November 7, 2005...
After 12 years--yes, TWELVE YEARS--since her last release, Kate has finally released a follow-up to "The Red Shoes" but after so long, can it really be called a follow-up? She took time off to have a child and live her life, but I imagine what her mind cooked up during that hiatus and the backlog of ideas and songs has expressed itself in the double CD release "Aerial." And we have in each disc, a replica of "The Hounds of Love." One disc is a collection of Kate songs, and the other is a concept suite like "The Ninth Wave."
So yes, much like "The Hounds of Love," let's start with the first side or disc one: A SEA OF HONEY, is a disc of “Kate songs,” as she herself calls them. She means that they are songs that stand on their own, independent of anything else—separate from an overriding concept. Each one tells a story, and these songs certainly do.
The opening track KING OF THE MOUNTAIN is spooky and swooping, with a vaguely reggae-beat. She incorporates chilly, edgy wind sounds but in the middle of the song, they are low rumblings of wind, as though being blown through a small crack in a window. The song is partially addressed to Elvis who may be “out there” somewhere, sad, lonely—riding a sled named Rosebud, thus likening the legend of the King of Rock and Roll to Charles Foster Kane, CITIZNE KANE, lonely and alone in his mansion. It has something to say about the price of fame as well—that it is a very lonely affair, with menace waiting ahead. And the only way out of it is to go “away.”
The video for this song is charming. It shows a mansion like Kane’s, but it is supposed to be Elvis’ house. His closet opens up by itself and one of his old glittery jumpsuits comes alive and dances itself out of the closet, through the house, and onto the wind. It blows by other clothes on a wash line, and the shirts try to reach up and touch “The King” (like screaming female fans at one of his concerts) but can’t go too far since they are clothes pinned to the line. The jumpsuit ends up high in the mountains, tinged with pink and red in a lovely effect, and finally to its old owner: there is Elvis, sledding down a hill on Rosebud. He is old now, with a gut and white hair still styled in his pompadour and accompanying pork chop sideburns. His old jumpsuit leaps into his arms and the two are overcome with joy to see each other again. It is fun but also quite moving. And a little shocking to see an old Elvis, which makes us reflect on what would have happened if he had not died, what he would look like, what he would have done with his career, etc.
On the track π, she sings the calculation to the one hundred and sixteenth decimal place! Who else in “pop” music would dare to do that? (I think of the old joke about anyone who is a wonderful singer: “She could sing the phone book and make it sound good!”) It is a simple premise: a sort of “love” song to either a smart mathematician or a savant. Either way, the man is, as she says, obsessed with numbers. Kate singing numbers takes the place of singing words. The tenderness with which she sings them replicates the love and lure they hold for this man, so numbers are the language here. It is said that numbers—well, math—is the universal language. And this flashes before us in a visceral way listening to her crooning and caressing the numbers.
On a tangent, I remembered the film CONTACT and how the information in the message was given in numbers, because the aliens knew that any civilization smart enough to know what π is, would be able to figure out the code!
BERTIE, a love song to her 7 year old son, is a startling track only in that it is a Renaissance ballad with period instruments! It is a true Olde English Madrigal. I LOVE how she manipulates her voice when singing “Sweeee-eee-eee-eeeeet kisses” and the following “Threeeee-eeeee-eeee-eeee wishes.”
On the surface, MRS. BERTOLOZZI is a lovely song about a woman doing the washing. But when you focus on the words it deepens into a song of agonizing beauty.
Right from the opening piano chords and her moaning voice, one can sense the weariness and sadness. She sings of a rainy Wednesday. It took hours for her to clean up the mess “they” made. The impression is that she is cleaning up after her own family or even that she is a maid for another family. She gathers the dirty clothes to do some wash, collecting “your” jeans and shirts and things. They go into the new washing machine and the way she sings “washing machine” shows that the object has significance, that this is not just an ordinary washing machine. She watches the clothes go ‘round in a daydream, seeing her blouse wrap itself around her man’s trousers (her longing to touch her man again). The daydream continues to the ocean where he is standing behind her. The repetition of the waves coming in and going out, coupled with the repetition of the tune is hypnotizing—like watching the agitator in a washing machine. Then she thinks she sees him out of the corner of her eye, standing outside, but she sees that it is one of her man’s shirts she has already put on the line to dry. It is quite clear at this point that he is dead since she says the shirt “seems so alive.”
This is the stuff that grief is made of. When a loved one dies, all we have left are the things that person owned, wore, touched, liked, loved, used. We are surrounded by these things, constant reminders of their absence. And in our grief, we try to keep ourselves occupied by doing the wash, trying to concentrate on little things that will not tax us too much. The washing machine becomes her focus. She can clean and do the laundry. They are things that ground, that root one in real life, but beyond that, are things that must be done. Life goes on in that awful paradox: life goes on for YOU, not for your loved one who is gone. It is a tender song, full of loss and longing.
And the end sounds like some kind of old jingle from an advertisement for a detergent, something from the 40s or 50s. The accent she uses here is approaching a kind of lower class, almost Cockney sound. Again, it is a memory, a piece of nostalgia for Mrs. Bertolozzi.
HOW TO BE INVISIBLE has a very menacing sound. The rhythm and bass line seem to be “stalking.” I LOVE the spell from the book she finds: they all have to do with hiding, disappearing or being somehow invisible. “Eye of Braille” is obvious since it references literally being blind, not seeing. “Hem of anorak” is the hood on an anorak, a heavy jacket. When the hood is pulled down, one cannot see, thus being blind as in the first line. It also reminds me of how children think that because they close THEIR eyes, that YOU can’t see them. One can sort of hunker down and “disappear” in an anorak. “Stem of wallflower” is kind of amusing because of course, a wallflower is not a real flower with a stem, but is someone who blends in with the wallpaper, someone who is mousy, plain, not noticeable, someone who “disappears.” And finally “Hair of doormat” is another one of those figurative images, a doormat being someone who lets other people “walk all over them,” thus rendering themselves, in effect, invisible. And all the images at the end are wonderful because they are so cinematic: if the Invisible Man were walking home, all one would see would be the leaves stirring behind him—or if he were to go swimming, it would be a little “storm” in the pool. Wonderfully visual. This song reminds me of the Kate from THE DREAMING, full of spells and incantations, ready to use her magic and turn into a mule at any moment.
