Milieu - An Uncertain Gradient (2024)

'An Uncertain Gradient' is a milemarker in the Urth - nothing more, nothing less - to mark the passage of time with a pleasant frame drawn around the same moment, twelve months later, following 'Beside a Green Window' on my 40th birthday.

From 40, a so-called milestone year, to 41, a much less glamorous year, much has happened, and yet it also feels that nothing has changed. This strange sensation persists, and I can't quite remember where or when I first noticed it - probably sometime in my teen years - but at 41 it still confounds me, how I can observe the passage of time, observe the very evident changes, and yet still feel weirdly indifferent, apparently numb to the feeling of that change having come and gone.

Or perhaps this feeling is itself what change does to a human mind, or anything made of the same biomass, susceptible to gravity and barometric pressure and temperature shifts, and this is to say nothing at all of the possible mental changes, the perception that can be utterly skewed, the senses that can deceive and fail, the synapses in the body-machine misfiring as the parts wear down. The physical sensation of entropy, continually rescanned and redefined by a progressively blind radar array.

And yet I do not feel sad about this, or worried about dying, at least in any greater amount than I have my entire life, preemptively grieving about the pain of old age and the loss of my functions. Those things will come, if I am lucky enough to be alive for that long, and given the progressively bleak state of the world since I've arrived upon in in 1983, that act alone will feel like a grand achievement. There's a contentment to be found in these years, for me, where even with all of the turmoil and suffering around me, and the heightened awareness of that negativity thanks to the irascible information superhighway, I can recognize my happiness as being more substantial than it has ever been before. I have my family, my work and all the topical or subliminal validation that I could need with you, Constant Listener, and this is more than enough.

So in light of my 41st year, I once again carve a line into this sun-baked tree, where it seems like only a little while ago I was doing the same thing. I hope you enjoy this arrangement of polite sounds and melodious moments, which I've placed into their own little orbits, with their own laws, their own gravitations and repulsions, all accumulating into another warm circling of the sun. Is there ever really a point? Does there even have to be? 'An Uncertain Gradient' is my half-hearted non-answer to these rhetorical questions. It sits beside a window and listens to the birds, and every now and again the music skips a beat, or recurs for a while, and it doesn't matter, because it doesn't need to.

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NOTE: If you are already a member of the Milieu Music Fan Club at Patreon, please do not purchase this album. You will receive instructions via a Patreon blog post that will allow you to add this release to your Bandcamp collection free of charge, where you can stream and download it as many times as you like.