Listening at the solstice
(Happy solstice, dearreader. I love our little planet, swinging through deep and silent space.)
(This post is about music and has a bunch of mp3s linked from it. If you’d them all once, download the zip file.)
Early this January, I deleted all the music on my computer and vowed to listen only to music I’d never heard before for the rest of the year. (New albums by bands I already liked were permitted.) Objects, surroundings, sounds, tastes, have a way of helping to sustain the continuity of feeling and self, stringing the days together like pearls — and sometimes you need to stop being who you were. I used to do that by moving to another place, but I like where I’m living now, so: nothing but new music. The longest day seems like a good time to listen back.
“Glossolalia – prophecies, Pentecost community, USA, 1960s”
This was the first thing I listened to, recordings of glossolalia from the astonishing collection Okkulte Stimmung. Divine inspiration and alien tongues was a good starting point (and oddly relaxing). (Seriously, find the collection if you can. Many recordings of things you never imagined someone captured on tape: Séance conversations with various dead worthies? Channeled beings from improbable planets? An astonishing ten minutes from an Egyptian exorcism conducted in جن language? All here. A box of wonders.)
You quickly realize, taking a vow like this, that you’ve kind of eliminated all the low-hanging sonic fruit. If you like a genre of music you’ve probably already heard all the big stuff. So you start digging. Or, if you’re lazy, like me, you jump to genres you know almost nothing about. Like girl-group tropicalia in the 1960s. And you find four sisters (named, perfectly and for real, Cybele, Cylene, Cynara and Cyva) who sing with a precision that could pick the hearts off a falling playing card, and who’ve created something like doo-wop with a wider emotional range, a touch of melancholy.
And you find out about Persian psych and folk music from the 1960s, too. (Plus early Algerian raï, but that’s a whole separate blog post full of dancing, public weeping, and trumpets — how can you help but love a form of music whose name translates as “Yeah!”) It’s so beautiful. This song is one piercing moment after another; by that delicate coda we stand like St. Sebastian struck with so many arrows of love and loss, but for once the arrows help us stand; their fletching helps us fly.
“Homesickness” / Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou
And about the tumbling-water piano work of Guèbrou, an Ethiopian-born, Jerusalem-based nun who plays like a collaboration of Scott Joplin and Lubomyr Melnyk — but comparisons don’t quite capture it. A fluttering music like a bird flown into a room and trying to find its way back to the open air, but utterly without panic.
And about this (from the AMAZING Ecstatic Music of the Jemaa el Fna) from Marrakesh in 2005. Run off moped batteries through terrible speakers, it’s an explosion of raw joy that acts as a permanent argument in favor of humans being ourselves in all our various ways. From that opening wall of guitar (?) noise, hang out in the Moroccan street until about 1:13, when something starts that’s like what the Velvet Underground might have become in a state of holy and radiant glory.
“A Summer Long Since Passed” / Virginia Astley
Of course you also come across things that are the kind of thing you would have liked, had you known — in my case, Virginia Astley’s curious and utterly dreamy album From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, instrumental miniatures played as though in the middle of an English field on a perfect summer’s day. Birds twitter, boats creak with rowing, distant bells sound, and piano phrases cycle like bees going from one flower to the next. (This is the lushest track on the record, with its children’s choir; some of the others are downright dark, with a slight Wicker Man glow from burning August fields.)
Luckily bands you love keep releasing music, too, like White Hinterland/Casey Dienel — which began with pianos and magnificently detailed, loopy lyrics that told intricate stories about free spirits, old buildings, and the fate of a ladies’ man — who have transformed into something rich and fuzzy, as though a picture of their previous music had been taken and all that came through was the lens flare. And this seems like a good place to stop, in a black and silent sea, in a lake the sun has never seen –
I’m looking forward to the next six months.