become lightning

become lightning is the overarching name for several music releases under my artist alias Seekind. It features mainly atmospheric piano and some vocal and electronic music. Being released on all big streaming platforms, like Spotify for example, I consider this project as a steppingstone into becoming a professional sound artist.

The name become lightningis inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche. In one of his writings, he remarks that at some point in history people began dividing the lightning from its flash. Put in a more abstract manner, through their language, people divided a singular event into a subject (the lightning) and its predicate (its flash). Nietzsche claims that this division does not accurately describe the nature of the thing in question. The same goes for the artist. There is the false belief that there is the artist (the subject) who creates art (the predicate).

After I had read this passage, I began thinking differently about my creating of art. Just like the lightning and its flash are indivisible so am I and my creating of art. In our thinking we divide something into a subject and a predicate but in doing so we are deceiving us about the nature of reality. Creating is not something I do. There is no I that comes before the create. There is only creation. This realization offered me the possibility of understanding creativity not as a decision but as an instinct, something I cannot, by nature, help but do. Art then is a specific form in which this instinct expresses itself, namely the transformation of emotion into the perceivable. With regard to Nietzsche’s lightning analogy, the process of creating art is the process of becoming nature, it is the process of becoming a true in-dividual.

Following this thought, become lightning is not so much led by a concrete theme that runs through it like a red thread but primarily by the undeniable instinct to become indivisible like the lightning through creation.