Mountains Sprout

It is incredulous the way

Mountains sprout

Up from flat earth, with

Tectonic shifts           

Or water washed minerals

Broadcast asunder

Leaving the landform

In some small way

Bigger.  Or the way

Guttural rock can spit

From its lips

Hot and liquid

Leaving the mountain fatter

And new skinned.

Its growth unsubstantial

Enough to catch

Their silent shift

Through slow time.

If we like gods could speed it up

And watch

The dance of landscapes,

The mountains

Shuffling their feet.

5ive Albums That Would Change the Way You Listened to Music: If You Were Me.

Part 2: The Soft Bulletin - Sound Science


       What do you do with a second?  Is it worth consideration? In a sense, a work of art is encapsulated time.  It contains the time it took for the idea to germinate, the time it took for the idea to mature, time for the idea to be instigated and constructed and then, of course, the time it takes to digest the finished product.  It is composed of many things, but incorporated with every ingredient; there is time.

Theoretically, in audible art, any second of sound could be filled up with any sound from any source.  Unlike most modern popular music, a song does not arbitrarily have to be conceived as a composition of three major chords and one minor chord played in succession at a particular tempo in order to support a specific melody.  Instead, every divisible instant of a song could be occupied by any conceivable sound and still support the melody.  Music as science.

Imagine a laboratory filled with hundreds of test tubes.  Each tube is filled with millions of bits of sound—sounds of every variety from every possible source, natural and synthetic.  Imagine picking up a test tube and pouring out a few hundred bits of sound into a beaker.  Then choose another tube and pour out a few hundred bits of something else.  Repeat a dozen or so times.  Next, cork the beaker and place it into a centrifuge to combine.  If you poured in too little of this, you ended up with something like generic pop.  If you used too little of that, you might have created something like folk.  If there were too much of too few ingredients yet combined quite thoroughly, you may have ended up with the tedium of speed metal.  If you used too much of every component or mixed them at the wrong speed or pitch, you may have created nice, thick noise.

Thinking about song construction in this way could lead to insanity.  When you open up your mind to the endless possibilities of sounds and the infinite amount of ways that they can be combined to occupy any conceivable amount of time; the task of selection, elimination, and inclusion becomes daunting.  This is what I had never thought of before—to me, song construction was a simple task: write some lyrics, find a melody, support it with three or four chords and you were done—until 1999.  It was the year I heard The Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips.  It sounded as though the authors began each idea with, “What if we could…” Each song seemed to be instigated by imagination rather than inspiration.  Instruments were deconstructed, manipulated, and reassembled in order that they might then meet the imagined demand of a specific second of sound.  Songs were not composed: they were invented.

These concepts had been taken to an extreme with their previously released album entitled Zaireeka.  If, as we previously stated, any second of sound is a space, which has the potential of being occupied by any sound, then that also means that the space could be occupied by any of an infinite number of sound combinations.  Imagine that the y-axis is the sounds themselves.  It is an infinite line where every point is a precise sound plotted vertically from low pitch to high.  It intersects the x-axis at a midrange point, let’s say for example middle C.  The x-axis represents time moving from left to right, past to future.  At a given point a sound on the y-axis could be plotted along the x-axis to occupy that moment of time.  If multiple points on the y-axis are plotted on the same point along the x-axis you have simultaneous sounds.  These sounds could be a simple chord (three points) or a complex combination of beats, beeps, bells, whistles, or plucks from any conceivable source (remember we are dealing with infinite lines both vertically and horizontally).  You can see how this way of thinking could get infinitely complicated relatively fast. 

Back to our laboratory experiment, our beaker would represent a finite amount of space.  It could only hold a specific amount of sound.  If the composer wanted to fill a given point on the x-axis with more sounds then the beaker could hold the composer would have to use mutable beakers.  But how many beakers can fit into a CD?  A compact disk, like a beaker is a finite space.  Zaireeka, you could say, was a project that required four centrifuges to spin four beakers simultaneously.  Four CDs would have to be played at the same time on four separate CD players.  It was an ambitious project that required quite a bit of work on the part of the listener.  But the point was made.  They had managed to fill a second of the listener's sound space with more distinctly audible plotted points on the y-axis then anyone had previously done with recorded sound. 

With The Soft Bulletin they scaled back their vision to include less distinguishable sounds per second.  In spite of it being less it was still more than enough. Though the concept was not exaggerated like it had been on Zaireeka, as each track moved along the x-axis every second was packed full of big, complex, dense sounds spread thoroughly along copious vertical points within audible range.  Sounds had weight and texture.  Sounds seemed to move up and down the axis with scientific precision.  Nothing sounded arbitrary.  There were no accidents.  There was an affection and an attention given to the composition that you just don’t hear in pop music.  It was Bach.  But maybe even more meticulously composed than a classical piece because with advancements in technology and electronic sounds the possibilities were almost endless. 

