What takes over is an adventure. A short finesse of stabs with a bow to govern its necessities. They're like facts, almost, these short notes. They keep it all in line, on time, in the scheduled blocks of where it's meant to be. But in-between them are longer, languorous plains of stretched-out notes, an emotive that goes on and on until the lungs are empty or the cords too short to keep them alive. Momentary pauses, and a repeat of pattern, subtle differences, as though every blend of fact and emotion is a new horizon crossed. In some places their tune hits crescendo and the emotive wavers, as though balancing on the verge, trembling there with the knowledge that falling is inevitable, but holding on for as long as possible, worth the torture of imperfection. And after the loudest note: near silence.
A studious calm. It begins to mix together, the long notes not so long as to refuse being cut off by middling trills, the sharps dance around them with precise footwork. It is something ancient and formless given a mind, this section, like a library operating well within Ranganathan's fifth, thoughts colliding in empty halls, strangers meeting by the happenstance-urge of shelving. Being in this music makes the listener feel unease as soft weals are interrupted by striking bass glares, the presence of an ancient power that demands their best and most rigorous efforts to live up to the purity of the sound they occupy.
The bio-rhythm that lay out at the start becomes louder and mixes in with the spirituous hymn. With each cycle there is an interchange between them. The pattern falls out of itself, becoming as ridiculous as an albatross attempting to fly for the first time, mistaken for an ambitious chicken by those who watch it. The horn section flatulates in the middle of the strings' most bold and stunning efforts. Piano notes dance through the antipodes like a wild jackrabbit as flutes pump points and emotives -
And then all at once, while the laughter is at its harshest, it is transformed by flight. Loud, brilliant, at once the spirit and the bio-rhythm united into a single being, an angel made up of mechanical sharps, eerie trills and one last, long note that holds throughout its whole flight, unwavering until the moment it must at last gasp. When it does, the music ends abruptly, entirely.
*
I only started enjoying the classics properly when I was introduced to a collection of them presented alongside stories in a kid's series called The Music Box, which followed the adventures of a pair of siblings as they skipped across the worlds of the classic composers. I learnt the tune of Carmen as she sang to a wild bull condemned to the bullfights. Peer Gynt was a clash of chaos amidst the troll kingdom of a mountain underground. Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue epitomized the raucous of New York in-between jewel thievery and taxi rides, and the Scheherazade took me to the oceans as Sinbad fought the colossal Kraken.
I could not (at times, cannot) understand what makes music good or bad. But this was something I could understand. That music was a language, and told stories - not in words, but emotions. The idea is that every note resonates with the peculiarity of a different one, and the way in which it is expressed; its volume, pitch, purity, repetition, accompaniment, and instrument all contribute to the exactness of that resonance.
So I learnt what emotions sounded like from music. So long as I had those stories to go along with them - and I listened to them many, many times - I had an index for what music meant, and by relation a good many other matters related to feeling. Even the reverse applied. Any story I read, anything I myself experienced (and still experience, to a degree) is accompanied by flats and sharps, drumbeats and cello quivers. Not regular, physical things, which though instrumental make simple noise because their story is out of synch, but emotional events. Peace and war, sadness and rapture. My soul speaks emotion, my brain interprets it as music. I cannot even consider what I might have been if I did not learn that crucial lesson.
*
School is just... a really, really bad idea. The idea of taking a group of people who haven't properly learned anything about life and putting them among peers makes them share ignorance far more than they share knowledge. So when as a stripling I started primary school and was asked by a classmate what music I liked, and I replied Tchaikovsky (my child-mind bunching his work together with Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov), this immediately spread, God knows how, and along with my accent, my tendency to read a lot and to talk to my own hands, and my utter, wide-eyed bewilderment at the approach of ball sports, marked me out for a high dosage of teasing. Any soft parts of my character were shelled away, tentacles of human contact withdrawn into the coconut, safely away where only I could get at them.
