The Benevolent Spirit of the Creative Impulse

For the past week, I’ve had these visions of rolling my ankle after seeing someone do it during a dance performance at our last show.

Really scary visions…but it’s to the point where I’m actually very intrigued by the notion and how it would feel. To be honest – if I could do it and reverse the pain after 5 minutes I’d do it. Kind of like those bruises you touch to “see if they still hurt” but you know they’re gonna. Or maybe that’s just me…

I had been sad all day. I don’t know why, truly, and I’m certain it will pass…but to be honest I cried a few times. A guy got decapitated on a bus in Canada, a co-worker’s family member lost an eye, another co-worker’s mother had just been in an accident recently…I think I was just out of sync with the planet.

When I got home, I decided to go outside and play my guitar in the screened-in tent in my back yard but the mosquitos made it impossible to enjoy. Upset, I decided to put my guitar in my car and go for a walk by the train tracks.

When you cross the tracks, there are several paths that lead into the woods. One of them is merely two ATV-dug trenches…sort of treacherous to the step.

Of course, I think about rolling my ankle and get a little nervous – but I’m determined to go for a walk and convinced that I’m going crazy about this ankle rolling business. I get several miles in and I see a fantastic rainbow.

In my depressed state (picture the voice of Eeyore), I think “A rainbow is nice, but I wish I’d see a train.” I used to go across the street to watch the trains when I was young.

After I get…maybe a mile in, I hear a rumbling in the distance.

It’s a fucking train!

So I turn around and start BOOKING it through this incredibly dangerous path back to the spot where I can see the train.

I hear the train catch up to me, and it’s right beside me…I’ve never been down this particular path so I’ve got no idea how much longer I have.

And I’m scared about spraining my ankle, so I’m really pussyfooting. Suddenly, I decide “fuck it” and don’t even look at my feet while I’m running.

I get to the end of the path in time to stop, turn to my left and watch the train go by.

And I burst into tears.

At least I think so.

On hip hop legend Nas’ last record he declared that ”Hip Hop is Dead”.  If you’re a rap nerd like I am, you realize that this sort of statement would be similar in magnitude to Jimmy Page declaring the end of the guitar solo or Jello Biafra becoming a Republican strategist.

Hip hop culture has brought us the proliferation of diss tracks…you know…Cannibus and LL…Sole and El-P, Queensbridge vs. BDP, Jay-Z and Nas or whatever bad rapper/crew you like and their superiour counterpart.  While hip hop certainly didn’t create the idea of expressing negative emotions towards a persona non grata, it has made a huge impact in making it more popular…even to the point where the collective conscious of music unwittingly picks up on the spirit of the protest.

Just as we listen to the sounds of The Clash, The Skatalites or whoever cites ska as an influence because of the creativity of triangularly traded Reggae artists – Jean Sullivan reminds us that the collective changes to culture will continue.  As if Roberta Flack or Bjork wasn’t enough. 

Jean’s record “Songs from the Comfort and Privacy of Your Own Home”, as it turns out, begins with a diss track.  I confess that I do not know if Jean is actually a hip hop fan…I should ask. 

Obviously directed towards either a manager or previous member of the band, Jean describes in candid and biting detail their shortcomings over what is an aesthetically ominous backdrop in “New Hampshire”.  Although rock tends to have a “simpler” syllaballic structure than hip hop, one can definitely hear the spirit of angst towards friendship lost that is a common theme in rap, hardcore punk and other types of modern folk music.

Perhaps I’m obfuscating too greatly the actual point of my post:  Jean’s album is FUCKING DOPE! (see what I did there?)

The second track makes up significantly for the haunting, dark nature of the opening cut by serving up a ridiculously dancable track called “Sad Song”, seemingly another diss track.  One thing for sure, Jean’s not going to shy away from her opinion on this album.  A ridulous bassline pops and hammers as a very warm synth ask us to somehow dance AND “sing a sad song”…and pulls it off.  Eerie, sad wails of “Come back” followed by what seems to be a Space-Station effected guitar remind us, when our dancing feet are tired, that things aren’t always simple.

