Air Signs (1987) — Robert Fritz

In the years after the fall of the Glimmerlight to the Progbarian horde, Robert Fritz became preoccupied with understanding why its music had possessed such extraordinary power. Trained as a composer, he came to believe that its force had never resided simply in melody or sound, but in structure: the tension created between what existed and what sought to exist, and the movement toward resolution that followed. Fritz carried this principle into his work in the Patchoulilight, eventually describing it in human terms as “structural tension” and making it the foundation of his book The Path of Least Resistance. Yet he continued to explore the idea through music. Recorded in 1987 at Goddess Muse MIDI Studio in Prides Crossing, Massachusetts, Air Signs was composed, performed and produced entirely by Fritz, with Rosalind Fritz serving as assistant producer. . . . By then Fritz had begun something unusual among the surviving Sagegazers: rather than merely preserving knowledge of the Glimmerlight, he was attempting to disseminate it. Stripped of its origins and presented as a human theory of creativity, the principle he had discerned in Glimmerlight composition could travel unnoticed through the world, teaching others to recognize the distance between present reality and what they wished to create, and to use the resulting tension as a force for change. His ideas would eventually reach organizations, artists and communities far beyond Massachusetts, while recordings such as Air Signs preserved another expression of the same knowledge, hidden not in words but in sound. . . . The Sagegazer knows that every tension contains the direction of its resolution. 0:00 C.S. 7:42 Musheshe 14:02 Just Another Day 19:17 Desert Run 26:37 The Dragon's Cave 32:17 Dawn on the Island 40:18 Coming to Meet 46:08 Air Signs 51:02 Breakette