely unique, often dark, always richly textured, abstract, and composed in a way that stimulates imagination.
From Insomnia to Improvisation
The feeling of simulation Quiddity and Quietus elicit aligns with the intent with which they were created. Suffering from insomnia, Adam sought to improvise songs to simulate slow brain waves active during deep sleep, with the goal to induce sleep.
Adam suffers from a type of insomnia where he quickly falls asleep but finds himself awake shortly thereafter and unable to return to sleep. “It seeps into your waking hours in the form of bizarre paranoia, feelings of ennui, and incredible dread,” Adam described the impact of insomnia on his life.
Alone and awake in the middle of the night, Adam decided to compose. “I was super-inspired by Robert Rich’s sleep concerts and experimentation with using different frequencies to illicit delta brain waves, which would in turn induce sleep.” He added, “Originally, there was no plan to release any of the music at all. I hadn’t slept in nearly a month and was climbing up the walls. I was just trying to find a way to pass the time and distract myself, while creating something to listen to that would help me fall asleep.”
Improvisation as a method of composing has always intrigued me, and so I asked Adam how he approached the method. “I limited each track to 3 elements to work with. I’d arbitrarily choose three instruments, and maybe some field recordings and see what would happen. I wish it was more glamorous than that! But the result was what was really interesting. Improvisation tends to lend itself toward a lot of impressionism. It’s purely left-brained and entirely unfiltered. So, the result of working that way led to something that perfectly summarized my state of mind at the time, which sort of betrayed my original intention of making sleep music.”
Adam said his approach to improvising shares some important similarities with his typical approach. “For me, personally, it’s tremendously important to create restrictive parameters to work within. If I can run freely then I fall apart from decision paralysis. I have an entire system where I’ll start off with something that I generally want to convey, but then feed it through integer-assigned algorithms that I’ve set up to help me randomly choose things like tempo, key/scale, instruments, effects pedals, meter, etc.”
Adam has been highly successful using this approach. He said, “I don’t think I’ve ever once had writer’s block since using this system. Once I have all those elements in place that I can then use them as guidelines to color within. Sometimes I’m laxer than others when it comes to how strongly I adhere to the guidelines. Making something entirely improvised and, in the case of Shores of Quiddity and Waves of Quietus, something within a strict time frame is just another set of restrictive parameters.”
Simulation I: Quiddity
Quiddity and Quietus were written at similar times and under similar conditions of insomnia, but each album has its own character. One clue to their differences are the colors in which the cover art for each were done. Quiddity is done in shades of orange and yellow, and the atmosphere of the songs are warm. Quietus, by contrast, is done in shades of blue, and the atmosphere of the songs are cold.
When composing the songs, Adam said it was “very simple, borderline boring, and limited to only 3 tracks of music per song.” As a listener, it is the compositions on Shores of Quiddity that draw me in. For example, on “Blackened”, opens with a minimalist bass line, sounds of fuzzy electrical wire fizzing in a puddle like zapping of neurons. The bass grows more ominous like walking down a dark tunnel, and the atmosphere grows murkier like dirty water, and finally there is some relief, perhaps rest.
On “Biphasic”, the listener is immersed in what feels like sounds of the clicking and clucking of the clock, the feeling of time passing, sometimes slow, sometimes fast. Soon, time starts to push down on you, and all you can feel is time not passing. You are paralyzed by time.
On “One of Each in Every Color”, the dynamics of the interleaving synths are like the sound of a hallucination caught on tape. The rhythms are a hypnotic force, yet there no rest, as there is a constant other presence that pokes and prods, the two eventually becoming so intertwined that they are something entirely new.
Another draw on Quiddity is the imaginative experience each song induces. This reminds me of the cover art on Quiddity, which shows portals that placed on the statues that indicate something is happening inside. This is exactly what the experience of listening to Quiddity and Quietus is like, each with their own character.
“4 am Knows My Secrets” is aptly titled. It elicits a sense of a dark outside, a fog so thick that the condensation is dripping off the leaves. It’s so quiet that you can hear it falling and crashing on the grass below. You are walking alone through fields with a flashlight, with a distinct feeling that what you are looking for won’t be found, but something else will.
Also aptly titled and perfectly placed late on Quiddity is “Windsor Hum.” It sounds like the body is in a state of paralysis, the reverberation of the humming is circling you in an empty space. There is a sense that, at last, the body has rested, but the mind is left awake to watch.
“Caput Mortuum” reminds me of the being alone with oneself and looking in the mirror, pausing to stare deeply into one’s own eyes, and before long the songwriting has cast you on an escapade through the desert, where there is no direction. With each passing moment, a dire reality solidifies like the setting of concrete.
