One goal of music might be that it feels like a living thing. This track breathes, throbs, pulses, seems like something that exists outside of the people making it. If I play it loudly enough, I feel like I vibrate in time and can almost feel myself drifting into it.
Never figured out if this is true for most people, but for as long as I can remember, when I lay in bed and try to fall asleep, I cycle through the same 10 or so thought-loops. They’ve never changed since I was around seven. Maybe the way I think of them changes, but the essential content has not. One of these involves me waking up to find that I am the last person on earth. This sounds bad, but it’s actually a comforting thought. Maybe I think of it when other people seem like the cause most of my problems. But I imagine walking the world as the only living person and it’s a good feeling.
This track feels like a soundtrack to this not-quite-dream. I imagine walking into a large warehouse where ice cream trucks are housed after dark. And maybe I’m the last person alive because there has been a nuclear war or something, and I walk into this hangar and it’s partially destroyed and there are ice cream trucks on their sides. The music-making devices are broken, and instead of familiar tunes they are spitting out random tones in endless loops, and they sound something like this. And once again I’m reminded of how much I’m drawn to broken music, tracks that were designed to function in an orderly fashion and then take a turn toward chaos.
I wear glasses and I tend to favor headphones with a slightly larger pad, the kind that covers most of my ear. Sometimes I hear people complain about how my preferred type of headphone looks, but that has never once entered my mind. My wife loves me no matter what my headphones look like, so my criteria is based on sound quality and comfort.
Since I wear glasses and also usually wear larger headphones, the cup of the headphone often rests partially on the arm of my eyeglasses. And some tracks, like this one, when I play them loud, will have a resonance that matches the arms of the glasses, so that my lenses will vibrate in time with the bass tones of the music. Since it’s a very small movement, it affects my vision in a very subtle way, throwing this light, twitching blur over everything for a second or two at a time. It is not an unpleasant sensation. And I like the idea that the music is not just happening in my head, but is actually doing something to my body and my vision, even if I am just sitting on the bus and looking out the window.
I’m going to say this was late 2005. I was working days as a paralegal at a law firm in Richmond, Virginia. In my off hours I was editing part-time and writing about music. Sometimes on my lunch break I liked to walk with my headphones on. Richmond is a beautiful small city, and there are a lot of off-the-beaten-path spots that are fun to explore on foot. Near the James River, there is a building that used to (maybe still does?) belong to the Reynolds Metals Company. They make Reynolds Wrap. I believe this building may at one time have been their corporate headquarters. I’m going from memory here. In any event, it’s a large industrial-looking building and it overlooks the river.
One day at lunch I went for a walk down to the river and I wound up near this Reynolds building. An interesting thing about this area is that it seems “industrial” and yet it’s also sort of in the woods, on a perch where you can see the river below. So the area smacks of both “civilization” and “nature” at the same time. I like that combo. And on this day, I was listening to my Discman, to a CD with this track on it. During that walk through the woods that surrounded this building, I probably listened to this track in particular two or three times. I had it on repeat around then, listened over and over.
This to me is like a “pop” version of noise music and I really like that idea. Play it loud and maybe you’ll see what I mean. It’s only three and a half minutes long, and there are parts that are very pretty, like those droney bits that might even be voices, and there are also these harsh abrasive blasts of distortion and static. When elements combine in this way it can really do things to me emotionally.
So on this day six years ago, I listened to this track a few times while walking on a trail near that building. And ever since, weirdly, every time I see a box of Reynolds Wrap, I think of this track. That opening blast of sound immediately enters my head. I have no idea how or why this happens. But that’s the human brain for you.
Several weeks ago, I opened a drawer in my kitchen, and my wife, who had been gone for a long time, attending graduate school in another state, had put into this drawer a small box of Reynolds Wrap. I usually buy the cheap store brand. But I saw the package and I thought of this piece of music, which still does a lot to me, and knew it had to be the next thing I posted to Invisible Music.
