There are two kinds of simple. Let me explain.

The first kind of simple is the kind of simple I like. For example, the arch. A pretty simple shape. Displaces weight for structural integrity while making a large opening. The Romans took the arch and turned it into fucking EVERYTHING. Domes, bisected domes, barrel vaults, intersecting vaults, barrel vaults made of intersecting vaults, they dropped it on it's side, cut it up, stretched it out and found all kinds of uses for it! And all of that from ONE. SIMPLE. SHAPE.

The other kind of simple is the kind I dislike, as it refers to one's mental capacity.

Oddly enough, simple minds tend to lead to needlessly complex things, while complex minds tend to create brilliantly simple things. I think this is an efficiency issue.

A simple mind must work with what it has, which isn't much. It ends up doing one task with many many small steps, because it can't find a more efficient way of doing the whole thing. A more intelligent person would consider all of the elements it has, and find a way to do the task in a few fairly easy steps, and it'll do it faster than the simple mind. I think it's partly genetics and largely personal knowledge.

I've met plenty of people smarter than me, and it's honestly surprising and slightly discouraging. But I've noticed their ability to abstract more elements of thought at once than I can. Which is probably the genetics portion of it.

So when I say something is too complex, or that I prefer simpler things, I do NOT mean I want something stupid. THIS is the stupid kind of simple:

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Flo Rida is Dub-Step. And Dub Step is representative of what pop music is becoming. Of all the forms of electronica they could have moved toward, they had to go THAT way. It is technically simple, yes, but it's also intellectually simple. It's stupid. He doesn't fucking DO anything!

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What the fuck is happening to music? It's been reduced to a massive beat with little bleeps over top! And NOTHING! That's all there is! It's like 90% of abstract painting! Pure surface! All the same, technically! Just copying the patterns of some other artist who was actually doing something cool!

This brings me to the other part of what I mean by "Simple", especially in regards to music.

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What is good about this? It just sounds clumsy. It's a long string of tiny little tricks that don't go anywhere. Most of which are annoying. I'm into noise music. And punk. And my philosophy toward music condemns rules. But I'm pretty sure he intended that to sound like a unified song, and it doesn't. It just sounds like a lot of little bits of songs that interrupt one another over the course of three minutes. It's a needlessly elaborate collection of complex elements. Yngwie has made some pretty good music. He has a good amount of compositional talent. But sometimes... He just makes squealy guitar noise.

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The only problem is that none of his music ever seems to go anywhere. Even if it sounds like it will, it always just kinda ends on an awkward note where it's like "Wait, your stopping there? Huh. Okay then, I suppose." His music also has this tendency to abruptly cut itself off for no real reason.

I have similar problems with classical music. Their stuff is way quieter, but it has the same awkward tendencies that aren't present in, say, Bach, or Beethoven, or Scriabin.

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I really like Scriabin. He had some cool ideas in synaesthetics, man. Had a major influence on my ideas in regards to my personal vision of panaesthetic art and the fragmented unity of the arts.

Let's get back on the topic of simplicity. Let's say I take a really simple composition, for a drawing or song. It's composed of four or five elements. The song sounds nice, but it's only a couple seconds long. The drawing also looks nice, but it's really flat and there isn't much too look at. So I ad to it. In the drawing, i add details. Just further simple forms applied to the larger general simple forms. They're composed within that larger composition. With the music, I break the sound. I turn each portion into a collection of notes that describe that sections overall sound. I can go on like this for eternity. Expanding the song to be an hour long tirade of sound arrangements, and the drawing into a technical marvel you'd need a magnifying glass to fully appreciate. The end result is complex, yes, but it's born if simple foundation, and comprised of simple components, and all components would focus on that overall purpose, the total composition.

Nature doesn't arrange things like this. Chaos is an element. And sometimes it can do amazing things. Especially if it is given the freedom to do so. In the end, it's the effect on the senses that really matters. If a bird song is so beautiful it brings you to tears, I'd say that's important and worth noticing.

It's hard to explain...

I believe in extremely well-constructed art and totally unintentional, chaotic, uncomposed art, but nothing in between the two.

Ideally, I'd like a highly composed song comprising entirely of elements that cannot be controlled, or an extremely beautiful, appealing, composed work deriving from something which is essentially chaos.