Places are not just physical, can’t always be mapped, are often lost and sometimes never found. Home is rarely an address, a street, bricks or mortar. We move on, we move away. The unsaid things always the loudest we hear. So sometimes we live in songs. Today I’ve been living in Gold Panda ‘Vanilla Minus’. It cuts my heart but the release is sweet.
No-one on earth could feel like this
What we pass on, what we share, what we gift one another is the chance to see the world through each other’s eyes. Our own experiences can blinker, filter out, cast shadows that, while necessary to push us forward on our own way through this life, facilitate an overlooking. It is easy to forget – and more convenient to believe – that something is ours, and ours alone, when in fact someone else shared it with us.
I had fallen down that rabbit hole. Oh so proud, oh so stupid. On the phone to my dad this week I had a moment of clarity: I owe all the joy I find in music to my parents. Every single drop. I owe them for dancing round our living room, singing at the tops of their voices to the Eurythmics. I owe them for always having a stack of blank tapes so my sister and I could tape the radio and make our own Top of The Pops. I owe them for letting me stay up to watch the Free Nelson Mandela and Freddie Mercury Tribute concerts. I owe my mum for learning to play the guitar in her late 30s. I owe my dad for dancing at my school discos. I owe them for not giving two figs about demonstrating their feelings through music, for dancing and singing and laughing at our cringing. Most of all, though, I owe them because this was their thing – appreciating music in such a loud and open way wasn’t something either of them grew up with – but they shared it with us. Yeah, parents can mess you up but they can also make you.
One more hour
The clocks go back tonight. It reminded me of a childhood story. It was about a man who lived in a house with many floors, each with a steep staircase leading to the next. The rooms on every floor each had a clock that needed to be wound. The man spent every day running up and down the stairs to wind the clocks, starting at the bottom of the house and working up. He would set them according to the time of the first clock, forgetting the time it would take him to run up all those stairs. He was constantly perplexed – all of his clocks were out of sync and he never knew the right time. Resolution came in the form of a friend who gave him a pocket watch he could carry with him and set each clock to that. This satisfied the man and presumably he lived happily ever after, forever setting his clocks, finding a peculiar contentment in always knowing the precise time.
Quite where I heard or read this story I have no idea but it caught my imagination – at the time purely because it just seemed so silly to me. Thinking about it now, it’s even sillier – a life lived trying to measure, contain and own time.
At some moment or other, we all try and do this. We wish away minutes, hate hours, dread days – reaching for something or someone the other side of that time. Maybe it’s only natural (or nurtural – that should be a word) but it feels like a waste. I want to live, to feel, in the moment. The next moment will come.
Today I have been mainly listening to James Blake’s ‘Klavierwerke’ EP [listen to I Only Know (What I Know Now) below]. His music is made out of patience. All those spaces, those breaths, those pauses. It slows my heartbeat; makes me glad to be just here, right now.
What’s the matter? You hurt yourself
Day versus night. Night versus day. Dawn has a buoyancy that appeals yet dusk feels more truthful. All the little lies that daytime demands, that lubricant collective coexistence, exhaust. The night has no time for all that tip-toeing around. Night time is private, selfish, brutally honest in the most tender of ways. The warmth of darkness is the ideal temperature for truly absorbed listening and the soundtrack currently killing me softly is Warpaint’s ‘The Fool’. It’s got me right between the eyes. It speaks to the aches in my body. It makes complete and utter sense in the dead of night – and it’s slowly unravelling me.
No one ever said believing is easy
A few weeks ago a friend reminded me of an argument we’d had at university that had sprung from a statement I’d made about human capacity for flight. I’d read something about how at this present evolutionary pit-stop we only use a teeny percentage of our brains. I had reasoned that somewhere else in the grey mush may lay the ability to take to the skies, no plane required. My friend had a field day. Part of me still wants to believe it, a little to ruffle his feathers but mainly because it’s just so much more fun. Imagine! ‘What if…?’s are where the magic lives. The unknowable is richer and the maybes more beautiful that any static certainty.
It’s my last day in New York today. I’ve been here almost a couple of weeks and a little of that fabled American dreaming has got to me but I’m grateful for the reminder. It’s too easy to be cynical sometimes, almost a reflex to sneer, and really difficult to dream when the weight of everyday presses down.
What’s more, believing that anything is possible is simply shit scary: the odds that the evidence will stack against us, let us down, are high. But the opposite is grimmer: a life of mapped out monotony, of never trying to strive for anything because it probably won’t go the way we want it to. Well, yeah, it might not but then, guess what, we might discover a different way that spins us off on a whole new tangent. That feels alive.
So, yeah, while the screen dream skyline of NYC has definitely perked me up, it was the music I went to see (Mount Kimbie, The xx, Warpaint, Teengirl Fantasy, Gatekeeper, Blondes, the Roulette group) and musicians I spoke to (FaltyDL, Meredith Monk and Blondes) that really got me excited again, got me believing again. What they share – what all artists share – is the daring to imagine their own worlds, to build something beautiful out of uncertainty and invite us in. It’s in these maybe-places I want to live.
