Madfish.002.NEW YORK - Therapy

This is the full text (condensed for leaf insert print) accompaniment to Madfish's 2nd CD Release 06.2009.

An equally animated and supporting counter to his professional persona, Madfish continues his personal exploration of beat-infused urban compositions.

Recognizing music’s ability to defy age, promote youthful vigour, and encourage creative direction,

Madfish, once again, seeks to define the audio-visual-spatial-art-form which his professional experiences and creations embody. The tempos, rhythms, and repetitions of every open space encountered produces visceral and corporeal responses that affect his musical compositions. Rhythm is there in the cycles of the seasons, in the ebb and flow of the tides, the birth, maturation and death of plants, and in the discovery of ourselves and our contributions to this place.

Through musical immersion Madfish’s abilities are strengthened and transferred to other areas of his life - providing avenues and opportunities for communication when and where other forms of self-expression  and faith in words falls short.  A level of effectiveness is afforded him in facilitating movement, increased motivation and engagement in an outlet for the innate expression of feelings and creative thought.

The second of Madfish's personal experiments reveals a story that holds the power to make the difference between withdrawal and awareness; between isolation and interaction. May it offer you youthfullness, inspiration, and fun. But most of all, I hope that it will encourage you to awaken to a new human narrative for the 21st Century landscape.

'Natural' Intervention

Poised at the point where plants and humans meet, I am consistently amazed and surprised wherever I go at the way the man-made world can be so effortlessly overwhelmed by the fecundity of nature. As a conceptualist designer at heart I find myself in fear of this ferocity and thus look for inspiration in the very world that is at risk of extinction – the man-made world. However, insistent repetitive patterns scribed across the earth’s surface – an attempt to tame perceived chaos that is nature – are temporarily set aside. This serendipitous juxtaposition of man versus wild here is serving as a pointed counterpoint - disruption of an otherwise repetitive pattern of nature - that in some way serves to scribe its own narrative on this (un)designed space. Did Olmstead possess the intellectual fortitude to envision this? Was this moment in time where seed found shelter in the very cracks of the world that we designers purport to heal intended? I now find myself being confronted with the moral and redemptive value of ‘natural’ man-made landscapes. Perhaps a more ecologically responsible attitude does lie in the questioning of the honesty and authenticity of a more naturalistic methodology of design which seeks to replicate nature; at the same time never acknowledging that it cannot replace or repair it.