Track By Track : Todd Cochran - From The Vault : Notes For The Future
By John A. Wilcox



I shall leave the intro to this track-by-track to Todd Cochran himself : Notes for the future are the “imagined sometime in the past” tropes of a storyteller. Freed from everyday “isms” of convention and released from the symbolic containment of the vault, the music is an allegorical exploration in futurism. The stream running throughout the musical narrative is a speculative commentary about our human search for meaning, and we’re reminded that as a version of our ancestors’ vision, this quest never ends.

From The Vault is structured around a sequence of recurring themes and develops as an unfolding tour of references, hints, and clues. Moving from one perspective to another, we connect with how our planet is perpetually in a state of seeking solutions. Within the soundscape, without words, an underlying language is speaking. Nature evolves for the sum of us, not the few. We are in a continual state of becoming. We are connected. Love is passed along, as is happiness. Nevertheless, expressly for the listener, an implied sense of reasoning encourages us to feel free and let go of all things familiar. And then, “over there” in the distance, we get a passing glimpse of the sacred structure...

Track 1: Painted By The Sun
TC: Mountain peaks, sea cliffs, oceans, opaque forests, desert savannas – and human faces colorized by the paintbrush of nature. The entirety of our planet is inhabited by intuitive human beings – all sun worshippers – collectively marking time in communal practices of decoding the mysteries of our existence.

Painted By The Sun is the dramatic opening that says the storytelling begins here. This is electronic music created from a point of view. With this opening, my first thoughts are introducing the album’s synthetic sound setting and sonic atmosphere. I use small brushstrokes, slowly adding the instrumental groups in segments of different colors and hues. I intend to invite the listener into the musical setting in a way that will allow the journey into this fictionalized space to feel natural.

We hear emulations of orchestra percussion, brass, and strings. As the textures develop, a melody emerges in the expressive voice of a woodwind. The lone solo voice of the sound symbolizes the sense of aloneness we encounter whenever imagining our unknown future. This is particularly relevant to our present moment in a world obsessed with the future – which has us pondering how we will transition from what was before into something wildly different from the reality of previous generations. Elaborating on this theme, the music develops into a larger context of connectivity whereby the sun energizes the total of our planet’s humanity. The mythologies we create in learning and knowing more express the drive we have to understand the real purpose of our existence. Through this lens, we experience new sounds, vibrate with the rhythms, and in a leap of emotion, see the intensely human faces colorized by nature’s paintbrush. Fascinating and beguiling, the complexities of coexistence challenge us. From beyond the limits of earth, abstract messages are relayed in echoes from the future.

Track 2: In You I See Endless Memories
TC: An imagined conversation between the sky and the wind.

When composing, I leave the abstract and become objective by putting myself in the listener’s place. Of the things I’ve absorbed as a listener is that there are some melodies in a piece of music that have to find a way to occur again. When the unique way a melody makes us feel resonates, we program ourselves to listen for it, hoping for its return. Because when it does, our relationship with the piece grows. In You I See Endless Memories is built around restating two themes from Painted By The Sun, the preceding track. We hear parts of the previous segment again – thoughts heard earlier are repeated. We recognize a sameness but in the light of a different time of day.

The melody evolves, becoming more complex and mysterious; it changes with each listen. I use a line of symmetry with slight variations of the musical elements to signify how the sky (spatial) and the wind (physical) are intertwined in an interstellar relationship. The melodies represent their imagined conversation, with the music hinting at how they communicate in a secret emotional language. The wind and sky are bound to each other – endlessly moving, morphing, and changing constantly.

Track 3: Isms Prisms
TC: Not one thing, but all things… spontaneous change shuttles us through the cycles of life.

Beats… Rhythms… Pulses… Overtones… Innuendo… Anywhere… Anyone…

We spend our lives in an ecosphere of emotions, audacities, half-truths, aftershocks, approximations, opinions, and oversimplifications. We’re surrounded by “isms” — and the quantum result of interacting with each other’s behaviors and attitudes. Here, I’m riffing on the “ism” optimism. When magnified and reflected in a “prism,” optimism emerges as a positive energy and becomes a powerful force of disruption – disrupting the patterns of cynicism and pessimism that isolate us from relating well with each other, and thus clearing the way to a more welcoming “here and now.”

Track 4: Transparencies
TC: Being transparent is naturally imperfect and intensely human.

Music can be an archetype of transparency, with the foreground and background interacting – the elements reacting and responding to each other—a lone instrument followed by shadows and refractions. Transparency forms our social space and the conditions of our relationships. Who we are isn’t always visible, but it’s crucial to how we see the world.

While not always able to factor another’s reason for an opinion or holding a position, we can gain an understanding as to why. Some think widespread transparency is a radical way to show up in the world. But this is the way we learn about each other. We get to appreciate each other and grow our understanding. We discover similarities and respect differences. Growing our humanness is for the progress of all.

