Emil Zapffe is the moniker for my studio project of experimental ambient/drone where I explore the connections between sound and philosophy. Musically it is broad in scope, ranging from electronic deep drones to electroacoustic abstractions and noise excavations: always very textural. My main tools to sculpt these sounds are digital processing of various kinds and field recordings, with a special focus on physical modeling synthesis and experimental electric guitar/bass processing. In late 2020 I’ve released my debut album titled “The View From Mount Zapffe” which revolves around existential soundscapes inspired by the essay “The Last Messiah”. The album was composed, recorded, mixed, and mastered by myself between 2018 and 2020.
You can read about the album’s concept below.
Nearly a century ago the Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer, Peter Wessel Zapffe, stated in his essay “The Last Messiah” that the human condition suffers from a primordial paradox: an overdeveloped consciousness.
This condition, our need for meaning, and the inability to find any answers to the fundamental existential questions bring existential dread and a “feeling of cosmic pain”.
“Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfill. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man requires meaning in a meaningless world. The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by over evolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns.”
In order to cope with this condition, humans have developed four main strategies: isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation.
The ebb and flow of this album are inspired by these ideas, freely exploring these existential projections from a personal point of view, without a clear meaning or intention.
Through the making of this album, some sounds began to interact with each other in unintended ways, much like the conflicting thoughts of a conscious mind, and rather than choking in its vertigo, I’ve tried to embody its cathartic power of transformation, releasing me from dogmas that imprisoned my vision of what life and art can be. As a result of this process, these thoughts became imagined landscapes where the mind dwells aimlessly, trying to overcome the need for meaning and searching for the acceptance of the natural processes of life and death.
This is also an attempt at sublimation much like the essay written by Peter Zapffe long ago.
So there is no meaning in climbing the mountain, but we must climb it to overcome vertigo and for once enjoy the view of the abyss as it really is: meaningless and peaceful.
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João Guimarães 