I am starting to notice a theme in the tracks that I select here. These are often pieces of music that have a powerful affect on me but that I don’t have an easy time arguing for critically. And I suppose that is a common thread through a lot of my writing about electronic music. The further sound gets from recognizable music structures, the harder it is to situate in a canon. With narrative film, we have a pretty strong shared idea of what makes something good—acting, photography, dialog, plot. We can say whether, in our opinion, something succeeds or fails on those terms. And so it goes for music: we internalize ideas about what makes for a good pop song when we are very young. The chords build and release tension, the melody is memorable, the words are interesting, the performance has something special. We have a language for discussing these things. But once we are talking about music that verges on “sound art,” maybe shared definitions are harder to locate.
This piece of music puts a lump in my throat, but it’s mostly just some kind of loop run backwards with a new melody laid on top (sounds like a melodica but I can’t be sure). “The backwards effect” is so basic it’s long been a cliché, but here, mixed with the subtle tune and some swirling sound effects, it does things to me. Backwards drums always sound like they are collapsing in on themselves, which feels both like “building” (because they happen regularly with every bar) and “falling apart” (because they start loud and contract into nothingness), and I certainly like that here. There’s also the way the woozy melodic pattern that repeats on every cycle makes me think of sculpture, because it just sits there in one place and allows me to admire it from different angles. I also like on the idea that something so simple can hit me so hard. Perhaps this took its maker 30 minutes to create but for years now I’ve been returning to it regularly and it never fails to stir feelings. Efficiency!
Please listen to this one loud.
This track has a quality I look for in music but don’t find often enough: it is overwhelming. It’s about six minutes long, and at about the halfway point, after the gradual accretion of drones has hit a saturation point, this gorgeous flickering vocal sample comes in. Suddenly the field of sound is filled with about four different elements any one of which, if heard in isolation, would get my excitement/pleasure neurons firing like crazy. But taken together, it’s almost a little too much, the musical equivalent of a deep tissue massage or something—that sensation where something feels so good it almost hurts and it glides along that edge between pleasure and pain.
I’m sure that sounds melodramatic, maybe even a little silly, but that’s the way this one feels when I blast it. And it’s quite possible you’ll feel nothing of the sort. Maybe this will sound like a generic electronic exploration with chopped-up vox—no big deal. Which has always been a challenge for me when it comes to writing about music like this. I’m trying to figure out why this abstract sound moves me so deeply and wondering if it’s something I can possibly explain, all the while unsure if anyone alive feels the same things I do. It’s an odd feeling and sometimes seems a little hopeless but I also enjoy the challenge.
I grew up in Mid-Michigan and a common sound in the summertime was the hum of cicadas. It wasn’t something I thought too hard about; it was more just a part of the background of suburban life, like lawnmowers and the voice of Ernie Harwell on the radio.
I’m not sure I knew the word “cicada” then, or at least I never used it. We called them “locusts,” and when I read biblical stories about swarms of insects blotting out the sky, these were the bugs I pictured. Took me a while to figure out they were just talking about grasshoppers. Which seemed far less ominous.
Maybe the plague stories added to it, but when I saw cicadas up close and didn’t just hear them in the trees, they were scary. I had been bitten by horse flies and deer flies while camping, which hurt like hell. And cicadas looked to me like horse flies on steroids. They are completely harmless, the internet tells me now, but the internet didn’t exist then. So I lived in terror of the moment when a cicada would be trapped on the porch in our back yard—flying around and banging into screens and making noise—and I’d have to figure out how to get it outside. I still have an irrational fear of bugs, especially big ones.
So this sound lodged in my brain. And now, when I hear thin, buzzy drones, I tend to think of cicadas communicating to each other across neatly trimmed suburban lawns. This sound brings with it both serenity (remembering easy summer days) and anxiety (remembering my fear of these insects). It’s an appealing mixture.
This track has that blend of qualities I really like. There are the shifting drones, and then all the scraping and rustling and twitching come together to create an atmosphere I can best describe as arboreal. I listen to it and feel like I’m exploring some small place we don’t usually go, the kind of hidden world you see when you turn over a rotten log and see creatures scurrying away.