By far my favourite song on the record, “I Didn’t Even Dream of Water” mixes words with sonic texures to create the feeling of listening to your uncertain spirit sing frantically through a body of fluid.  I have no other way to describe it.  By the third song, you know that Jean is simply going to make whatever noise she and producer Luke Sullivan, with whom she plays in the band Left Hand Does, would like to make.  Period.  Late, unnerving delays in the backing vocals during the chorus exaggerate the “anxiety attack” vibe the whole song pulls off.  I mean this in the best way imaginable.  This is also one of many songs that uses house-specific imagery that makes the name of this collection of works wholly appropriate.

“I Got the Radio” is the first time a style “repeats”… as its similarities to “Sad Song” in dancability and structure are undeniable.  The song is slightly more aggressive, featuring a fantastic Fripp-esque guitar ”event” following each chorus.  To me, it sounds very much like a sinister version of the Talking Heads…which is enough to bake my muffin.

I do not understand “Pone-Wo”.  Not a single bit, after almost a year of trying to decipher what the “meaning” may be.  All I know is that it’s haunting in a very effective way.  I still can’t tell if the song is, literally, about a puppy…but I’ve always created a metaphor in my head of a particular kind of personality type that’s seen as posionous and contagious, and is spread by care and contact.  There’s a very cool violin break in the middle of the song that breaks up the chugging and eerie guitar line that dominates the majority of the song.

“Greener” is a song that’s generally a little too positive for my tastes – but there have been days where I’ve gotten in my car and started driving what I knew was to be a long distance and been completely rejuvinated by it’s positivity.  It starts alright enough, with some imagery about a wonderful day that is brought to another level by music.  An apt concept for a song that can achieve that same thing for me, given the right circumstances.  The minimalistic guitar and synth make this song a real journey in frequencies.

Then there’s “Bed in the Sea”…which starts off very reminiscient of one of Eno’s “hymn-like” songs off Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy and ends up becoming layered in beautiful, airy, harmonies that are complex enough to remind you they are there, but are subtle enough to let the melody shine through.  A wonderful image persists throughout the whole song.

The next song got my attention right away with the blasting drum beat at the beginning and the eerie lyrics come in “The nerves of dead people, the open ends of their curling fingers are still poking at us years later.  The last days of summer still swim in your mouth.”  This song introduces yet more house-specific imagery, but wraps it up into a wonderfully bizarre chorus “You’re a one horned white horse, the miracle machine is down.”  This song is one of the most lyrically potent on the record and is, so far as I can tell upon repeated listens, much more deeply related with the “house” concept than I had originally thought.  Whether intentional or not, I see a picture of myself walking around and accidentally touching the woodstove because of a power outage when I hear her wail “Feel and look around…feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeel and look arounnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd”  This song is EPIC.

“Thanks” is something of a musical haiku, consisting of but one sentence and clocking in at merely 45 seconds:

“Just wanted to say thanks for causing me a need for something impossible for me to have, thereby creating a problem where there was no problem before.”

As something of a makeshift Buddhist (more on this someday, I’m sure), I consider anything that employs the negativity of a situation towards the realm of self-improvement and appreciation a complete success.  I think many people would have a hard time creating a sentence that manifests the concept as clearly as this one.  As for what it means, or who the thank you would be directed to – I know that I, personally, always think of a particular lady (she changes over time) that I would love to get to know much better and yet has no interest in me.  I am delighted by knowing people that have value, and the most obvious and simple example of that is our own painful desire to “acquire” them as people in our “inner circle”.  Once we can recognize that, we can be alright with people existing within their own realm instead of seeing them through our own personal paradigm.  Yada yada.  Blah.  I could go on for far too long, and I’ve not gotten to where I need to be so it would foolish to lecture even the internet about it.

After this haiku, “A Tangle of Brown Spiders” weaves its way in through synth bells, a floating bassline and synchopated guitar.  Another fantastic use of lyrics to achieve visiual cues(which, along with the rhythmically intricate bass work, is Jean’s most treasured asset on this record) we start seeing more house imagery…and Jean is at her best when she is dark, hopeful and bizarre.  This song is a wonderful example of that particular formula excelling.  If I had to choose a 2nd favourite behind “I Didn’t Even Dream of Water”, this would be it.

The final cut, “Hindsight” shows an aggressive vocal attack from Jean as she simply tells it how it is, juxtaposed with a very melodic bridge and chorus with arpeggiated synth highlights.  This song has Depeche Mode-esque percussive synths during the entire track and seems to use programmed drums, but at the end gets frantic as it builds up to an abrupt ending and you’re left wondering “What just happened?” - looking back at the musical journey you’ve just experienced.