It's a real pity, because I think I lost out on a lot of good music that way. I couldn't distinguish between the good and the bad on the outside world, either; I just knew that past my books and private games there was a world of ridicule. I hated the idea of the radio and Mtv. In part because it was pressed to the ear of the Exterior, pouring in all the violence and cruelty I felt occupied it. In part I felt this because of what I had learnt growing up about music being a story. When you take one lyric, a single beat and tune and repeat it ad infinitum the story is a cancer, mindlessly reproduced with no conclusion, no change, no development. The two were the same, really. Neither allowed any room for something a little bit different.
I took no joy from learning the Macarena. Hip-hop and rap were mindlessly brutal. Britney Spears (aside from just being terrible) represented a hollowness of sexual idolization that I felt tore away the substance of childhood and replaced it with the unattainable. The same was true for a lot of rock music. But I found favourites in emotions that were not wrapped up in lyrics; the nonsensical joy of The Hamster Dance and The Ketchup Song which were open to interpretation, and by being so, open to me. Stranger among them was Enya, introduced by one of my brother's friends for its piano sections. In Enya I found the wild peace of the classics given a new voice, and it occupied me for years. Somehow it was to me both savage and tranquil, an epoch where new feelings could be expressed in old ways. Immaterial, freeform, spiritual.
Were life not a symphony and destined to carry on, I might have been content to stay there. Life is a sequence of events, and each demands a new emotion to specifically name it. To deny that change is to become a reverie, disconnected and unevolving. Even so, there is a fine line between growing and simply taking on a different form. I could not, for example, now suddenly like Pop music or R&B.
My answer to this problem was in Virtual Reality. I am an avid player of computer games - some of my first story ideas were designed along the line of computer games. The thing about VR? It has great music. Most people don't even realise how great. Once again I found music accompanying stories, but moving away from classic sounds into the inventive riffs of thrash metal as I fought a war against alien robots in Wild 9, walked the Elven city of Quintarra in Arcanum, pillaged the sprawling Underdark in Neverwinter Nights, lead House Ordos in planetary warfare in Emperor: Battle for Dune - it's scary how far I could keep going with this. Some people have favourite songs they listen to, that explain them, that say what they're feeling. But my music - my music assures me that though I live in Virtual worlds and Book worlds and Imaginary worlds, my feelings are just as genuine. They emote that a bunch of kids can't look at what I listen to and say I've missed the point of music, that I don't understand feelings because my experiences are all of dead ages past conventional time and space.
You can see the theme, carrying on. Vague lyrics, interpretative. My introduction to anime was simultaneously an introduction to J-Pop, which while it has lyrics has them in a language I don't understand. For a long, long time, I did not want to hear what was being said. When I did hear, it was about sex, or money, or drugs, or being misunderstood, or rebelling, or relationships, or God, and I did not want to associate my own feelings with any of those. I did (and do, as much of this still stands) not want to identify with other people, because I could tell there was something wrong with their programming. Mine was (as is) still far from perfect. I don't want to paint a picture of myself as a wronged but saintly outsider because growing up I was horrible. I couldn't interact well with my 'soft' parts tucked away so when people reached out to me I was as much of an abuser as others were when they mocked me. I was at a heavily Christian primary school, and because of that I felt God should shoulder a lot of the blame for having an exclusive flock. Accepting any part of that convention into my soul through music was anathema.
My 'shell' was defective, whorled with false likes and angry parody. Part of that anger came out in listening to Weird Al Yankovich, who took the morbid crass of musical culture and proved it wanting. Hate is a strange thing. It doesn't enter my soul, but sits somewhere above it, spitting fiercely. Not real for me. Maybe just for others.