The next song is JOANNI, a brief snapshot of Joan of Arc going into battle. It is unexpected on many levels. She refers to Joan of Arc as Joanni, a very familiar, chummy nickname. The carefree, swinging sense of the song is something I would never have associated with the subject matter. Shortly after the songs starts, there is a faraway battle cry. Her approach to painting this little mini-picture of Joan of Arc is one of admiration and perhaps even awe, as everything, the soldiers, even the flags and banners stop when Joanni comes on to the field—and if it were to be filmed, I would expect to see Joanni in slow motion, confident, charismatic, sunlight glinting off her armour, hair bouncing, as her head slowly turns to survey the field, her eyes sparkling in the sun. She blows a kiss to God and she never wears a ring on her fingers—because she has dedicated herself to God, she can never belong to another.
I really like the very odd throaty humming chorus at the end and we hear the far away battle cry again. Despite her gruesome, fiery legend, this is a very sensual, upbeat, gliding song.
And the disc ends with A CORAL ROOM about Kate’s mother’s death. It is a deeply still song and I found myself holding my breath through it—which had nothing to do with the fact that most of the song takes place under water.
The fact that it is just Kate and her piano imparts a very scaled down, intimate effect. Once the song gets underway, it feels so intimate, that it verges on feeling as though one is prying, seeing right into her heart and head.
Like so many Kate songs, the imagery stands in for something much bigger and more important. So, what do we know from the words? Well, to start with there is a city draped in fishing net. The city is underwater, but how? Has there been a disaster? Did the city sink? We don’t know yet. Through the half-light (the sun penetrating only partially into the depths), she says the towers look like they are covered in webs. A few lines later, we see where these webs came from: the spider of time. And what exactly is the spider of time? My sense is that it is the invisible movement of time, how all things eventually die, crumble, fall apart. It is entropy in the form of a spider, slowly, eventually covering everything in a web of time and age. She says there were hundreds of people living in this city—once? At the time of its destruction? Did they get out? The planes came crashing down and pilots drowned. Was there a war?
Kate sometimes does something interesting in her lyrics by mixing time periods and tenses. So in the line immediately following the planes crashing and pilots drowning, the speed boats fly overhead. Well, we WERE in the city BEFORE it sunk but now we must be underwater, seeing things from the city, looking up—and we see the bottom of speed boats. If we are under them, they do appear to be “flying.” Now, we are up in the boat, and she tells you to put your hand over the side of the boat and asks what you feel. What COULD you feel? What does she WANT you to feel, to notice? Here we jump to her memory of her mother who evidently had a little brown jug that she kept milk in. It is something that belonged to her mother, and just like Mrs. Bertolozzi with her husband’s clothes, it is what she has now instead of her actual mother. She says it holds her memories. And she can hear her mother singing a line from an old, traditional Irish tune about a little brown jug. It is a beautiful touch to have a tenor “echo” the song, as though it is another memory, a piece of nostalgia. (Kate did this once before in a song called MOMENTS OF PLEASURE from her prior release THE RED SHOES. The song is similar in intent, recounting memories of people who are gone. She says “I can hear my mother saying, ‘Every old sock meets an old shoe’.”) Again, we jump around in time: “I hear her laughing, she is standing in the kitchen as we come in the back door—” but suddenly we are thrust forward in time, after her mother is gone, to see the jug fall from the shelf in the kitchen, perhaps from the vibration of the closing back door. It falls, and breaks. And it is brilliant that she says NOTHING about the heartbreak of the jug shattering, one of the precious things that belonged to her mother—she simply sings, “See it fall—see it fall.” Little spiders climb out of the broken jug, to start weaving webs over it immediately, aging it, breaking it even more.
And we pull up and back, as she sings that the pieces will lay there for a while in a house draped in net, in a room filled with coral. By this, we see that the city has been under water for some time, long enough for coral to grow and fill the room. And again, she tells you to put your hand over the side of the boat. She repeats it, in a tone cracking with emotion (indeed, she sounds like she is on the verge of tears through the entire song), almost daring you to do it. And tell her what you feel. Do you feel the lives that used to live there? All the lives that were lost? Do you feel her mother, the jug? Do you feel her grief? Her grief is in the water—her grief IS the water, burying the city, her old house, her mother’s house, her old life. Under water, being covered by webs, being erased. She knows that being engulfed by grief over the loss of a loved one is to be underwater, in the half-light, living a half-life. It is to be drowned, unable to be rescued. It is to witness, helplessly, the drowned world, unable to rescue it or anyone from it.
All in all, I found disc one to be subtle, very deliberately paced, delicate and hypnotic. It seems like Kate is exploring a new sense in her music, one of “trance”—hypnotic and driving, a little along the lines of what is now being called “trance” music, but without the dance floor intent. HOW TO BE INVISIBLE, JOANNI and to a degree PI made me lapse into an alpha-state and stare straight ahead, inside of myself. And as for A SEA OF HONEY—there are sea and water images in 3 of the 7 songs.
Disc two is obviously A SKY OF HONEY, since the entire suite takes place under the sun or stars and moon, in a sky filled with birds. It is all about the sky, the “aerial,” the direction “up.”
Her previous concept piece "The Ninth Wave" was a complex, dense layering of ideas, images and sounds. In that prior release, the songs bear little relation to each other musically but they are connected through the story line of a woman adrift at sea in a life jacket after some kind of boating accident. The woman spends the night alone in the water, trying to stay awake, waiting to be rescued, while she hallucinates out of exhaustion and fear. She has a past life flash of being tried for witchcraft and drowned, she leaves her body to visit her loved one at home waiting and wondering where she is, and she ends up floating in space, looking back at the earth.
