Below is words only.

Many words.

Difficult to write about music. 

Maybe more impossible to write about your own. 

Many pop-quotes about how it's useless to try. 

But what genre is that?

I’m not the first and I doubt I’ll be the last, but this half-theory came over me about fifteen years ago. 

Where does all this feeling in music come from? 

Why does it hit so hard? 

Why do the bass drops send us nuts? 

And the tension seem like endless bending time.

Too many of examples of music being magic. 

But do these examples all lead to the same very real reality?

That all sound came from 

One of Three things. 

One. 

Things that threaten you from the earth and sky environment.

Weather, thunder, rockslides, rain, floods, meteors, wind, storms...

Two. 

Things that threaten you from the animal queen / kingdom. 

(And inversely the sounds of animals that are gentle or peace-giving)

Three. 

Things you instinctively need to protect. 

Your babies, kin, kindred, loves, mates, neighbours, the stash...

And that’s it. 

Nothing else makes a sound so important to get your blood pumping.

The endorphins racing.

Chemicals flowing.

Arms and legs twitch (if you have them). 

These are the sounds which mean something right now. 

Or the sound of a warning that something BIG will change very f***ng soon.

Is this the rawest palette we as musical humans have? 

I think it is, if we want to sculpt sound or make music that pushes the listener deeper into the present and future.

The other side.

There’s a sub-theory, a dangerous one maybe. 

Completely entwined with the first. 

It is that all musical sounds that reference things we recognise from the past, is a palette of nostalgia. 

The yearning for something that we have or haven’t experienced. 

This is not about the present, or the future. 

It is a re-living of someone else's past.

Fifties open body guitar thru a dusty radio. 

Rhodes keys bone dry. 

Drum machines thru a tape machine. 

“Tonight” and “Baby” and “I love you”. 

These things make us feel a recent past, 

which stays there. 

In the past. 

Do these evocations come out towards us from the speakers?

Or do WE actually move back in time towards THEM? ← I think this one

We think we hear these tropes pushing into our reality, 

but really, we time travel to our bounce of that story. 

Your bum squeaks on the red leatherette bench in the diner 

or bounce along in the front seat on the gravel back-road 

or lie motionless the messy bedroom floor 

or wait it out in the darkly lit alley corner in Rio.

And that’s it?

That’s all. 

But it is plenty. 

Luckily it is two things of plenty.

A sound may vanish and pop up from anywhere on this spectrum to somewhere opposite. Sounds and feelings disappearing and reappearing. 

Depending on where you are. 

Depending on when you are. 

Depending and what has come before or what has been forgotten. 

This is one way of thinking about the power of the musical unity that we share. 

Tell me to bog-off if you like. 

But this is where my mind goes when the spine tingles.

Or when the neon lights are blinking through the undercover-agent's office window.

Detail

When sculpting the sound for a piece of music I think about your ears, 

and your time. 

Why should these vibrations go into you? 

Why these vibrations? 

What could they excite? 

I think of you.

I think of you touching rough paper on an especially quiet day.

You're hearing the whispery sound of your fingerprint on the fibres. 

How might that be at 75 decibels? 

About the volume of a noisy vacuum cleaner. 

Might it tingle your spine a little? 

Or a lot?

Why does it rise up just before a chest-rumbling nose-popping baseline?

I think about the guitar amp that you blew as a kid. 

You got it just before Eid. 

You were playing the only chord you know, 

way too loud. 

And now you miss that crackle.

I think that you really want to sing. 

But all you ever manage is a soft hum on your own. 

But this SOUNDSYSTEM STACK at this rave, 

you climbed the fence to avoid police, 

it's making you feel like it's your choir.

I think that you know you love club music, 

but there’s this little thing about it, 

maybe it doesn’t speak to you in quite your language. 

Maybe 1 tune in 100 does.

I think about you, the DJ, looking to take this dance floor to a slightly different planet. 

Or deeper down into the crust of this one.

These are some of the things.

Honesty and transparency. 

An obsession with this question sprouted and grows.

Is it possible to record a piece of music in a space where the player is thinking about a feeling, a story, and living this story, and going through the physical motions as they perform and record?

A film scene without a camera. 

She's in the hazy blue light. 

She thinks about her mother whilst opening a window to the sound of the suburbs outside. 

She's babbling, singing. 

And the listener feels exaclty what the singer feels. 

Every empathic cue drunk up by the ears.

The listener's ears and cortex entwine and ripple to make sense of the story. 

The music comes alive. 

Or synthesis… 

The synths are recorded in a simulated room set inside a bigger warehouse space (using reverberation software). 

Different instruments are placed in different spaces in the virtual architecture. The whole audio model is built faithfully to recreate architecture of a real place. The sistine chapel. Your uncle's factory. Your old School. Temple.

Would this careful loving act of realistic audio processing create an impossible to un-feel sound? 

Even more compelling than your favourite music production.

[ Track: Dini ]

Recording for Real

Can we create a nostsalgia for the future by 'recording for real'? 

They are thinking about the future of their own existence, the clank of road-work machines outside clank away. Something is fumbled on the table. It's wood, hollow, lifted up.  The violin notes tumble into time with the clank clank clank and they lean up against a creaky desk, the radio fuzzes with noize. 

the window scrapes open to a flock of robot birds flapping between the clanks... 

[ Track: King Silence ]

x@vahakn.co.uk  thoughts? ☻