The Soft Bulletin is hard to swallow at times because of its limitlessness.  If we listen to the radio often we are used to digesting a limited serving of sound.  The sounds many vary widely from song to song or album to album but The Soft Bulletin can have those variations within one specific song.  Again, there is no randomness to be found.  If the tonal palette suddenly changes; it is always with thoughtful reason.  Every sound has a purpose.  Sounds become important to the narration.  They lead you through the story sonically.  They carry you to emotional extremes by adding and blending succulent sounds to create a devastating concoction with each track—each one pressing the limits of the beaker walls.  Trying to shatter the glass.

Would You Rather Try Spitting Infinitives or Kicking up Appearances in a Well of Malformation?

We are spitting images at each other.

we are fraternal twins. we are busy

making sentence while striving for

perfunction. we are two-piece pods,

two sides of the same clone, appalling

contraception prematurely immaculated

with multiple organisms then gradually

redressing. we are dancing on heirs with

standing oblation. we are injourned

internally, pleading profusely, and barely

responsible. we are starved for infection

and gambling convulsively, tracing our

routes through the banter of dialects,

raping our locks through the keyholes of

innocence, babbling of relevance to ears

that hear circumvent. we are setting bids.

we are accepting goals. we are waxing

inaudibly. we are epitomized. we are

puzzlesolved. we are quiettouched,

guiltriddled, inkstained, and quicklysolvent.

we are roadwary and scarred to death. we

are brackish waterfalls merging in middles.

we are financially insewered. we are

underworked and overpaid. we are

troubleshot, pilestocked, paperworked, and

piddleproduced. we are frenzy franchised

and pleasantly surplused. we are

druggeddown, rockbottomed, footmouthed,

sextoothed, soundbitten, assfatted,

fiddlefingered, palletskinned commercials.

we are excessive compulsively date raped

till blue in the mouth. we are flying safe to

straighten our lives and it is not working.

5ive Albums That Would Change the Way You Listened to Music: If You Were Me.

Part 3: The Glow Pt. 2 - A Warm Amnesia

It was early winter 2001.  You were living in a small three-room apartment in Tennessee.  You had just read a review of an album that had been released a few months earlier, The Glow Pt. 2 by The Microphones.  It had been years since you had dived deafly into an album, something you used to do often.  After too many disappointments you stopped taking chances and started only buying what your friends were buying.  But you were in need of something new and unique to fill up some empty winter space and lately your friends weren’t around.

The mail arrived 45 minutes before you had to leave for work.  There was not much time to absorb anything before you had to drive your 1984 Dodge Ram pickup into work where you sold propellant driven pyrotechnics to fireworks enthusiasts.  The review told you to put on your headphones.  So you did.  You lay back on your bed and put them on. 

Ukulele strumming oscillated between your left and right ears.  The thunderclouds broke up, the rain dried up, the lightning let up, the clacking shutters just shut up, a soft voice sang.  Sound moved around your head like wind changing direction.  There were moments of calm peaceful lyrics and intimate strums on nylon strings.  Then, there were moments of bombastic surprises of sound—floor toms pounded, cymbals cracked and splashed—loud and distorted.  Every track blended together with little or no space between them.  It felt like you were in the middle of a storm—the middle of the story.  Time up.

Driving to work you thought about an album as a singular piece of art—one complete thought.  If there were no interest in getting radio play, why did an album have to be composted of ten, three-and-a-half minute tracks arbitrarily set one after another?  Why couldn’t an album be one song with different movements? 

You thought about the analogue sounds, the tape noise, the ambient clatter, so noisy and messy and real.  It was as if you could hear the recording space.  The little room in a rented house where Phil Elvrum was standing in a pool of wires and cords singing, I could not get through September without a battle. I faced death with my arms swinging. But there I heard my own breath and had to face that I’m still living.

Lyrics were not overly poetic or philosophical but could not have been more honest or vulnerable. Rarely do they rhyme or have meter.  Thoughts were not forced into a specific rhyme scheme but rather left as they are, random and abstract, at times senseless, with the music built around them.  Thoughts were left incomplete, unfounded, unanswered.  This was unlike anything you had heard before. 

And maybe you spent that night in your girlfriend’s apartment because she was flying home to visit her mom and didn’t want to leave her feuding cats alone in her apartment.  You packed the CD in your backpack because you didn’t want to be without it.  What if your apartment burned to the ground?  You would regret not taking it.  You got to the apartment late and went to bed. 