Well, A SKY OF HONEY is nowhere near as complex, at least in story line, but it is just as spiritual. It is abstract, Impressionistic. In fact, she invokes Impressionist painting with many references to colors and light and an actual painter as a character in the “story.” It is also much more in the tradition of an Impressionistic piece of music, like something by Ravel. It is a song cycle and has leitmotifs both lyrically and musically. Of course the overriding image is that of the sky and birds as we cycle through a day, but not just any ordinary day—it is Midsummer, a halfway point of the year, the pinnacle of light itself, the time when days begin to grow shorter. Time, the earth turning, color, birds, light, sun, moon, stars, sunset, sunrise, language. Trying to catch it on canvas—or at all, somehow, anyhow.
The PRELUDE exists for one simple reason: to introduce the bird song that permeates this suite. As pigeons coo under smooth, languid tones and Kate plays a deeply wistful melody on the piano, a little boy (as played by her son Bertie) announces to his Mummy and Daddy that the day is full of birds, and that it sounds like they are saying words. It is quite startling to hear that, yes indeed, they do. When I first heard this piece I literally gasped when I heard the language under the bird song. The coo is infused with what your ear swears is human speech. The birds are trying to speak, to communicate. What are they trying to say?
The PRELUDE is written as the traditional definition: a short piece of music, in free style, usually for keyboard.
We slide right into the PROLOGUE, meant to introduce us to the cycle. It is an innocent enough introduction, betraying none of the adventure and rapture to come.
The throbbing synthesizer and piano act as the afternoon sun, pulsing down on us, making us sleepy, dreamy. Warmth emanates from the sun and thus the instruments. She sings to Midsummer itself: “Every time you leave us/ So summer will be gone/ So you’ll never grow old to us.” This makes me think of the ancient Greek legend of Persephone, daughter of Demeter, who at the end of every summer, was forced to return to her husband’s home under the earth. Her mother would mourn for her daughter and winter would come. But Persephone was allowed to return months later, her mother’s happiness would create summer, and Persephone would never grow old.
The pulsing afternoon sun continues. She likens the light to the light in Italy, famous for otherworldly sunlight (witness the Venetian paintings of Turner). She sings in Italian, “Oh my Rome, my treasure, full of sun light…” Enter drums and strings as she sings, “What a lovely afternoon. Will you come with us to find the song of the oil and the brush?”
Which introduces us to the oil and brush man, the Impressionist painter in AN ARCHITECT’S DREAM. The sensual, languid sound of afternoon is intensified here with the addition of bongos. It is the barest suggestion that something may be building…
Kate watches a man paint a plein air landscape. He continues despite the ever-changing light. How do you capture a world that is constantly becoming something different? It captivates her to watch him create, layering the colors, the forms. Even when he makes a mistake, it becomes a perfect part of the composition. The painting is constantly evolving, just like the landscape and the light. So in a sense, there is no such thing as a “mistake.” It simply IS, in harmony, which in a way, is the ultimate theme in this suite, the concept of harmony, of being fully present in time and space.
And the late afternoon rain sweeps in…
Far away thunder. Birdsong. The short THE PAINTER’S LINK…is a link between the previous song and the following? Is it a link for the painter between this world and his painted world? Our poor painter stands and watches his work ruined. “What has become of my painting? All the colours are running.” Kate sang previously that whenever the painter works on the pavement in his painting, it starts to rain. Maybe his painting is a magic link to this world? If it rains when he paints the pavement, perhaps the running colors are timed with the sunset, with the paint mingling and mirroring the actual sunset? Again, according to Kate, there are no mistakes, there is no “ruined”—his lovely landscape has turned into a wonderful sunset. The link is the sunset, the link between day and night.
And now, the SUNSET itself. The music turns into a sultry jazz combo, as the light and air turn sultry. The light slips out of wet clothes and changes into an iridescent blue. At dusk, blackbirds sing a song of colour. The sand does too, singing a song of crimson, red and rust. All is awash with colour.
This piece is full of achingly lovely images and words. “Every sleepy light/ Must say goodbye/ To the day before it dies.”
As the sun and colours become more and more fiery, the music spins into a Spanish Flamenco, a brilliant touch linking the “fiery” Latin culture with the red and fire of the sunset.
The birds are singing clearer. Or maybe your mind, as it stills and watches the colours, is becoming accustomed to understanding bird-speak? AERIAL TAL (Sky TALk? the name of the language of the birds?) is a bridge between the sunset and the milky blue dusk of tenebre. It is…
SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN, where “the shadows come to play/ ‘Twixt the day/ And night.” Between this and that, neither this nor that—it is the stillness and silence as she and a significant other watch it all from the top of the highest hill. And every sleepy light says goodbye to the day…the sun (son) says “Goodnight mum.”
“Sweet dreams…” answers Kate in what sounds like a whispered sample from a Gregorian chant, and the dreamy, floating, swirling, hallucinatory NOCTURN begins our Midsummer night. She wonders if they are awake or asleep—“Could be we are here/ Could be in a dream”—the scene and moonlight-soaked landscape are so surreal, they could be in a dream.
A sexy, trance-like bass line comes in, underscoring the sensuality of a swim in warm, “milky, silky” waters in the middle of the night. Their clothes lay on the beach, their footprints lead right up to the water, they are alone. They stand in the Atlantic and “become panoramic”—this line speaks to me of something akin to an out-of-body experience. I have heard of people, during meditation, achieving a sense of the vastness of the space around them, and she achieves that standing in the ocean—“The sky’s above our heads/ The sea’s around our legs.” The piece turns even more fantastical with her newfound enlightenment of space as she sings that the stars are caught in their hair and are on their fingers. Even the galaxies are just a few inches away: “A veil of diamond dust/ Just reach up and touch it.”
The music begins a slow gallop here: something is building, something is happening. Here, Kate is joined by a chorus of herself in a magnificently chilling, goose-bump-raising, warped harmony. “It came up on the horizon/ Rising, Rising.” The sun is coming back, bringing with it the colour of honey. She is joined by male voices and they hurriedly abandon singing for a much more powerful and urgent sound: “LOOK AT THE LIGHT!/ Climbing up the aerial (sky).” The light is changing, it is back, and it is white and it is changing and it is jumping off the aerial and it is changing and it is changing—and all the dreamers awaken at the abrupt end of the song—BOOM!