This is one of those tracks where, if I told you exactly what year it was made, you might not believe me. But this is not the same thing as being “good”. So I wonder if this will sound as lovely to you as it does to me. I wrote a bit before about how much I like music that sounds “broken”. This is a good example of “broken music” that I like. Something about simple, pretty, possibly childlike music that has been distorted is extra appealing to me. It makes me think about continuums: Noise vs. Melody, Pretty vs. Ugly, and so on. Tension comes from these ideas pulling against each other. And the very best music usually (but not always) has some kind of tension in it.
I like art that confuses me, and that goes doubly for music. Anything that makes me cock my head a little bit and say to myself “What’s this, now?” is bound to stick with me. Listening to and writing about music for a living has lead me to a place where it’s easy and in fact useful to slot music into categories in order to develop a framework for discussing it and understand the audience I’ll be discussing it with. I don’t have a problem with any of that; on the contrary, to me, genres are fun, the way new names and scenes come and go. As long as you don’t take them too seriously, they seem harmless and can often be helpful.
But maybe because I live in this world, tracks that don’t lend themselves to this kind of reduction can become objects of intense interest. This track has voices, a regular rhythm, and a chant-like structure that could almost be melodic. It has sounds that seem to come from instruments of some kind. So it almost sounds like people in a room “playing” something, but it doesn’t sound like any kind of pop music. It’s hard to tell if it’s acoustic or electronic or if these voices are being processed. They seem to cut off in strange ways, and while I can make out a few words in English, most of the sounds are not in a language I can understand. So I can’t quite figure this track out and it sort of dangles in front of me, odd and beguiling and just out of reach.
Might be easy to guess at least the era of this track since it uses a technique that was in vogue in certain electronic music circles for a pretty short window of time. But I doubt many could guess the artist since this person was never really a “thing” and seemingly vanished years ago. Anyway…a few things come to mind when I listen to this.
1) My wife Julie is a performance artist and choreographer. I often collaborate with her on ideas for sound, and in the past I’ve manipulated and mixed tracks to go with her pieces. Years ago, she was making a piece that involved an extended section that used Labradford’s “twenty”, a wonderful track from their final LP, fixed: content. The section she used was very spare, with a twangy electric guitar playing a recurring pattern (I know—sounds like Labradford!) One evening I was in the studio with her and her performers and I was watching the piece to get ideas for sound and I was also running the stereo. After playing a section of “twenty”, I hit the “rewind” button and the sound that came out of the stereo took everyone’s breath away. That guitar twang was being cut-up to a rhythm that fit the sound just so, and the clicking of the CD player with this particular tone was absolutely stunning. One of those random accidents that maybe leads to a new realization. For me, it was a reminder of how much I am drawn to “broken” sound.
2) I’ve been lucky in that I’ve only really ever had one terrible experience with drugs. Not that I ever did a lot of drugs, and I haven’t done anything heavy for a very long time and I’m quite sure I never will again. But there was a time when I was pretty much up for whatever as far as chemicals went. And one bad night at a rave I took too much of something that came from a stranger and maybe had something else in it and I had what I later saw described as an extreme dissociative experience. I was hallucinating, which wasn’t fun, and I was also incapable of communicating with anyone, either by talking or by hearing what they were saying. Everything I said and heard was complete gibberish, so I felt trapped alone inside this awful experience. This track reminds me of how the voices sounded during the worst of that night so it still makes me slightly uneasy even though I also admire its beauty.
3) I wrote about this track once before and looked for a long time to see what the sample source might be but never had any luck. You can hear words, which offers some clue, but I could never say definitively. Maybe someone reading this will know.
A while ago I thought I might write a column called something like “songs that changed my life.” The phrase is a cliché as far as talking about music, of course, but I thought it might be an interesting exercise to try and think about whether any songs actually did change my life. Not just in a “Hey I have a new band I like” kind of way but in a “My life would be totally different if I never heard this” kind of way. I still might write something like that at some point because it’s an interesting idea to me—can music ever mean that much?—but I got stuck because I couldn’t think of that many songs for which it was actually true. One of them, I wrote about on my Tumblr late last year; this was another one that came to mind.