Once upon a time
The way we communicate is changing, has changed, will always change. Language evolves, channels emerge, technologies revolutionise.
One thing remains static, however: the equation of efficiency with ‘better’ communication. Dominant modes of communication in the western world have propelled exchange into the realms of response. Because technologies allow for ‘instant’ communication, we expect and desire it.
Yet when we focus on speed, we lose sight of reflection. By aiming for efficiency, we refuse ourselves the opportunity for consideration, germination, rumination, and marination. All those good words that suggest and demand slowness.
When all we’re doing is responding in the most efficient way, we are not fully engaging in or committing to the richness of communication.
Dance the night away
I don’t believe in balance. It’s a fallacy. A pretty yet damaging ideal. To subscribe to balance would be to iron out the vital, invigorating flux and flow between transcending the everyday and living in the moment. We need both.
I mention this because I went to see Blondes last week. And then I went again on Tuesday. They had a big affect on me because they made me think of – no, feel – a time when transcendence was ingrained into our daily lives. When achieving transcendence through music – and movement to music – held an essential role in connecting, commemorating and celebrating stages in our ever-turning lifecycle. And yes, you could argue that music still holds a transcending role at important life events yet the reverence with which we regard it is greatly diminished.
Modern society at best marginalises, and at worst outcasts and outlaws, transcendence. Callings, careers, vocations, and past-times that focus on feeling over function are discouraged and invalidated. In our limiting capitalist society, freedom is defined through accumulation yet true transcendence don’t cost a thing. Just dance. Mind and body as one. That’s what Blondes made me feel. Dancing to their music felt like giving thanks. It wasn’t just a Tuesday night anymore, it was a celebration of life. Transcendence of the everyday and living in the moment as one.
Remember this
Sitting by the open window in my living room, arms raised up above the back of my chair, shoulder muscles stretching deliciously, a soft breeze stroking my face, I think: remember this. Record this sensation. This moment right here, now; save it. And I will remember sitting by a window in the sunshine but it won’t be this window, on this day. It will be a remembered idea of sitting by a window, a layering of memories of many open windows over many summers. Sensation can be recalled yet not truly remembered. It is wholly connected to the body and of the moment. That said, more than anything else, music can take you closest to remembering a sensation. A recreated sensation perhaps. Lose yourself in a song you hold dear for reasons pertaining to a person, a moment or an event in a your life and you can almost almost taste that time again. Music enables the body to remember. Remember?
Slow down
The internet can sometimes feel suffocating. That is no grand statement, merely a watered down echo of a billion similar utterances before it. While the breadth and depth of this virtual world of ours can tower, it’s the pace that really gets to me. The urgency is seductive for a little while but it’s like trying to chase tornados: sooner or later you’re going to be swept up with the swirling picket fences and braying farm animals.
That’s why Connan Mockasin‘s 10-minute masterpiece ‘Forever Dolphin Love’ is the most vital track of this new decade so far. It doesn’t even really get going until 4 minutes in. 4 minutes! That’s a whole minute longer than the supposedly perfect pop song. This is a song that unravels in its own time. That demands you match your pulse to its. That has a sensory impact far beyond the aural. It manifests like heavily scented smoke rings; sinking, soothing, slowing. It’s a lullaby to the pleasure principal; a Pied Piper-esque call to luxuriate in a physical, rather than virtual, here and now. Tune in, lean back, stretch out. What’s the rush, after all?
I Am Love
How much of our identity is who we are for other people? This question was in my head as I left the Ritzy having just watched I Am Love yesterday evening, stepping out into gauzy, near-dusk light, the sky the most startling deep blue, one shade away from nightfall. It was like a layer of the screen depiction of the ripe Italian countryside had been laid on top of Brixton’s newly gentrified streets. If that sounds sensationalist and melodramatic in this constrained little collection of pixels, arranged into patterns that attempt to convey shared meaning, I’m okay with that. It feels good to feel, even when it takes on a supposedly negative form. To wake up, to see the world from a slightly different angle, to remember there are those different angles. A million angles. A million corners to turn around and find yourself somewhere new. I am rambling. And getting corny. Again.
But back to identity. After a little reflection, I realised that that question in my head approached identity as if it were something static. I don’t really believe that. To believe that would be to give up. To accept. To stop exploring. To shut off new experiences on the basis of past ones. I refuse to climb into a box and stay there for the sake of an easy life. What’s alive about an easy life? What’s exhilarating about order? What’s joyful about being born, filing in line and replicating the same kind of life, over and over?
That kind of social tidiness is a Tory’s wet dream. And my nightmare.
“Someday” by Ce Ce Rogers just started playing on shuffle. Bloody Apple. Second guessing my emotions again. And getting them right.
Ruth Saxelby 