So music continued to trace the evolution of my true soul, through the more adult themes present in Hellsing and Love Hina, Kurumi Steel Angel and Ruin Explorers. It's sad, because it doesn't amount to much. This wasn't an accumulation of music, these were singular songs over years which described the smallest feelings prevalent in me. I once paid my brother to make a CD with the anime tracks on it, lost it and found it years later. The nostalgia tore me, made me cry in the depths of my lost teenage soul, because I had not felt anything similarly spoken with that music's honesty in years. By that time I had moved onto Gregorian Chant, returning to the baseline, tranquil state of the Enya years, a world apart from the one I lived in. There were noted exceptions, as there are in anything. Sometimes there's good music with terrible lyrics, and vice versa. But none so worthy of mention in this case as Chop Suey, which has a measure of both. I'd listen to that one occasionally as a kind of masochistic outlet, rejoicing in my disgust for its bad parts and my love for the good, and the way both existed in a way that ruined neither. It was a pivotal point, a gateway into another way of doing things... a question: is it possible for something individual and unique to exist and remain whole within society? Or is an individual destroyed by association? It was a question I desperately needed answered.
By sixteen, there was little music left to me, because there was little soul left to me. Nothing really imprinted. Thoughts and ideas yes, uncoloured by song. Glorious, terrible ideas, the ebb and flow of the universe opening up to me, the gates of madness which I could never tell which side I was on, just that I was on the approach...
And one ditty. Just one left. Simple notes, surrounded by blood.
At seventeen, I had a collection of music that amounted to 3 songs, and all of them came free with Windows XP. I owned no I-pod, and my cds only stored VR. I listened to Vertigo about 60 times. And then I knew things had to change.
Over the next few months as I wrote Shadowolf, a safe distance away from the chaos that had closed me up, I started to traverse the world of music in earnest. I returned to the Arcanum Suite, because I borrowed one of the main themes of its world as a focus for the book. From my cousin, an eminent data pirate, I found two bands I liked: Streetlight Manifesto and The Cat Empire. I can't really say why I liked Manifesto... maybe because I was in the last stages of teen angst, the themes and notes synched, and because they evolved. The music changes all the time, and yet it's linked (speaking of the Everything Goes Numb album here) into one single encompassing melody. I think at first I really needed something crude and unpretty, like a weapon, to hack away with until I found what lay beneath my crust. And Manifesto was like attacking my shell with a pneumatic drill.
This made lyrics okay to me. They weren't a problem anymore, provided they were the right ones. Perhaps the best way to describe it is that the barrier I had always kept up between music and language, soul and body, were dissolving as I became a writer. It's like... you know when you read a certain phrase a lot, you stop seeing the individual words? Like "ONCE UPON A TIME" is something you can read from the middle. I was experienced enough now to hear words and extend into their every permutation, read them from the middle without really putting them in context, so that a song's meaning bent around me rather around their creators. The words had become music themselves.
The Empire is similar, but very different at the same time. They are astounding musicians, very eclectic and completely unconstrained. Listening to them is more like opening up to the idea of something different. A lot of the time I don't like their lyrics, but I still enjoy the song. That's like saying, "I don't feel the way you do, but I accept that you feel differently". And I think if I was the kid, meeting myself on the first day of primary school, that would be what I need to say. Letting The Empire have an embassy in my mind was my way of saying that the angry, isolated kid I was had finally stopped the war.
I still think you people are crazy. My misgivings about sex are worse now than ever. I still won't drink or smoke or do drugs. I give religion a wide berth, and I only swear when I'm in character or under threat of violence. I still prefer books, and will not play computer games with real people. But I don't want to kill you, and that's a very, very important difference.
Somewhere around Sahalamut and the close of my second reading of The Last Days of Socrates, between marathons of The Sims 2 and a single beautiful song within it, I got into Jazz and Country in a big way. Katie Melua in particular, I remember, playing in the car through the artificial pine forests of xxxxxxx, and practically all of Shadowolf's journey through the desert was written to Norah Jones, in a period of time I spend in my brother's old room at the same large wooden desk I am sitting at today. I cannot describe accurately the measureless bliss that comes with writing a novel. The memory is better than things were at the time, I'm sure. People still thought I was an idiot for dropping out of school (I think they still do a lot of the time, but they mention it less). I still went through stages where I spend entire weeks lost in computer games, rediscovering my love for Myst and its music, and Populous and its music, but the happiest memories are the ones I spent with Shadowolf, learning to write in the wilderness of my own spirit. I finished my first draft on Easter Friday, 2009. I was listening to Vernian Process, forerunners in a musical movement called 'steamwave' that catered to the tastes of those who loved the majesty of Victorian times and the innovation of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, and combined them all.
