Noos-letter of the Foundation for the Law of Time

1. What is your artform?

I call myself a Multimedia Artist but primarily and firstly it was music and then visual as well as writings and lyrics. Never been interested in performance art. Music and video for me is something I create in a studio... like a painter. We don't make painters perform.

Audio was my early pop song demo tracks ... and then on to the 15 album ambient Visionary Journeys catalogue .... leading up to now with an album of new age anthem songs - stories of light and love. First single: Floating.

Visuals included nature videos and talismanic covers as well as spoken guided visualisations Then all the writing of visualisations articles, websites, journals and lyrics. This year I want to start blogging.

and/or vision?

All my work is about healing and inspiration and transformation on a personal and planetary level. In my vision - as my songs and music are played more and more through various media that they actually have an impact on the planetary vibratory rate and provide the soundtrack and some of the tools to contribute to the transformation. A vision that came to me with my album The Radiant Self was that it could be played in a cancer ward and everyone would go into remission. I'd love to see people all over the world using my music as part of their projects.

2. What other artists inspire you?

In New Time I would describe anyone who creates anything as an 'Artist' whether it's a masterpiece or a lovely dinner or a crocheted doily or the secretary placing flowers in the foyer or the perfect golf swing. Heck, riding in the back of the bus is art if you are living consciously.

People in all 'arts' who inspire me include Richard Bach, Stanley Kubrick, Steve Jobs, Dalai Lama and Bono. Currently, I'm really enjoying the visionary artist Peter F. Christiansen who I featured in my new song video and I'm starting to enjoy the new breed of 'funded aware people' like Foster Gamble and his Thrive Movement.

3. What does the phrase "Time is Art" mean to you?

I have been struggling outside of the system for about 35 years now as I explored all my various creative facets... from side-drummer to poet to organist to cook to song-writer to guitarist to audio-visual producer to studio builder and audio engineer and synthesist to singer and producer and label to promoter and performer to Festival stallholder to TV music producer and video cameraman, producer and editor to Apple Mac whiz and re-masterer and digitiser and designer and webmaster to Musical Director and Sound Designer to releasing singles from an upcoming album - all to do with bringing through my creative expressions... and slowly and surely as I'm guided and things are revealed I express whatever vision is fruiting. There's quite a queue back there!

As many will be feeling - what changed in 2012 was that we are synching up now... with natural time and natural being. We give ourselves permission to all be artists. We no longer measure our moment by seconds and minutes or money and success but measure it instead by how creative we can be with every moment - as the song says "And we'll make earth the paradise it's supposed to be..."

Find Japetus on the web:

japetus.com
http://www.tiny.cc/floating-itunes

PS
Below is my favourite definitive statement on how I see [art] - by Carl Jung in 1933

How Art Creates the Artist

"Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process...The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is 'man' in a higher sense--he is 'collective man'--one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.

"...There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative fire. It is as though each of us were endowed at birth with a certain capital of energy. The strongest force in our make-up will seize and all but monopolize this energy, leaving so little over that nothing of value can come of it. In this way the creative force can drain the human impulses to such a degree that the personal ego must develop all sorts of bad qualities...in order to maintain the spark of life and to keep itself from being wholly bereft...[these negatives] of artists resembles that of illegitimate or neglected children who from their tenderest years must protect themselves from the destructive influence of people who have no love to give them--who develop bad qualities for that very purpose and later maintain an invincible egocentrism by remaining all their lives infantile and helpless or by actively offending against the moral code or the law. How can we doubt that it is his art that explains the artist, and not the insufficiencies and conflicts of his personal life? These are nothing but the regrettable results of the fact that he is an artist--that is to say, a man [or woman] who from his very birth has been called to a greater task than the ordinary mortal. A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.

"It makes no difference whether the poet knows that his work is begotten, grows and matures with him, or whether he supposes that by taking thought he produces it out of the void. His opinion of the matter does not change the fact that his own work outgrows him as a child its mother. The creative process has feminine quality, and the creative work arises from unconscious depths--we might say, from the realm of the mothers. Whenever the creative force predominates, human life is ruled and molded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the conscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current, being nothing more than a helpless observer of events. The work in process becomes the poet's fate and determines his psychic development. It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates Goethe....The archetypal image of the wise man, the saviour or redeemer, lies buried and dormant in man's unconscious since the dawn of culture; it is awakened whenever the times are out of joint and a human society is committed to a serious error. When people go astray they feel the need of a guide or teacher or even of the physician. These primordial images are numerous, but do not appear in the dreams of individuals or in works of art until they are called into being by the waywardness of the general outlook. When conscious life is characterized by one-sidedness and by a false attitude, then they are activated--one might say, 'instinctively'--and come to light in the dreams of individuals and the visions of artists and seers, thus restoring the psychic equilibrium of the epoch.

"In this way the work of the poet comes to meet the spiritual need of the society in which he lives, and for this reason his work means more to him than his personal fate, whether he is aware of this or not. Being essentially the instrument for his work, he is subordinate to it, and we have no reason for expecting him to interpret it for us. He has done the best that in him lies in giving it form, and he must leave the interpretation to others and to the future. A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal.

"....This is why every great work of art is objective and impersonal, but none the less profoundly moves us each and all. And this is also why the personal life of the poet cannot be held essential to his art--but at most a help or a hindrance to his creative task. He may go the way of a Philistine, a good citizen, a neurotic, a fool or a criminal. His personal career may be inevitable and interesting, but it does not explain the poet."

Japetus - List of influences

Bands
Adam and the Ants
Alice Cooper
Captain Matchbox
Culture Club
Comsat Angels
Chicago
Coldplay
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
Crowded House
Daddy Cool
Foo Fighters
Frankie Goes to Hollywood
Genesis
Green Day
Hawkwind
Icehouse
Jamiroquai
Japan
Jethro Tull
King Crimson
Led Zeppelin
Midnight Oil
Pink Floyd
REM
Savage Garden
Skyhooks
Split Enz
The B52's
The Beatles
The Church
The Dissociatives
The Eagles
The Easybeats
The Monkees
The Moody Blues
The Reels
The Police
The Thompson Twins
The Waitresses
The Who
U2
Yes

Artists
Al Stewart
Billy Idol
Bob Dylan
Bryan Ferry
Cat Stevens
David Bowie
David Gilmour
David Sylvian
Elton John
Elvis Costello
George Harrison
Harry Nilsson
John Lennon
Paul McCartney
Peter Gabriel
Phil Collins
Rick Wakeman
Robert Palmer
Roger Waters
Sting