Back to the river

When my mom and dad first started dating, my dad was into something she calls "space music". This space music consisted of avant-garde duo Art of Noise, and the cheesier Ray Lynch and Deuter, among other things that I was not nearly so familiar with (my grandmother in fact had a habit of putting on Deuter tapes during dinner parties when I was small). The space music rubbed off on me in a big way, creating a long aversion to intelligible lyrics (Radiohead is still mostly unintelligible), and a huge, squishy soft spot for electronica (for lack of a better term) and melodrama, and to a lesser extent, classical music. There's a good reason for these preferences, and it's that often times these songs are engaging enough but blank enough to let my imagination run.

Tati and I used to lay our futon down and listen to Deuter Cicada and our long, dark living room would become a densely tree-lined river, deeper and darker and bluer and purpler and more shining and more fire-fly speckled than the entrance to Pirates of the Caribbean, the futon our raft. When we were kids we would constantly form stories together, and we took the trip down this river a few times, altering the story as a recurring dream is altered each time the dreamer dreams it, adding stages or characters or events at will, but taking the cues of the music more or less the same as last time.

My music crisis continues more or less as it has since the very end of highschool-- that is, I can't listen much to my own music any more, and I haven't found another band I care about nearly as much as Radiohead. That isn't to say I haven't heard any good music at all, I have, but it has been like little rain showers, momentarily taking over my life, pattering and rushing, before drifting away. I've been listening to ISO50's ambient electronica playlists half out of habit and half out of interest. It's been comforting, I suppose, to listen to this almost featureless wash of blips and dry beats and electric tones, but it's not a return to the stimulating landscape I had as a child.

The closest I've gotten lately are these albums or songs:

The Knife - Tommorrow, In a Year
This album veers too far into icy sea-shore with rusty ship-wreck territory, an album that consists mostly of a soundscape fraught with machine screeches, clicking, cracking, and low singing. Stand out song is the Coloring of Pigeons, which is probably the most bizarre song I've ever heard, running the gamut between minimalism and operatic bombast, singing of yellow cocoons and evoking a dream-mashup of the X-Files and a Salvador Dali painting. I'm not kidding-- this is what I think of when I hear it. And for three weeks while it snowed and thundered I was obsessed with it.

The Books - The Way Out
If you stretched DJ Shadow's "Blood on the Motorway" into a whole album, you would get a pale shadow of the Book's The Way Out. On the surface they're similar pieces, humanist music formed of found bits of wacko mystic self help tapes and muted, gentle melodies that occasionally scatter and clack around like falling marbles. But the Books offer diversions and surprises, which are sometimes good or which break the mood, shaking the listener up a little. "Beautiful People" is a smooth, lilting song that seems to be about math but maybe if you listen hard enough it has other secrets to reveal.


Goodriddler - "Caught between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea"
The piano in this song is strangely entrancing in this song. It suffers, perhaps, against the Books because it takes a similar route, but the piano is so compelling that I haven't been able to stop listening to it, which is saying a lot because I ordinarily don't much like piano based music.