We are given a brief moment to catch our breaths from that sudden dazzling, majestic sunrise as the pulse (sunlight) returns, and the birds start to titter. Our entire world is now the AERIAL, the grand finale to this suite, and a grand one it is. The earth rotates, the sun returns, the song of time must be sung—and we take off at a full adrenaline gallop, hearts pounding, as the sound becomes commanding, stomping.
She yearns to be on the roof, she needs to be on the roof—no, she must be on the roof, up, UP on the roof, as close as she can get to the birds, to the sun. I can almost hear her saying, “I don’t know why, but I have to, I HAVE to get up on the roof.” We feel delirious with her and she asks “What kind of language is this? I can’t hear a word you’re saying/ Tell me are you singing?” We feel the rush, and the noise among the birds. She can’t hear what you’re saying over the birds. But who is speaking? What language is this? The Aerial Tal/ the bird-speak? The language is a language of song. And we take a break to put two and two together… she “sings” a duet with some birds: they twitter, their voices rising and falling in a pattern, and she laughs, her guffaws rising and falling in a pattern. They take turns in an inspired stretch to make one song, which illustrates that bird “song” is speech, a language just as ours is. We make sounds that rise and fall like they do. All speech is song and John Cage said, “All sound is music.”
Suddenly she realizes what they are saying, that they are laughing, and why. They are happy the sun is back. They are giddy with joy because the sun is back. How something so mysterious and complex can be so breathtakingly simple. Happiness. Joy. Laughter. Let’s join in…
I see her standing “up, up, high on the roof,” ecstatically raising her arms with the rising sun, in a state of rapture, a state of bliss, ready to take to the sky with the birds. At this point she begins to babble, to sing like the birds—what language is this? Is she speaking or singing? It doesn’t matter—this is a true Maslowian peak experience, one that takes you completely out of yourself, that makes you feel very tiny, or very large, at one with the universe, a feeling of being a part of the infinite and eternal. This is true euphoria. In a fit of frenzied yet metered musical laughter, she is gloriously transcending and we are going with her as she turns into the birds, the sky, the sun.
After 12 years--yes, TWELVE YEARS--since her last release, Kate has finally released a follow-up to "The Red Shoes" but after so long, can it really be called a follow-up? She took time off to have a child and live her life, but I imagine what her mind cooked up during that hiatus and the backlog of ideas and songs has expressed itself in the double CD release "Aerial." And we have in each disc, a replica of "The Hounds of Love." One disc is a collection of Kate songs, and the other is a concept suite like "The Ninth Wave."
So yes, much like "The Hounds of Love," let's start with the first side or disc one: A SEA OF HONEY, is a disc of “Kate songs,” as she herself calls them. She means that they are songs that stand on their own, independent of anything else—separate from an overriding concept. Each one tells a story, and these songs certainly do.
The opening track KING OF THE MOUNTAIN is spooky and swooping, with a vaguely reggae-beat. She incorporates chilly, edgy wind sounds but in the middle of the song, they are low rumblings of wind, as though being blown through a small crack in a window. The song is partially addressed to Elvis who may be “out there” somewhere, sad, lonely—riding a sled named Rosebud, thus likening the legend of the King of Rock and Roll to Charles Foster Kane, CITIZNE KANE, lonely and alone in his mansion. It has something to say about the price of fame as well—that it is a very lonely affair, with menace waiting ahead. And the only way out of it is to go “away.”
The video for this song is charming. It shows a mansion like Kane’s, but it is supposed to be Elvis’ house. His closet opens up by itself and one of his old glittery jumpsuits comes alive and dances itself out of the closet, through the house, and onto the wind. It blows by other clothes on a wash line, and the shirts try to reach up and touch “The King” (like screaming female fans at one of his concerts) but can’t go too far since they are clothes pinned to the line. The jumpsuit ends up high in the mountains, tinged with pink and red in a lovely effect, and finally to its old owner: there is Elvis, sledding down a hill on Rosebud. He is old now, with a gut and white hair still styled in his pompadour and accompanying pork chop sideburns. His old jumpsuit leaps into his arms and the two are overcome with joy to see each other again. It is fun but also quite moving. And a little shocking to see an old Elvis, which makes us reflect on what would have happened if he had not died, what he would look like, what he would have done with his career, etc.
On the track π, she sings the calculation to the one hundred and sixteenth decimal place! Who else in “pop” music would dare to do that? (I think of the old joke about anyone who is a wonderful singer: “She could sing the phone book and make it sound good!”) It is a simple premise: a sort of “love” song to either a smart mathematician or a savant. Either way, the man is, as she says, obsessed with numbers. Kate singing numbers takes the place of singing words. The tenderness with which she sings them replicates the love and lure they hold for this man, so numbers are the language here. It is said that numbers—well, math—is the universal language. And this flashes before us in a visceral way listening to her crooning and caressing the numbers.
On a tangent, I remembered the film CONTACT and how the information in the message was given in numbers, because the aliens knew that any civilization smart enough to know what π is, would be able to figure out the code!
BERTIE, a love song to her 7 year old son, is a startling track only in that it is a Renaissance ballad with period instruments! It is a true Olde English Madrigal. I LOVE how she manipulates her voice when singing “Sweeee-eee-eee-eeeeet kisses” and the following “Threeeee-eeeee-eeee-eeee wishes.”
On the surface, MRS. BERTOLOZZI is a lovely song about a woman doing the washing. But when you focus on the words it deepens into a song of agonizing beauty.
Right from the opening piano chords and her moaning voice, one can sense the weariness and sadness. She sings of a rainy Wednesday. It took hours for her to clean up the mess “they” made. The impression is that she is cleaning up after her own family or even that she is a maid for another family. She gathers the dirty clothes to do some wash, collecting “your” jeans and shirts and things. They go into the new washing machine and the way she sings “washing machine” shows that the object has significance, that this is not just an ordinary washing machine. She watches the clothes go ‘round in a daydream, seeing her blouse wrap itself around her man’s trousers (her longing to touch her man again). The daydream continues to the ocean where he is standing behind her. The repetition of the waves coming in and going out, coupled with the repetition of the tune is hypnotizing—like watching the agitator in a washing machine. Then she thinks she sees him out of the corner of her eye, standing outside, but she sees that it is one of her man’s shirts she has already put on the line to dry. It is quite clear at this point that he is dead since she says the shirt “seems so alive.”
