For some time Justin has been releasing a mix of what he’s had in rotation, riffs from a collection of music that encompasses more than just sound. It’s a novel voice, one which I’ve looked forward to after each week of work. Experiences created: recently it was on a trip to Kansas City that I heard Ryan Adams softly singing Wonderwall, and tonight it was an evening on the deck with bratwurst on the grill while my iPod sounded out Devil Town for the end of my journey through the week.
I was that kid who – upon the rabid crush with girl X – would produce from the very corners of his music collection, a mix tape as a gift. It was no small task of meaning and I can remember the labor, even now, though I did it many times. What I didn’t understand then that I do now was that it wasn’t a gift; it was an attempt of mine to weave a narrative into music to be read by its listener. It wasn’t the lyric, the tricky beat, or guitar chord. It was a language of its own, the language of music, often unheard by the listener.
But I was that kid who heard things: up late at night, listening to Jazz Hour on Voice Of Kenya, that kid who listened to the twice dubbed Bach concerto, the one who would replay songs from memory to pass time on the long bus rides home. There was always something in the music itself, abstracted away from the physical aspects: the tape, the album art, and the logical explanation. Something living in between the sound atoms that were smashing together to form the vibrations on my eardrum that made it more. It was more and it was indescribable.
Perhaps it’s not just hearing. It might be that synesthesia – that you hear a track and it causes synapses in your brain fire off simultaneously: where you were when you heard something, what you were doing, what you are doing, whether you’re up, or down, alone or in a crowd –an all encompassing thing that I have to resign myself to calling the language of music.
I’ve never had real words for music, but I remember going to Hollywood to shop at Aarons and overhearing people talk – a well known DJ I recognized talking about electronic music with the words “pop” and “crunch” and “glitch”, the guy in front of me by the information booth asking about artists in terms of artists “… a soul sound, but more bluesy like a Memphis Minnie sound” – and being amazed at their ability to match human language to music. And that I understood what they were saying the way an amnesiac would gaze at something and recognize it without a context for how they knew.
Things can’t be cemented in spoken language the way they can in music. Perhaps that’s why it’s so special, why crushes get mixtapes, why radio stations and disc jockeys have “followings”, why those who hear the language of music fiendishly collect and listen, recreating and creating moments for the future, present, and why those who somehow bridge what is written and what is heard are to be treasured. It's why, when my friend A's father died in the Ukraine, she packed her things with tears falling, listening to his music. I know she'd never heard it quite like she did that day.
It’s that moment in Boston, with all your friends around you, when an unexpected slide guitar grips you while your head is spinning. A kind of permanence that can becomes an ambience you can reach into at any point along the future.
It’s the first time you hear something and you realize that you’ll never forget that this was when you heard it for the first time, and that the song will follow you through your life like an old companion.
What’s following me to bed tonight is the avant sound textures of Valgeir Sigurðsson. I’ll remember.