Track 5: We Make Two, Two Make We
TC: Music is a language of interacting tones and colors through which one is able to experience the other; the abstract and the personal. The notion of two streams of thought merging into a unified idea makes for a wellspring of originality. At once distinctly different, yet in combination, resonating wildly.

The music oscillates— among other places — between the real and the mystical. This piece is partly a commentary on how we’ve all observed how some people feel bad about feeling good. In one form or another, we all are dealing with the weight of the world. Some express it more profoundly than others. Upbeat emotions are the voices singing in our ears that change the way we feel. When creating music, my energy passes through different masses. I’m quantum phasing all the time. When I think about affinity, what’s going on in the atmosphere of our people space is quite remarkable. In between this and that, there’s oxygen in the middle, in what’s happening in the space between you and me – and once the energy gathers, we are we.

Track 6: Eye Dreaming
TC: Within you, my love, I see endless mystery.

Eye Dreaming is a song without words. People sing songs with words to each other to transmit meaningful feelings. Having spent a significant amount of time exploring the forms of songwriting and composing, I appreciate the variances between the two. Eye Dreaming is a combination of both. The singing melody communicates the endless mystery. Love is connection and is born in attraction, one transforming the other into its mirror and protector. Love is an exploration of ensuring that that place inside us is accessible. From there, we endlessly ask questions, never having all the answers.

Track 7: Moon Glow
TC: This duet of a middle-sized plucked string instrument and Balinese gong expresses energies I’ve experienced in Indonesia, where the nighttime sky sometimes seems so vast there appears to be an aura around the moon.

Listening to music, we often ask, “What is it saying?” Some associations are surreal, and others are tonal, a sequence of thoughts that enchantingly align with your emotional mood. Be at one with your wondering, allow an image or a single sound, or combinations of the two to suggest another – uninhibited and spontaneous. I envision this music as a sound sequence of identity, memory, place, and timelessness.

The cadence of the gong and the plucked strings form pictures in your mind. Sparkling black sands, shimmering crests of waves, illuminated by the moonlight. Then comes the feeling of flying, untethered, into the infinite deep purple, green and blue.

Track 8: Hymn For The Hidden People
TC: This is a tonal essay – an homage to the poor, the rebuked, scorned, unseen, and unheard. The music challenges our lack of compassion and moves us to feel the many who toil and struggle in silence, yet stay in the light, with hope and determination.

The sound of the Tibetan Temple Horn in Hymn For The Hidden People is that which comes from deep within. A primal intonation. We hear it as transmitting the alive essence of being. In an abstract poem sans words and language, the two notes sounded by the horn are universally understood. I visualize it as the innermost human sound of crossing a river with no destination in sight.

In carelessness, we sometimes become contemporaries of our ancestors, oblivious to the timeless lessons learned.

In a sculpture formed around two notes, I’m speaking about the experiences of those who exist on the borders, the unseen fringe, the periphery of life, and the complexities of catastrophe. Connecting and responding to the circumstances of others positions us on the road to peace.

Track 9: The Spinning Circle
TC: There are no simple explanations or a single equation that defines a circle. A circle has no beginning or end, there’s no start, finishing point, or conclusion. Only infinite revolutions rhythmically intertwined.

Based on a tuned Gamelan melodic pattern, with The Spinning Circle, I’m expressing my indebtedness to conscious artists who’ve shown me the importance of accentuating the beauty of differences and representing forever and eternity as a cosmic circle. I’m inspired by outsiders who lived on the edge and captured a vision of what could be and captured the reality of the world via an individual vision.

Within The Spinning Circle, improvising becomes a composition. Conscious artists mold and shape their ideas in pursuit of broadening the cultural landscape and do so with their creative slant. Creative non-judgmental assertions. Not a single thing, but many things. The Spinning Circle is past, present, and future as one unit.

Track 10: Inseparable
TC: Balance in our lives and the spaces we occupy is a dance of opposites. “Om” and “Amen” are the thing.

A mind-to-hand impression of distant lands, imagined fiction, and an allegory in futurism, Inseparable is a potpourri of influences stemming from my jazz palette and love of Indian classical music, and rendered in an electronic soundscape. It is a mix of genres and eras of idioms, progressing from one setting and flowering into another. The, for me, natural intersectionality of the musical influences extends from the music I was exposed to during my early formative days, which has stayed with me since.

Music is a language of interacting tones and colors through which one is able to experience the other; the abstract and the personal. The notion of two streams of thought merging into an integrated idea makes for a source of imagination with diverse components that, in combination, clearly resonate.

As the story moves from one scene to the next, the narrative of Inseparable is about inexplicable unity, culminating with the storyteller revealing how with compassion, we get a glimpse of the sacred structure. And in that instant, we see that “Om” and “Amen” are the same thing.

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