In the morning you awoke disoriented.  Your eyes opened and it was a dream place.  This was not the real world.  This was not your home.  This was not your bed.  This morning light was not your morning light.  You didn’t have shutters: you had blinds.  And your light was dimmer because of the trees surrounding your apartment.  This light was uninhibited.  You liked this feeling.  Then, there were two toms fighting on top of you—hissing and crying.  Two jocks in love with the same girl.  They darted across your chest and ran out the room.  You remembered where you were but stayed very still, enjoying the warm amnesia of the moment before. 

You got out of bed.  You put your new curio into the player beside the window, turned it on and up, and went into the kitchen to find something to eat.  You poured two bowls of cereal and milk.  You set one on the floor for the cats and walked back to bed.  I’ll wake up, your cat will pounce on me and I’ll meet the day, I’ll be in your bed, you’ll be in the air while I’m awake, it sang.

Had your life already been lived by someone else?  Songs had been sung about love and you knew that love.  Songs had been sung about heartbreak and you had experienced that same heartbreak.  Songs had been sung about being angry and frustrated and you got those too.  You loved them.  This was different.  This was mundane—specific.  This was hearing the wind, hearing a clap of thunder, hearing a car driving by or waves hitting the beach or the roar of a jet engine.  This was seeing lightning strike, seeing sunlight reflecting off of a rock, seeing your bare feet, seeing your bare arms.  It was the touch of fingers in your hair, a cool roof to your bare back, bare feet touching bark, the warmth of a fire, the warmth of the sun, the warmth of someone’s skin.  With limp arms I can feel most of you, he sang.  Never had music been so sensuous.  Never had there been so much beauty in visual, audible, and tactile minutiae.  

The Glow Pt. 2 was about storms.  It was about the recklessness and indifference of a storm and the fear and disorientation that comes with it.  It’s dark, the sun went down and the power’s still out. It’s cold, my blood barely flows.  And it was about calm.  It was about the first time you were able to remove your clothing and feel the warmth of the sun on your skin after a long time of being covered and huddled up.  When the real dawn came I saw it crawl over the hill and I felt clean and shook my hair out in the light.  It was about calm within storms. Your typhoon blows through my harbor but I meet it head on, I just bend like a palm, your deadly blow feels calm.  And it was about times when you wished for storms.  I want the wind to blow my clothes off me, sweep me off my feet, take me up, and not bring me back.  You wished that there would be wind strong enough to blow off your comforts and carry you away reckless too.  And it does this.  Do you remember?

5ive Albums That Would Change the Way You Listened to Music: If You Were Me.

Part 4: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea - Watching Lightning Strike

        It was 1998.  I was sitting in my apartment.  The phone rang.
        Hello.

Come over right now.  I found someone who’s a better songwriter than J. Mascus.

Impossible.

I hung up and left.  An eight-minute walk later I sat on the edge of my friend’s mattress.  He lifted the needle and reset it.  We listened. 

I picked up the jacket.  In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.  It sounded like an adventure—uninhibited in every respect.  The vocals were bodacious yet vulnerable.  Jeff Mangum’s voice pitched and cracked with emotional impudence.  He did not seem bothered by what his voice could or could not do with proficiency—allowing the emotions of the song to dictate tone and pitch rather than ascribing to standardized rules.  Rather than setting the key of a song within range, the key was raised just beyond reach. Where another singer may have been embarrassed by their vocal limit: Mangum exploited it. 

The same devise was applied to the instrumentation.  Every sound was used to evoke an emotional response.  The use of Theremin and organ added haunting palpability to modern rock cord progressions.  The slow dirge of horns and tambourine and snare drum rolls of The Fool evoked images of death in sepia.  What began with clean and clear acoustic guitar tones, by the end of side A, was blown out past the point of distortion.  The bombastic strumming of Holland, 1945 sounded like it was playing through blown speakers.  Affecting acoustical sound, it was cacophonous, truly oxymoronic.  And beautiful.  Bleedingly beautiful. 

Thematically it was no different.  Spousal abuse, mass graves, reincarnation, apparitions of Anne Frank, marital infidelities in trailer parks, were among the scope of topics retrieved from oblivion like gems by a grave robber. What was beautiful about the macabre scenes, such as, being buried alive with your sister, was that there were beautiful stories dying with these characters, if only they could be unearthed, if only they could be resuscitated.

This album did what I thought only novels could do.  It brought the entire world into the square-footage of your bedroom.  It was a history of ancestors’ life experiences and personal childhood memories; yet it was so common—so relative. 

How could an album contradict itself in so many ways and yet achieve equilibrium: impudent/vulnerable, bombastic/comforting, morbid/beautiful, unfamiliar/applicable.  For me, it stretched the limits of what a rock record could be, from which there could be no recoil.  

5ive Albums That Would Change the Way You Listened to Music: If You Were Me.