This is the stuff that grief is made of. When a loved one dies, all we have left are the things that person owned, wore, touched, liked, loved, used. We are surrounded by these things, constant reminders of their absence. And in our grief, we try to keep ourselves occupied by doing the wash, trying to concentrate on little things that will not tax us too much. The washing machine becomes her focus. She can clean and do the laundry. They are things that ground, that root one in real life, but beyond that, are things that must be done. Life goes on in that awful paradox: life goes on for YOU, not for your loved one who is gone. It is a tender song, full of loss and longing.
And the end sounds like some kind of old jingle from an advertisement for a detergent, something from the 40s or 50s. The accent she uses here is approaching a kind of lower class, almost Cockney sound. Again, it is a memory, a piece of nostalgia for Mrs. Bertolozzi.
HOW TO BE INVISIBLE has a very menacing sound. The rhythm and bass line seem to be “stalking.” I LOVE the spell from the book she finds: they all have to do with hiding, disappearing or being somehow invisible. “Eye of Braille” is obvious since it references literally being blind, not seeing. “Hem of anorak” is the hood on an anorak, a heavy jacket. When the hood is pulled down, one cannot see, thus being blind as in the first line. It also reminds me of how children think that because they close THEIR eyes, that YOU can’t see them. One can sort of hunker down and “disappear” in an anorak. “Stem of wallflower” is kind of amusing because of course, a wallflower is not a real flower with a stem, but is someone who blends in with the wallpaper, someone who is mousy, plain, not noticeable, someone who “disappears.” And finally “Hair of doormat” is another one of those figurative images, a doormat being someone who lets other people “walk all over them,” thus rendering themselves, in effect, invisible. And all the images at the end are wonderful because they are so cinematic: if the Invisible Man were walking home, all one would see would be the leaves stirring behind him—or if he were to go swimming, it would be a little “storm” in the pool. Wonderfully visual. This song reminds me of the Kate from THE DREAMING, full of spells and incantations, ready to use her magic and turn into a mule at any moment.
The next song is JOANNI, a brief snapshot of Joan of Arc going into battle. It is unexpected on many levels. She refers to Joan of Arc as Joanni, a very familiar, chummy nickname. The carefree, swinging sense of the song is something I would never have associated with the subject matter. Shortly after the songs starts, there is a faraway battle cry. Her approach to painting this little mini-picture of Joan of Arc is one of admiration and perhaps even awe, as everything, the soldiers, even the flags and banners stop when Joanni comes on to the field—and if it were to be filmed, I would expect to see Joanni in slow motion, confident, charismatic, sunlight glinting off her armour, hair bouncing, as her head slowly turns to survey the field, her eyes sparkling in the sun. She blows a kiss to God and she never wears a ring on her fingers—because she has dedicated herself to God, she can never belong to another.
I really like the very odd throaty humming chorus at the end and we hear the far away battle cry again. Despite her gruesome, fiery legend, this is a very sensual, upbeat, gliding song.
And the disc ends with A CORAL ROOM about Kate’s mother’s death. It is a deeply still song and I found myself holding my breath through it—which had nothing to do with the fact that most of the song takes place under water.
The fact that it is just Kate and her piano imparts a very scaled down, intimate effect. Once the song gets underway, it feels so intimate, that it verges on feeling as though one is prying, seeing right into her heart and head.
Like so many Kate songs, the imagery stands in for something much bigger and more important. So, what do we know from the words? Well, to start with there is a city draped in fishing net. The city is underwater, but how? Has there been a disaster? Did the city sink? We don’t know yet. Through the half-light (the sun penetrating only partially into the depths), she says the towers look like they are covered in webs. A few lines later, we see where these webs came from: the spider of time. And what exactly is the spider of time? My sense is that it is the invisible movement of time, how all things eventually die, crumble, fall apart. It is entropy in the form of a spider, slowly, eventually covering everything in a web of time and age. She says there were hundreds of people living in this city—once? At the time of its destruction? Did they get out? The planes came crashing down and pilots drowned. Was there a war?
Kate sometimes does something interesting in her lyrics by mixing time periods and tenses. So in the line immediately following the planes crashing and pilots drowning, the speed boats fly overhead. Well, we WERE in the city BEFORE it sunk but now we must be underwater, seeing things from the city, looking up—and we see the bottom of speed boats. If we are under them, they do appear to be “flying.” Now, we are up in the boat, and she tells you to put your hand over the side of the boat and asks what you feel. What COULD you feel? What does she WANT you to feel, to notice? Here we jump to her memory of her mother who evidently had a little brown jug that she kept milk in. It is something that belonged to her mother, and just like Mrs. Bertolozzi with her husband’s clothes, it is what she has now instead of her actual mother. She says it holds her memories. And she can hear her mother singing a line from an old, traditional Irish tune about a little brown jug. It is a beautiful touch to have a tenor “echo” the song, as though it is another memory, a piece of nostalgia. (Kate did this once before in a song called MOMENTS OF PLEASURE from her prior release THE RED SHOES. The song is similar in intent, recounting memories of people who are gone. She says “I can hear my mother saying, ‘Every old sock meets an old shoe’.”) Again, we jump around in time: “I hear her laughing, she is standing in the kitchen as we come in the back door—” but suddenly we are thrust forward in time, after her mother is gone, to see the jug fall from the shelf in the kitchen, perhaps from the vibration of the closing back door. It falls, and breaks. And it is brilliant that she says NOTHING about the heartbreak of the jug shattering, one of the precious things that belonged to her mother—she simply sings, “See it fall—see it fall.” Little spiders climb out of the broken jug, to start weaving webs over it immediately, aging it, breaking it even more.
