Tunes to tune in to
The other day I said to Liza that music is the secret faith of all artists (and contemporary visual art is the opposite, we don't really like it. some kind of horrible wrong turn there). Like when I heard Ruth Garbus’s Kleinmeister for the first time, I listened to it every day for a month. Whose book do I read that much? And so spontaneously, without distinguishing what it does for me from what it does to me. It was something that healed me, that helped me think, and feel, and find new dimensions of the voice even though my voice is nothing like Ruth’s and will wobble to different places. And at the same time, it seemed to be Ruth telling some refracted story about Brattleboro life, about coming alive as a body and a voice. I’ve often wanted to write something about it, not in the way of criticism but just wishing I could give something back to this music, that I could share the way I hear it. I haven’t figured out how to do that, but luckily it fends for itself.
https://ruthgarbus.bandcamp.com/album/kleinmeister
Actually I know who I am reading that way, Jon Fosse, I’ve just finished book 1 of Septology. I don’t really want to do anything else but I am doing everything else including write this newsletter, and I am going to start taking German lessons at last, and I have to go back to teaching this week.
On the weekend we went to see Ellen Arkbro play chords at Blank Forms. I’d never been before, except to see Bahauddin Dagar shred Raag Yaman (which is the Lydian one) on a Rudra Veena for about four hours. But that was in a church. I’m rooting for these guys.
Here’s a recording of Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar playing Yaman
https://ideologicorgan.bandcamp.com/track/raga-yaman
It occurred to me when I was there that I had never heard this kind of music performed before, it was always headphone music to me. I know it isn’t, that there are elements of improvisation and installation and hall resonance but I think I didn’t know it in my bones. I’d grown up in a place with a limited live music scene, and found my way to a lot of this stuff when 21 felt infinitely far away, so live music and alcohol were the things that took my older friends away from me. All of that is so long ago.
Back then I listened to this so many times in low quality mp3 on the worst headphones. That was what we had. I’d listen to this on a clock radio
https://orenambarchi.bandcamp.com/album/grapes-from-the-estate
Back to Ellen. She was playing some chords, it was very slow music, you can sort of get an idea of it here:
https://ellenarkbro.bandcamp.com/album/chords
But I found that finally I could name what it was about the live aura. There were these variations in the dimension of tinniness and fullness, overall volume, noisiness, compression, in other words the variation in the music was almost all in exactly the sphere which people tend to hand off to an audio engineer, and which our systems of dissemination and home listening recognize no responsibility to reproduce. In fact we are quite proud of our ability to flatten these differences and make everything sound “good” and the same. But that was where we felt the wobble. In the tin orbit. I was sitting on a little stool and felt these changes produce alterations in my posture which were very strong. At times it would fold me over, or pull me into a stable meditation posture, or something prouder, or it would make me stretch, I could feel pain in my body, or distance from that pain. I don’t know how she does it. But recorded music is really dilute medicine in this area. In the same way sometimes I like to go to a Buddhist temple so that I can experience the same thing with the sound of a bell or a chant or a wooden block. But of course the bell player or block clomper is a bit of a religious goody-two-shoes and often sort of lost in an orientalist fantasies of egoless ultra-discipline. Fantasies which you have to admit do find some support, but still. There’s a bit more humour in it I think. Sometimes these Zen guys seem like they’re in the army. Somehow Ellen’s whole thing seemed like a better version of that.
Afterward we chatted with people, and even met Ellen, who is amazing, has a lightness, none of the bitter block-clomper there. We talked a bit about Berlin, the terrible winters. So terrible. But I liked it actually. I just was there for the whole winter, I kept extending my trip. I was saying how alive I had been there, how I had rewritten almost the entire next book when I was there. Liza, who visited during that time, and didn’t like it as much, cut in to say “it’s not Berlin, you’re just in love.” And I laughed and said that was probably true, probably exactly right. Just that. Maybe I have nothing at all to say about places, or my relationship to place is like my headphone music, which alters music and place, maybe usefully so, but in a way that misses the music and the city.
The other day Elle told me that Apple Music now auto-remasters playlists (adjusting volume and maybe bass/treble balance?) and that this is helpful for making songs flow between different albums but is sometimes jarring when it breaks the continuity between tracks on the same album. Something about this seemed horrible to me, evil, bad, and a few unprintables, yet it didn’t seem so horrible that I listen to almost all of my music on noise cancelling headphones while walking around or even sitting in my house, that I use music to silence the city, and of course I also flatten a lot of these differences. Is some music meant to be loud or quiet? I wouldn’t know. Actually I made this mistake with Sunn O))) — during the deep lockdown I listened to this record a lot but always at a volume that was comfortable to me, without any curiosity about Sunn’s live shows, which are apparently profoundly ear-damaging and have a Satanic tinge. It actually sounds like a completely horrible experience to me but they made something that I could use in spite of themselves. You may hide from the light but you are made of it.
https://sunn.bandcamp.com/album/pyroclasts
It made me think about these differences, of course writers deal with it too. I have made my peace with the fact that basically, of my stories, I am responsible for the sequence of words and essentially nothing else. Yet a huge part of the book is the paratext. An ex of mine put me on to a great book about this, Gérard Ginette’s “Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation.” Will your chapters have names? Epigraphs? This is something that my students often sweat over and it’s been sometimes sad to have to tell them, at least those with commercial ambitions, “don’t think too hard about it because that decision will almost certainly be taken away from you.”
So a writer becomes a writer of sentences. And a musician a writer of sequences of notes, chords, scales, verses, choruses. There’s a lot we can do, and actually the assumed divisions don’t always feel so bad. Sometimes the audio engineer is doing the part you can’t seem to do, capturing more and not less of the live sound, the subtle variation, they are the first critic who renders your work readable to other critics, since hardly anyone will risk an original encounter with anything. That would be the most difficult thing of all, to let the world be new to us, without the certainty that we will be able to put words to the experience, or that even those closest to us will understand them when we do. And then when they do, what a miracle.
https://chrisweisman.bandcamp.com/track/the-right-off-key
I’ve been having a bit of a hard time recently, in some ways just waiting for time to pass. Three more days like this. But I think I may have turned a corner. More soon on very different topics. Peace throughout the solar system!
Now listen to this.
https://chrisweisman.bandcamp.com/track/the-fingers-of-mars
Now SHARPEN.
https://fievelisglauque.bandcamp.com/track/flaming-swords
That's it for now.