As Quiddity approaches its close, “Crisis Apparition” elicits a feeling of fluttering conscious, floating in the sea, crashing with each wave, a brief feeling of peace. Quiddity closes with “Small as Sleep”, which captures what feels like three distinct ongoing themes on the album. One is a hollow atmospheric sound that opens the song. It like wrestling with the monster that has kept you awake. This is juxtaposed to a lullaby that can hardly catch itself to make its tune. And then there is the humming that bears the heavy weight of defeat and acceptance.
Simulation II: Quietus
All Burial Grid albums use sounds and textures to create melodies, emotion, and engage one psychologically. A striking feature of Waves of Quietus are the imagery-inspired sounds used to write the songs. For example, Quietus opens with “A Gale of Tranquility,” a fantastical lullaby at the gates of a grand ice castle. But soon the humming of the drones come, swarms of bugs, leaving nothing but your corpse behind.
“Solus” opens with a sound like running in a digital rat wheel. As it goes on, there are noticeable perturbations, with sounds like peaking behind a soap bubble curtain to see new psychedelic places that we cannot visit, because we must run on the rat wheel.
“All the Loons Are Gone” features the sound of running up an endless staircase with large, clunky wooden shoes juxtaposed the sound of gears inside a giant clock spinning.
The sounds that open “North of North of North” elicit the feeling that something is happening around you, but you cannot see what it is. Barely conscious, you are left to wonder if there is someone or something there. The soundscape is like being infused with new memories, attaching new body parts, each with their own new sensor. And then the soundscape shifts, a transition has occurred, and there is a salient feeling of adapting to the new you.
States of awareness are conveyed through the sounds on Quietus as well. For example, “Longyearbyen” opens with the static-colored state of awareness. The centerpiece of the soundscape are elastic sounds that zig and zag, set against cold, ominous drones while droplets of ice spears randomly fall from a melting ceiling.
“Pale Black Dot” also features a static-colored state of awareness, a hazy space in between high-pitched piercing sounds through which beautiful melodies emerge over time and the shuddering of dark, humming drones, conveying a sense of indecision.
The atmosphere on “A Derangement of the Senses” conveys a feeling physical hopelessness, where random invasions of sensory input momentarily consume the mind like a needle injecting electricity into the brain.
Quiddity and Quietus both elicit feelings of being stuck, like the frustration of insomnia. I asked Adam why he felt it was important to improvise in this state. He said, “I think I instinctively knew that there was something that my subconscious was hung up on. In my experience, improvisation pulls emotions out of some pretty obscure corners of our brains that we normally can’t access when trying to arrange and formally compose music. It’s like primal scream therapy.”
“Last Sequoia on Earth” closes the Quietus. It’s patient. It feels like there is only one message to convey, perhaps an emergent product of Adam’s parameterized approach to songwriting. It elicits a sense of lying on one’s back. The piano-like sounds are massive, like the Sequoia’s the song is named after. The atmosphere is cool and wet with drops of ice occasionally falling from above through which and emerging feeling of peace begins to dominate.
I asked Adam what distinguishes Quiddity and Quietus for him. He said, “It wasn’t obvious to me at the time but I hadn’t really dealt with my father’s death 6 months prior. I was having extreme health anxiety, probably because I had just watched my dad succumb to prostate cancer very, very, very slowly, and very painfully. In addition, I hadn’t really felt the sadness of that loss. He had been sick for 3 years before dying. I knew that it was terminal. I knew that I had to let him go. So, I intellectualized the process. I was like, ‘Hey I can read the writing on the wall. Better start preemptively grieving and learn to accept this.’ Only, that’s not how grief works. Grief and trauma are like tiny slivers of glass that get driven into your skin. As your body processes and rejects them, they are eventually forced back out. Grief and trauma are the same way and there’s no rushing it. It’s a natural process that you have to sit back and allow it to roll out. I’d say the difference between the two is this: Quiddity sounds like a person with an anxiety disorder trying to soothe themselves back to sleep, whereas Quietus sounds like loss that goes beyond sadness and into emotional squalor. The cosmic horror of losing someone who is a part of you.”
Adam told me he never intended to release Shores of Quiddity and Waves of Quietus, which resonates with another sentiment he shared with me about his journey making music. When he started making music, it was “just having fun with friends and tapping into some sort of primal energy.” He went on to say, “Then you gain some fans and it all goes to your head and you begin to use art as a way to shoehorn yourself into a world that confounds you. You make art for yourself, sure, but once it’s done, you hold this thing in your hand and think to yourself “this is going to fix me in the eyes of other people,” all while losing sight of the fact that in the very act of creating it, it already served its entire purpose” Similarly, the purpose of Quiddity and Quietus was simply composing them.
What I most enjoy about listening to Shores of Quiddity and Waves of Quietus is that each listen is like its own acid trip. No two experiences induced by the music are the same. It’s all a simulation.