And we pull up and back, as she sings that the pieces will lay there for a while in a house draped in net, in a room filled with coral. By this, we see that the city has been under water for some time, long enough for coral to grow and fill the room. And again, she tells you to put your hand over the side of the boat. She repeats it, in a tone cracking with emotion (indeed, she sounds like she is on the verge of tears through the entire song), almost daring you to do it. And tell her what you feel. Do you feel the lives that used to live there? All the lives that were lost? Do you feel her mother, the jug? Do you feel her grief? Her grief is in the water—her grief IS the water, burying the city, her old house, her mother’s house, her old life. Under water, being covered by webs, being erased. She knows that being engulfed by grief over the loss of a loved one is to be underwater, in the half-light, living a half-life. It is to be drowned, unable to be rescued. It is to witness, helplessly, the drowned world, unable to rescue it or anyone from it.
All in all, I found disc one to be subtle, very deliberately paced, delicate and hypnotic. It seems like Kate is exploring a new sense in her music, one of “trance”—hypnotic and driving, a little along the lines of what is now being called “trance” music, but without the dance floor intent. HOW TO BE INVISIBLE, JOANNI and to a degree PI made me lapse into an alpha-state and stare straight ahead, inside of myself. And as for A SEA OF HONEY—there are sea and water images in 3 of the 7 songs.
Disc two is obviously A SKY OF HONEY, since the entire suite takes place under the sun or stars and moon, in a sky filled with birds. It is all about the sky, the “aerial,” the direction “up.”
Her previous concept piece "The Ninth Wave" was a complex, dense layering of ideas, images and sounds. In that prior release, the songs bear little relation to each other musically but they are connected through the story line of a woman adrift at sea in a life jacket after some kind of boating accident. The woman spends the night alone in the water, trying to stay awake, waiting to be rescued, while she hallucinates out of exhaustion and fear. She has a past life flash of being tried for witchcraft and drowned, she leaves her body to visit her loved one at home waiting and wondering where she is, and she ends up floating in space, looking back at the earth.
Well, A SKY OF HONEY is nowhere near as complex, at least in story line, but it is just as spiritual. It is abstract, Impressionistic. In fact, she invokes Impressionist painting with many references to colors and light and an actual painter as a character in the “story.” It is also much more in the tradition of an Impressionistic piece of music, like something by Ravel. It is a song cycle and has leitmotifs both lyrically and musically. Of course the overriding image is that of the sky and birds as we cycle through a day, but not just any ordinary day—it is Midsummer, a halfway point of the year, the pinnacle of light itself, the time when days begin to grow shorter. Time, the earth turning, color, birds, light, sun, moon, stars, sunset, sunrise, language. Trying to catch it on canvas—or at all, somehow, anyhow.
The PRELUDE exists for one simple reason: to introduce the bird song that permeates this suite. As pigeons coo under smooth, languid tones and Kate plays a deeply wistful melody on the piano, a little boy (as played by her son Bertie) announces to his Mummy and Daddy that the day is full of birds, and that it sounds like they are saying words. It is quite startling to hear that, yes indeed, they do. When I first heard this piece I literally gasped when I heard the language under the bird song. The coo is infused with what your ear swears is human speech. The birds are trying to speak, to communicate. What are they trying to say?
The PRELUDE is written as the traditional definition: a short piece of music, in free style, usually for keyboard.
We slide right into the PROLOGUE, meant to introduce us to the cycle. It is an innocent enough introduction, betraying none of the adventure and rapture to come.
The throbbing synthesizer and piano act as the afternoon sun, pulsing down on us, making us sleepy, dreamy. Warmth emanates from the sun and thus the instruments. She sings to Midsummer itself: “Every time you leave us/ So summer will be gone/ So you’ll never grow old to us.” This makes me think of the ancient Greek legend of Persephone, daughter of Demeter, who at the end of every summer, was forced to return to her husband’s home under the earth. Her mother would mourn for her daughter and winter would come. But Persephone was allowed to return months later, her mother’s happiness would create summer, and Persephone would never grow old.
The pulsing afternoon sun continues. She likens the light to the light in Italy, famous for otherworldly sunlight (witness the Venetian paintings of Turner). She sings in Italian, “Oh my Rome, my treasure, full of sun light…” Enter drums and strings as she sings, “What a lovely afternoon. Will you come with us to find the song of the oil and the brush?”
Which introduces us to the oil and brush man, the Impressionist painter in AN ARCHITECT’S DREAM. The sensual, languid sound of afternoon is intensified here with the addition of bongos. It is the barest suggestion that something may be building…
Kate watches a man paint a plein air landscape. He continues despite the ever-changing light. How do you capture a world that is constantly becoming something different? It captivates her to watch him create, layering the colors, the forms. Even when he makes a mistake, it becomes a perfect part of the composition. The painting is constantly evolving, just like the landscape and the light. So in a sense, there is no such thing as a “mistake.” It simply IS, in harmony, which in a way, is the ultimate theme in this suite, the concept of harmony, of being fully present in time and space.
And the late afternoon rain sweeps in…
Far away thunder. Birdsong. The short THE PAINTER’S LINK…is a link between the previous song and the following? Is it a link for the painter between this world and his painted world? Our poor painter stands and watches his work ruined. “What has become of my painting? All the colours are running.” Kate sang previously that whenever the painter works on the pavement in his painting, it starts to rain. Maybe his painting is a magic link to this world? If it rains when he paints the pavement, perhaps the running colors are timed with the sunset, with the paint mingling and mirroring the actual sunset? Again, according to Kate, there are no mistakes, there is no “ruined”—his lovely landscape has turned into a wonderful sunset. The link is the sunset, the link between day and night.
And now, the SUNSET itself. The music turns into a sultry jazz combo, as the light and air turn sultry. The light slips out of wet clothes and changes into an iridescent blue. At dusk, blackbirds sing a song of colour. The sand does too, singing a song of crimson, red and rust. All is awash with colour.
This piece is full of achingly lovely images and words. “Every sleepy light/ Must say goodbye/ To the day before it dies.”