This record can make you dance and it can make you think at the same time.  Good for anxious episodes of disarray, fun-time drinking sing-a-longs or reflective contemplation, I really don’t think anyone can say they don’t get their money or time’s worth with a record like this.

First things first…this being a blog, I must complain.

A pet peeve I have is when an avid listener of music refers to themselves as “just” a listener, or “just” a fan, or however it is put.  Minimizing their role in the artistic reality of sound simply because they weren’t the human that manifested the sound.

I think it’s a shame, because in the same way that G-ds that have no believers cease to exist – music ceases to be interesting when there is no listener to experience it.  (And yes, if the tree falls and nobody hears it, it falls silently.  As silently as a one-handed clap.)

Taken from Dictionary.com:

mu·sic   /?myuz?k/ –noun

Even the very first, limited, definition makes reference to the listener’s role in music.

I’ve also recently began re-reading Eric Tamm’s book Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound - which last night revealed to me the following Eno gem (which originally comes from his 1979 lecture “The Studio as Compositional Tool”): 

[Before the advent of recording] the piece disappeared when it was finished, so it was something that only existed in time. The effect of recording is that it takes music out of the time dimension and puts it into the space dimension. As soon as you do that, you’re in a position of being able to listen again and again to a performance, to become familiar with details you most certainly had missed the first time through, and to become very fond of details that weren’t intended by the composer or the musicians. The effect of this on the composer is that he can think in terms of supplying material that would actually be too subtle for a first listening.

There’s two interesting notions presented here:

#1.  The phenomenon of having music exist for perpetuity, and thus become inherently more complicated over time.

I beleive it’s obvious why such a thing would be interesting to a songwriter and to a certain extent I agree with Mr. Eno.  However, I believe that improvised music as a whole can raise some questions.  If one is to improvise, for example, within some relatively simple predefined guidelines (a simple C Major progression, for example, consisting of only C, Am and G) the results are going to be more “pleasing” aesthetically due to the consonance of the guidelines.

However, this is when musicians run their actions through said predetermined filter…complete, total, and utter improvisation almost requires that such a filter not exist.  The mind is short circuited to the instrument, and the notes are not always in unison.  However, through these dissonant and “theoretically unsound” notes one finds a certain level of complexity that will never exist again past the moment it first exists.  This complexity is still there, regardless of the notion that it cannot be contained forever in a recording.

The element that I don’t think Eno considered in his lecture is that the listener interpreting the piece is paramount to it being, or not being, more complex.  A piece’s “complexity”, at its core, will depend on the listener’s sonic aesthetic preferences (an amalgamation of their concious intent and their cultural experience).  A Middle Eastern throat singer, for example, will not consider the overtones of their voices “complex” in the same way a Western listener will.  Similarly, very “simple” melodies by the Beatles could seem otherworldly out of context.

#2.  Taking a piece of art out of the “time” dimension and putting it into the “space” dimension.

This is the one that I’m finding interesting on a completely different level.  My friend is heavily into magick as of late, and through her I started contemplating a lot of the philosophies that I’ve held through my lifetime…the way that we interact with the physical “reality” around us and such.  Time is of particular interest to me lately.  Perhaps because as I get older, I realize it has a finite quality that I’m not sure I’m a fan of.

I am slowly (ha) becoming convinced that time is not linear, but is rather how humans describe a particular set of conditions.  We see things happen that indicate time has passed…vertexes lose hair, breasts sag, tree leaves change colours, milk goes bad, the price of soda rises - these sorts of things.  In essence, “time” is what we’re using to describe the pattern or order in which we have seen those particular events occur.

And it occured to me – perhaps panic attacks, hallucinations (induced or otherwise) and ritualistic alterations of consciousness (magick/religion) are all times in which humans are going legitimately insane as they realize that time is NOT a linear filter through which our spacial relationships are concieved…this leads us to a state of mind that is rife with new information that is not confined by any semblance of the ”timeline” that humans have created for ourselves.  Given that we have never, from birth, been given any indication that time is anything BUT linear – I can imagine the results of an unconscious realization being fairly unpredictable at best.

So…are you hearing music on record, or is the music on record because you’re hearing it?  Fuck a chicken and an egg.