I first heard this track before I’d figured out that writing about music would be something important in my life. I liked writing, I liked music, I liked reading about music, but I hadn’t really written about music. I probably thought I didn’t have anything to say that others would find interesting. But listening to this track was a watershed. I heard it and found it fascinating and felt like I had a lot of ideas about it that I wanted to share. It was also way outside of anything I had any sort of knowledge or expertise about. (If you’ve followed my writing over the years you might be able to guess what this is since I’ve referenced it probably a half-dozen times on Pitchfork in various pieces. Several times the mentions could probably be described at gratuitous—what can I say, I really wanted people to check it out!)
What did I hear in it? Well just on a surface, the sounds to me are very beautiful, this sort of brilliant and shimmering electronic hum that I respond to on a biological level. I can put on headphones and turn up the volume and just revel in the way the ear pads vibrate my face. It’s “ambient” in its way, but it feels physical to me, like it’s not in the background but it’s actually crawling all over my skin.
And that gets to the other thing I love about it—this completely electronic music sounds like nature to me. The most “artificial” thing evoking the most “natural” thing. I hear crickets buzzing and wind through trees and twigs snapping under feet and see cells dividing in the womb and time-lapse photography of flowers opening when I listen to this thing. But the sound is crunched and processed to within an inch of its life, like, many billions of calculations probably went into its creation.
Before I heard this track, I could never imagine that a piece of abstract music without tune or melody could do something so profound to me. And the fact that I came to this track completely ignorant and was still bursting with ideas about it made me realize I wouldn’t mind chasing that feeling with some regularity.
In 2002 I participated in a feature for Stylus called “IDM Focus Group”. It was a riff on a feature from Tom Ewing’s early blog New York London Paris Munich, where people would listen to a pop song and discuss it without being told what it was. The fact that the music in the IDM feature was of the experimental electronic variety (or “intelligent dance,” if you must) made the whole thing a bit stranger, because this sort of music is normally dependent on context to give it meaning. With no lyrics, no vocal personality, and no understood pop idiom, music that is ultimately just sound can be hard to get a handle on.
I reviewed Fennesz’s Endless Summer for Pitchfork in 2001. I love that record for many reasons, but one of the things I found so interesting about it initially was how the title and packaging (a beach scene with TV scan lines in its original version) tended to guide the way the music was heard. Though Fennesz did in fact riff on a guitar bit from the soundtrack for the film Endless Summer, I don’t think the music would be widely heard as “warm” and “nostalgic” if it was titled Deep Below the Dark Earth or something like that. The sleeve and title gave it a context that tinted how this purely instrumental, often highly abstract music was received. And though I think the music on Endless Summer is absolutely wonderful, I doubt it would have reached as many people if it’d been titled the way Autechre titles their records.
Thinking on this, I decided to start a Tumblr project that I’m sure is doomed to failure. I am going to resurrect some of my favorite instrumental tracks, mostly (but not exclusively) in the abstract/experimental/electronic vein, and post them here and write about them without indicating what they are or where they come from or when they were released. You can listen to them and you have the sounds and my words and that is all. It’s done all the time with images on Tumblr, of course—random streams of unrelated photos for your viewing pleasure. But music is different.
I’ll try and post a track or so a week here. I greatly encourage anyone who reads this to post a comment—what it makes you think, what era it might come from, and so on. I suspect people might be a little shy because they are worried about being wrong, but I hope that’s not the case. This isn’t about trainspotting or testing knowledge. Ideally it’s about listening to sounds and thinking about how they make you feel. That’s what I’ll be doing, anyway.
If something catches your ear and you want to know what it is, feel free to email me.
Note: I didn’t think too hard about the name of this thing—I liked the way invisible music sounded and it seemed to fit with what I’m doing here. But days after this first post I realized I was probably inspired by the “Invisible Jukebox” feature in the Wire but somehow I never thought of that when I chose this name (I am sure it was there unconsciously though). So I want to acknowledge that I’ve loved that feature in the Wire for years and look forward to it every month and if the title of this blog seems like a rip-off it’s because it probably is.