                Part 5: Loveless - The Python Eating a Deer

It was 1994.  I was reading an interview with Jason Martin.  He was giving the brief story of how his band, Starflyer 59, came to be.  Silver had been released less than a year before.  His EP, She is The Queen, had just come out.  I had become quite fond of both.  In the article Martin mentions the influence of My Bloody Valentine on his music.  Interesting.

I was in the Columbia House Music Club (membership was still rampant in the 90’s).  I flipped through the pamphlet of monthly musical selections, no Bloody.  I went to my bookshelf where I kept the yearly exhaustive catalogue of albums, no Bloody.  I remembered the cook at the cantina where I bused tables, telling me that he would refuse the obligatory monthly selection and simply (or perhaps, not so simply) write Columbia House a letter requesting the order numbers of the albums that he wanted to buy.  I went to my desk and composed a textbook business letter; complete with return address, date, inside address, salutation, body, complimentary close, and signature.  I took a drake mallard stamp out of my parents desk and a few weeks later I unwrapped the out-of-focus, pink-filtered, close-up of a hand strumming an electric guitar—Loveless.  It felt foreign in my hand.

My immediate reaction was aversion.  It was spacey—otherworldly.  Part of me wanted to turn it off, to accept defeat.  I had bit off more than I could palate.  Yet, others liked it?  There had to be something there to discover.  Either they were crazy for liking it or I was crazy for rejecting it.  I decided to press on.  I pushed my way through Loveless’ dizzying sonance dozens of times in the next few days.  The sounds seemed stretched—every instrument manipulated beyond distinction.  It droned.  It lingered.  It smoldered. It was as if the disk was lagging; yet the songs seemed fast.  It was fire, burning under water.

Within a week it had me.  Anytime my mind would wander throughout the day it would dead end at Come in Alone or Sometimes.  Those melodies would find me.  They would stalk me with haunting resonance.  There are other albums that I replayed frequently because I liked them, because I enjoyed them, because they were easy and comfortable.  Loveless was the first album that had ever courted me—that ever pursued me—that summoned me to listen.  And it didn’t just want the time that I spent listening to it.  It wanted every wasted thought, every idle moment.  If there were space, its melodies would squeeze through.  Loveless took time to dissipate.  It took time to digest.  It was thick and layered.  It crept in slowly over many listens.

The vocals were slurred and hidden.  Lyrics were as indefinable as the instrumentation.  In fact, at times, they were indistinguishable from the instrumentation.  And, yet, they were unforgettable—resonating, following, predatorial.  You could neither forget them nor remember them entirely.  But the melodies imposed themselves even without lyric comprehension: somehow that was acceptable.  It was lyrical without narrative.  It was so unique and incantatory that you could get something out of it without knowing exactly what it was saying or doing.

How could something that was initially so contrary to my instincts and so unapproachable in its intonation and attitude become so loveable, so lovely.  In Loveless the shrill sounds of sirens whose intentions are seemingly vague and frightening become comforting, intimate whispers that in the end, hold you—warm and spellbound.

These Words

You will not remember these words

They will not needle into your head

And stitch themselves inside with thread

These words won’t be your conscience

You will not remember these words

They will not infect your skin

Dilute, diffuse, and swim

Into streams and currents,

Ebbs and flows, allocate and permeate

These words are not a toxin

These words are not pretty

You will not package them

With paper, bows, or ribbon

You will not give them

To your friends as gifts

Print them on a bookmark

Or frame them on the wall

These words are not a token

You won’t find comfort in these words

They won’t wake you sweating

Undress you, make you flush,

Ravish you, break your heart,

Slip away in the dark

You will not miss them when they’re gone

You will not remember these words

You won’t sell them in dark alleys

Or buy them in seedy neighborhoods

You won’t dissolve them on your tongue,

Roll them up in paper,

Or inject them in between your toes

They will not lift you up when you are down

Or drag you down when you get high

These words won't mitigate the wound of being you

You will not touch these words with science or technology

You won’t pin them on your table under light and lens

Dissect them, break their bones in quarters,

Section them, or suck their marrow

You can not augment these words

You will not manipulate these words in politics

Or decorate these words with metals

You won’t discuss them in universities

Print them on your shirt

Chalk them up on sandwich boards

Or quote them in your letters

These words won't bring catharsis

These words won’t be your guiding light,

Muse, or alma mater

You won’t add them to your cannon,

Recite them in cathedrals,

Synagogues, or mosques

These words won’t be your anthem

These words will not birth ideas

Or bring about revolution

These words will not start war

Or bring peace,

Raise the dead or heal the sick

These words won’t walk on water

These words will not affect you, burden you,

Change you, harm you, or better you

These words have no intent

These words have no detail

There is no irony in these words

These words are right

These words are true

These words are absolute

This ink is light                and   hardly     visible

  Yet these words do not hint

But you will not remember these words

               Because 

These 

Words

     Are not written here.