As the sun and colours become more and more fiery, the music spins into a Spanish Flamenco, a brilliant touch linking the “fiery” Latin culture with the red and fire of the sunset.
The birds are singing clearer. Or maybe your mind, as it stills and watches the colours, is becoming accustomed to understanding bird-speak? AERIAL TAL (Sky TALk? the name of the language of the birds?) is a bridge between the sunset and the milky blue dusk of tenebre. It is…
SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN, where “the shadows come to play/ ‘Twixt the day/ And night.” Between this and that, neither this nor that—it is the stillness and silence as she and a significant other watch it all from the top of the highest hill. And every sleepy light says goodbye to the day…the sun (son) says “Goodnight mum.”
“Sweet dreams…” answers Kate in what sounds like a whispered sample from a Gregorian chant, and the dreamy, floating, swirling, hallucinatory NOCTURN begins our Midsummer night. She wonders if they are awake or asleep—“Could be we are here/ Could be in a dream”—the scene and moonlight-soaked landscape are so surreal, they could be in a dream.
A sexy, trance-like bass line comes in, underscoring the sensuality of a swim in warm, “milky, silky” waters in the middle of the night. Their clothes lay on the beach, their footprints lead right up to the water, they are alone. They stand in the Atlantic and “become panoramic”—this line speaks to me of something akin to an out-of-body experience. I have heard of people, during meditation, achieving a sense of the vastness of the space around them, and she achieves that standing in the ocean—“The sky’s above our heads/ The sea’s around our legs.” The piece turns even more fantastical with her newfound enlightenment of space as she sings that the stars are caught in their hair and are on their fingers. Even the galaxies are just a few inches away: “A veil of diamond dust/ Just reach up and touch it.”
The music begins a slow gallop here: something is building, something is happening. Here, Kate is joined by a chorus of herself in a magnificently chilling, goose-bump-raising, warped harmony. “It came up on the horizon/ Rising, Rising.” The sun is coming back, bringing with it the colour of honey. She is joined by male voices and they hurriedly abandon singing for a much more powerful and urgent sound: “LOOK AT THE LIGHT!/ Climbing up the aerial (sky).” The light is changing, it is back, and it is white and it is changing and it is jumping off the aerial and it is changing and it is changing—and all the dreamers awaken at the abrupt end of the song—BOOM!
We are given a brief moment to catch our breaths from that sudden dazzling, majestic sunrise as the pulse (sunlight) returns, and the birds start to titter. Our entire world is now the AERIAL, the grand finale to this suite, and a grand one it is. The earth rotates, the sun returns, the song of time must be sung—and we take off at a full adrenaline gallop, hearts pounding, as the sound becomes commanding, stomping.
She yearns to be on the roof, she needs to be on the roof—no, she must be on the roof, up, UP on the roof, as close as she can get to the birds, to the sun. I can almost hear her saying, “I don’t know why, but I have to, I HAVE to get up on the roof.” We feel delirious with her and she asks “What kind of language is this? I can’t hear a word you’re saying/ Tell me are you singing?” We feel the rush, and the noise among the birds. She can’t hear what you’re saying over the birds. But who is speaking? What language is this? The Aerial Tal/ the bird-speak? The language is a language of song. And we take a break to put two and two together… she “sings” a duet with some birds: they twitter, their voices rising and falling in a pattern, and she laughs, her guffaws rising and falling in a pattern. They take turns in an inspired stretch to make one song, which illustrates that bird “song” is speech, a language just as ours is. We make sounds that rise and fall like they do. All speech is song and John Cage said, “All sound is music.”
Suddenly she realizes what they are saying, that they are laughing, and why. They are happy the sun is back. They are giddy with joy because the sun is back. How something so mysterious and complex can be so breathtakingly simple. Happiness. Joy. Laughter. Let’s join in…
I see her standing “up, up, high on the roof,” ecstatically raising her arms with the rising sun, in a state of rapture, a state of bliss, ready to take to the sky with the birds. At this point she begins to babble, to sing like the birds—what language is this? Is she speaking or singing? It doesn’t matter—this is a true Maslowian peak experience, one that takes you completely out of yourself, that makes you feel very tiny, or very large, at one with the universe, a feeling of being a part of the infinite and eternal. This is true euphoria. In a fit of frenzied yet metered musical laughter, she is gloriously transcending and we are going with her as she turns into the birds, the sky, the sun.
If you liked this, read my other essays on Kate's "50 Words For Snow" and "The Ninth Wave."
http://www.katebush.com/
Kate Bush is magic.
Kate Bush taught me how to fly.
7 comments:
Dear Jeff,
It is impossible, however much I've reworked this comment, not to border on the saccharine; such has been the profound effect of your thoughtful, soulful words on Kate's art and artistry. You have helped a writer replenish once-dry wells and draw water once more.
Judging by our exceedingly similar taste in art of all sorts and your feelings upon them, I assume (if it means anything to you) you are a fellow INFP. Beyond just admiring and being inspired by Kate's depths, I am inspired by the mind these thoughts have filtered through. Thank you for this blog.
Warmly,
Ryan
Hi Ryan,
Thank you SO much for your lovely words. I am blushing. I love writing and creating art of all sorts (and have been lucky enough to make a career out of creating) but Kate makes it easy. Her work is so profound, so rich, so enigmatic, and so vital...I simply feel it and then translate what I am feeling into words.
If you haven't yet, take a peek at my essays about her other works, especially the astounding, miraculous "The Ninth Wave."
http://ohbythewayblog.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-ninth-wave-by-kate-bush.html
My experience at Kate's "Before The Dawn" London show here:
http://ohbythewayblog.blogspot.com/2014/10/kate-bush-before-dawn.html
And a post about "50 Words For Snow" here:
http://ohbythewayblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/50-words-for-snow.html
Thanks again for visiting, for reading, and for the extremely kind words. I appreciate it. Good luck with your own writing!
Happy New Year!
