Music Thinking and Thinking Music

When I started Music Thinking 13 years ago, I checked the Internet to see if this term was used elsewhere. I only found the term 'thinking music' related to a record by Brian Eno called Neroli. So happy to have found a unique name where URLs and social media addresses were not taken, I started to name my activities Music Thinking. This was the start of musicthinking.com, the jam cards, and the Power of Music Thinking book and podcast.

But, back to Brian Eno and his thinking music. I liked the record Neroli which is in the tradition of his ambient music. Eno describes this in the liner notes as fulfilling his ambient prescription: "to reward attention, but not so strict as to demand it". What a beautiful description! Very inspring.

O.k., why do I share this??

Well, there is something new: together with two friends, I started a new project - we call it MRZ (the initials of our family names). We come together regularly to improvise in the triad of ambient, minimal and experimental.?

It goes like this: We first decide what instruments we will use, connect the electric instruments like guitar and synthesiser, adjust the microphones to record instruments like saxophone, shakuhachi, circle saw blades, or whatever we bring to the session, and then we go.

We do just one take, listen to it afterwards, decide if we are happy with it, and then keep it or drop it.

This week, we released our first (digital) album,?Improvisations in an Ambient Space. You can listen to it exclusively on Bandcamp before we put it on Spotify and Apple Music. Streaming is free; if you want to support this, you can download high-resolution files for a small price.

There are five tracks, and we gave them the name of the winds and included a little association.?

But the intention is that everyone can listen to it and let their minds drift, whether looking out of the window or just working while listening.

1. West 09:40?

Repetitive, minimal, beautiful melodic arches overlap deep breaths. Is it film music, ambient jazz, or just music for thinking and looking out of the window?

2. North 07:36

Clear blue sky, walking, hiking in circles, following the northern light, it's fresh, a bit icy, but far from cold. Hear the huskies talking?

3. East 12:24

Orange Red Sunrise Over Mountain Peak, pulsating beams of sound. Open space for new energy; greetings from warm bamboo and friendly circuits. The bells?

4. South-West 12:16

Warm winds of piling partials, sliding in harmony. Quantum mirage in slow motion drops. Green eyes on a sandy beach?

5. South-East 07:32

Sonic meditations in an emergency. Harmonic broadband tone calligraphy. Where are the birds?

So please enjoy our thinking music - music that hopefully creates pictures, sounds, smells, and feelings and inspires you to do whatever you are doing.

Check it out, listen for free, like it, and follow us.?The next EP will be released in December.

A personal note

As an avid reader of Music Thinking (the blog, the book, the jam cards) you can easily relate this process to the music thinking framework, where we first decide which instruments we choose and then start opening up, sensing, listening, understanding, being, becoming, showing and doing -? there is EMPATHY in the game, PERSONALITY and in our case JAMMIN' before SCORE.

So you see that my thinking and working go parallel in business and in music - with a little help from my friends.