Is Access a Problem?
The "Squirrel!" Effect
The other day, the extreme music label Nuclear Blast posted a new video from the French band Alcest on the label's Instagram account. I knew of this band, never listened to them, but they are adjacent to many artists I do like and I remember watching an Amoeba "What's In My Bag" episode in which Alcest's leader Neige 1 selected an Emma Ruth Rundle album, and given that her album Marked For Death is a favorite for the remainder of my life, I marked Alcest as a band to leap for whenever they may come across my various algorithms.
The video is for the song "L'Envol" ("Flight" as Google Translate explains to me). The visual style reminds me of the Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings that was a strangely critical piece of art for me when I was a kid. According to the video director it is, and also by the Golden Age of Illustration. The song features most of the fundamentals of black metal: tremolo picking and drumming that focuses on cymbals and snare work.
"L'Envol" 2 kind of messed me up the first time I heard it. I love many, many songs, but sometimes I hear something that seems to jostle my physical and psychological self in a way I wasn't totally prepared for. Yob's "Upon the Sight of the Other Shore" for one. Bon Iver's "715 Creeks" for another. Part of the instant physicality of the song comes from the essentials of black metal that make me resonate so much with that genre. For such a mournful and sometimes sinister art form, I believe black metal to have a specific "lightness of being" to it. The first few Darkthrone albums all make me feel lifted off the ground as soon as the wafer-thin tremolo picked chords begin. As Death Metal feels humid and downward, Black Metal tends to feel elevated. 3 One of the best descriptions I've heard for the kind of music that makes you feel whole and hollow all at the same time is from David Foster Wallace's novel The Pale King:
This song is making me feel both warm and safe. As though cocooned like a little boy that’s just been taken out of the bath and wrapped in towels that have been washed so many times they’re incredibly soft, and also at the same time feeling sad; there’s an emptiness at the center of the warmth like the way an empty church or classroom with lots of windows through which you can only see rain in the street is sad, as though right at the center of this safe, enclosed feeling is the seed of emptiness.
Despite the catharsis of "L'Envol," even though I listened to it a few times in a row, I quickly moved on to other shiny things, some delivered via the algorithm, some stumbled on less mathematically.
I don't think this is an original idea at this point, but is access a problem? Is access + volume even worse?4 If I had such a stunned response to hearing "L'Envol" for the first time, it seems like the more authentic and intentional response may be to focus on that song and understand what it is about it that makes me feel the whole and hollow sensation.
Sometimes I sincerely wonder if interest in music or any kind of art can devolve into addiction. Immediately after listening to "L'Envol" a few times, I had this creeping narrative that "there is something else that deserves my attention, I just don't know what it is yet, so I need to find it."
The algorithms are so useful, and they do function really well if you engage with their parameters: liking and disliking songs on Spotify playlists, thumbing up and down videos on YouTube, sharing and re-posting reels on Instagram. But their function is to serve themselves and that service is persistent volume of new or unseen content, not the deliberate consideration of that content.
"L'Envol" is one of those songs that contains enough emotional data that it's worth listening to exclusively for a little while.
I like finding and reading new books, but The Plague is the only book I may actually need.
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a nom de riff, as black metal performers have a long tradition for ↩
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man, most of the time I have really stupid opinions about French culture, but it sounds so cool to try and say this song title ↩
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this also matches the vocal performance of these genres, Death Metal being lower and diaphragmatic, Black Metal being almost completely sung from the head. ↩
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volume as in an amount of something, not the loudness of something ↩
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