There were others too. With Shadowolf out of me I slowed down a bit (too much) and started watching movies a lot. I picked up Kimya Dawson after watching Juno, and some of The Beatles after a John Lennon documentary. Kimya is great because she exists so far outside of convention, I couldn't understand how the world had let her live. I've heard people say she can't sing, or that she holds a guitar more than she plays music... people don't get it. She is without question the most honest and uninhibited vocalist I've ever heard. She is truth personified, someone who says not only what she's thinking, but what she's afraid to think. If the world was like that - can you imagine that? If your soul was like that? It isn't childish or imperfect at all. It's innocent. Kimya Dawson is there to let us know that no matter what happens, you can reach that place. Innocence is a quality that isn't lost by experience, but given up by many because of experience. But only if you let it go, and give in to the lies and convenient shelter of a coconut shell. I think it might be better to let the mollusk-softness spread out and feel like you could burst into tears at any second.
Miley Cyrus came after that. I like to get obsessed with things, and for whatever reason, at that moment in time, that thing was Miley. It was different to any kind of music I'd listened to, because it was popular and industrialized... so what I really wanted was to know that somewhere in the middle of that hollow LA universe there was a human core, something real. I think Miley had it, sometimes. I really do like her early music. Mostly the stuff that isn't so popular, but I can't understand why. Because those songs are the most real.
It took a turn to the retro after that. From the cheerful "Hello Dolly" theme used in WALL-E, to the brilliance of a drowned world in BioShock, I found I had a taste for swing and old-style Jazz. The Ink Spots are pretty good, though a tad formulated, and The Andrews Sisters definitely struck a chord. I like Billie Holiday too, she's as real as can be out of that time, but...
It's a problem for me that they're all love songs. I need something more than a person as the focus in music. I get bored when they're about people. Love is amazing and all that, and I'll even admit that romantic love is way up there in the exponentials, but my soul isn't built around loving people, no more than it can be about paper money or materialism. I don't love people. I love souls and ideas. Can you see the difference?
Still, the swank and style of the era make me feel like I've escaped something. The Easy Virtue Orchestra is a brilliant blend of Faux-Jazz, with modern songs redone in an old style. That's beautiful - it's like the parody of Weird Al being turned on its head, not exposing the fraudulence in a song's nature, but showing it at its absolute best.
What I was feeling made even more sense after FALLOUT 3, a game which combined the old style with a post-apocalyptic world. Because I feel that whatever happens to change the zeitgeist of the world is a kind of apocalypse, no matter how gentle. Values are lost, rare and beautiful things die that shouldn't have. In the end only people can keep them alive in their hearts. That's what swing is, and that's what I am. Old-fashioned and out-dated, and none-the-less refusing to die.
New things in older styles exist too. I found another love in the bittersweet melodies of Caro Emerald around Christmas 2010, really kicking music set against lyrics stuffed with materialism and heartbreak. It's so sad to have those two together, because they don't fit together. Not at all. I listen, but I can't bear to listen. The conflict is like screaming in my head.
I took a road trip with my brother shortly after, and the music I had on hand dried up pretty quickly, before the desert even. But xxxx has always had music in bulk - even when it's not what could conventionally be called music, even to progressives. It involves a lot of echoes of recorded voices and static.
Though even there, I found diamonds. In rap, of all places. That trip served as my long-awaited introduction to Saul Williams, anon Niggy Tardust, a warrior poet who had been recommended to me by an elderly lady in my Tai Chi class some time prior.
I had never known lyrics as they should be before then, except in part with The Cat Empire and Kimya Dawson. Williams is astonishing because he is a revolutionary - the messiah of a musical genre. He's struck through the cultural annihilation that is rap and turned it away from the obsession with property that arose from racial slavery in the U.S. He offers an alternative; rapping not about death and Babylon but about rebirth and the struggle to cast off the lingering chains of slavery largely self-imposed by the gangster mentality, and roughly abused by 'projects' of a rich and powerful government. Just listen. Some of what I love about his music is the nightmarish scope of his metaphors, as though each description melts into the next, a chimeral romp across every sign and symbol of human history and language, a mindscape wrought from poetry.
More. There's always more. Tardust paved the way to Archandroid, whose music is equally bizarre, and another pleasant riff to add to my journey. Struggling with increasingly severe insomnia and emotional disconnection from flesh-and-blood human beings, I found myself walking a weird path. It was not a bad one, though it was hurting me. When you exist inside your mind long enough, your mind starts existing outside of you. My world was escaping me. I've detailed a fair bit of it on this blog, so go adventuring if you want the full picture... but perhaps the most telling was a period of musical dormancy and regress. I once more reverted to the serene escapism of VR, and lost myself in stories. It isn't a particularly wrong or detrimental thing to do, really, just walking in a different way. But what was detrimental was that my writing suffered for it. I have a mission on this world, and I can't be distracted from it by too much adventure. I also think my lack of human connection was troubling me, for reasons I can only assume are also wrapped up in being 'human'. Mortality is a position that comes with a lot of strings attached.
My solution, for a while, was to seek out live music. I'll say right away that contrary to most people I prefer dead music I love over live music I like. I'm more comfortable around the dead and the unliving. But in many ways live music is like a magnet, drawing together certain types of people where it plays. Where I go to listen they are not 'my' type of people (I have no type of people) but not wicked people either. That means there's always a chance for connection.
Fortunately I have friends in the industry whose music I do like, so I go listen to them once in a while. It didn't really work all too well, and I can't say I actually connected with anyone to the unhealthy level I'd consider effectual, but I felt a lot better for trying. And there's something to say for breakout musicians - they get you thinking. Thinking about conventions, about the meaning of good music, if its good enough to tap your feet to. Gives you some idea about your contemporaries too. The truth is I love the artistic scene in The City. There are a lot of crazy people out there, and a lot of innovators. I think that what comes out of here in the next ten years is going to be amazing. What music teaches us in being performed live is that Art starts at home. Think small, think local. In general people have this idea that if you invent something or start a business or act or whatever you should aim to compete on a national scale, if not a global scale. The easiest way to do that is through software, launching projects into the great and interminable collective subconscious we term our Internet. We forget that Art itself, while existing in the ephemeral arteries of the mind as software, does have a physical counterpart as hardware, and that we can reach people through that hardware. So what if you just perform for your friends? So what if you don't sell a patent and share an advance technology with only a handful of clients? If you can make it work for you, you end up with something ironically greater than greatness; a living world, where you walk alongside those who have dreams and talents we usually see as distant and unattainable. The difference between live music and dead music is that we can touch the living, but only worship the dead. Both are important.
When you get to know people better, you get to know their music too. I have found that it is a very rare thing to genuinely adore another person's music. I don't really understand how this works, but what I do know is that I associate myself with the Other more than with the Same. If I hear a track from someone else accepting it would make me the Same. But if I have found it by immersing myself in unique and profoundly personal experiences, the music is part of the Other, and can enter my identity.
Much like encountering other people, it's possible to like their differences without actually wanting to see those differences subtract from the sum of your being. It feels strange, because I don't really have much use for things I like. Only things I love. There is a lot of music out there I may have loved, had I listened to it under different circumstances. There's music I want to listen to, but it fills my gut with a certain hollow sadness, and makes my brain harbor thoughts I would rather see wrecked at sea.
Assembling music is like assembling an outfit. There are songs that you grow attached to and wear everywhere you go, like a favourite pair of red cowboy boots or a grungy hoody. There are some that you feel extraordinarily comfortable in but you wouldn't dare wear over your trousers, or without trousers to protect their modesty. Some parts of your collection are exchangeable as you look for your best match - and you can always keep the accessories hung up and pull them out whenever you are feeling nostalgic.
But what you choose to wear each day brings you fully closer to realising who you are. Music teaches lessons. Each song listened to, carefully accepted or discarded, will bring you that much further up the tower. And up. And up. And up.
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