Best to you,
JEF
Jeff,
My pleasure! It was the combined thrill at reading all your Kate essays last morning that compelled me to write to you. I have always credited her as my favourite writer, an aural seamstress that transcends the medium to become not just an art but a way of living. I can sense how much you’ve allowed her to permeate your consciousness. I have, too, and she’s imbued my world, in even its simplest and mundane trivialities, with the mystical force of myth.
Little else has been as transcendent, terrifying, rapturous, and moving to me as The Ninth Wave. I have learned a great deal about the craft of storytelling from your essay on the album than any how-to book on the market. As a writer and admirer of soul-stirring art, I would be grateful if you could point me to any books, films, albums that have had such an effect on you, with respect, of course, to the unarguable truth that there is no Kate like Kate. (I am watching Wings of Desire tonight, thanks to your nod in your essay on 50 Words for Snow.)
Happy New Year to you!
Ryan
Hi Ryan,
How did you like “Wings of Desire?” I think it is a glimpse into the workings of the universe, and the first time I saw it when it was released many years ago now, I just wept through the whole first section, with the angels following people around. Sort of shattering in a way.
You can look at my favorite films list to the right on my blog, but I will personally recommend to you a film called “Fearless” with Jeff Bridges, about a man who survives a plane crash and how it changes his perspective. It plumbs some deep, primal emotions and places.
Another SPLENDID piece of filmmaking is Terrence Malick’s “The Tree Of Life” which, while on the surface deals with a famly drama in texas in the 1950s, is really about the beginnings of this reality, and the state we find ourselves in as human beings on this physical plane. It is a very ambitious artistic statement to make. If you have not seen it yet, please do, and then read about it to solidify what you have just seen. Malick’s work is life-altering.
You might also enjoy a film called “Baraka,” although it is not a film in the traditional sense of having a plot or narrative or characters. The characters actually turn out to be humankind and the narrative is simply the fact of our existence. It is an exquisite travelogue of images from around the world, from other countries, and from some cultures whose relationship to the meta-world shares space and consciousness with this realm. A very special film, and you seem like you would be able to FEEL it instead of just watch it.
In terms of books, some works that capture this enormous essence of creation and being (it’s a tall order): PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK by Annie Dillard (it reads like a nature novel, like WALDEN POND Dillard uses nature as a springboard to get to some magnificently cosmic places) and FOR THE TIME BEING. Like I said in one of my Kate essays, the first tenet of good art to show, not tell. So novels are a little trickier since they must be about something, but they still must SHOW the workings of the universe, not talk directly about it. Kathryn Davis wrote a lovely book called THE THIN LINE you might enjoy. Of course if you want to expand your consciousness, you can try some Hesse, like DEMIAN or maybe even reading MEMORIES, DREAMS, AND REFLECTIONS by Carl Jung. I happen to be a Jungian and respond well to that perspective.
And in music, I actually wrote a piece for my blog called “Music That Makes Me Cry” which contains pieces I bet you already know, but if not, take a look and maybe search for them on YouTube to listen.
http://ohbythewayblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/music-that-makes-me-cry.html
And speaking of Jung, if you like Peter Gabriel, his album SECURITY features several songs that are quite Jungian and one in particular, “The Rhythm of the Heat” is actually about Jung himself, and his account of observing drummers in Africa. It is a powerful work.
I adore the early music of Sigur Ros because they really DO capture an expansive sense, a peak experience. I was speaking with a friend recently about music and I was struggling to describe my relationship to it. I have a deep relationship with music but not in any way that would make sense to an actual musician. I’ve had people tell me I should learn to play an instrument, but the conclusion I have come to is that I need music to be something holy, to be something amorphous, to be something not of this world. I need it to alter my consciousness like a drug. I use music like a drug (since I have never taken any real drugs in my life!). I don’t want to dissect it and see how it works, to see “backstage” so to speak. I want it to remain a fog that comes and envelops me. And Sigur Ros manage to do that nine times out of ten.
Hope this helps. Stay in touch!
Happy New Year!
JEF
Jeff,
Thank you ever so much for your reply! I know this will not only be valuable to me but to any lurkers out there who may chance upon it.
Watching Wings of Desire was for me a surreal experience. Though parts of the film droned with the mundanity of human experience, I allowed it to lull me. At one point I was startled awake by a most thrilling jolt of déjà vu. The actor spots the angel behind the fence. As it dawns on the angel’s face the true nature of the actor, the actor says, “Oh yes. You’re not the only one!” The hairs on my arms refused to sleep. I shall never comprehend it intellectually; what it did for me spiritually continues to resound.
I am unsurprised, but no less delighted, to see that I am familiar with all artists and films you mentioned, save for the books. All of them merit a revisit, as I’ve matured considerably since my first exposure, and even your briefest words hint at enticing layers I hadn’t perceived.
I revel in your thoughts on music, an ear I emphatically share. To hear you mention Peter Gabriel excites me: I have been nervous to watch Passion and Birdy, for fear of tarnishing the sublime visual, emotional heights and highs they continually inspire. Sigur Ròs' atmospheric film, Heima, has been that for me, too. And it does not take much: there is a brief sing-song call in Kate’s Under Ice you mention that, though simple, brief, and easy to miss, makes my scalp tingle. It’s moments like these when I cherish this sacred sensitivity for the boon that it is.
I am also very pleased you mention Jung. You have the air of an alchemist about you. This statement may sound like a non-sequitur, but they are linked! His writings on alchemy and synchronicity have been dancing in my head since encountering your blog. Your writing has an unusual way of reaching such a specificity of feeling as to act like a mirror to the reader (at least for this one) which, by virtue of identification, occasions subtle transformations to take root. By the end of each essay, I felt the dissolution and sublimation of spirit transpire. Through Kate’s artistry, no doubt. But also your own.
It is unlike me to sing such praise. But it took an external source, just as Kate allowed what inheres in you to rise up through the waves of feeling she pours, to recognise the same capacity in myself. And that’s where the synchronicity slithers in; it was the perfect timing for this insight.
I thank you, I thank Kate, I thank the Universe. I begin 2017 with a heart-skipping glee for Story.
Ryan
Hi Jeff, I coincidentally came across this blog. But strange phenomena do exist, so to call it coincidence is a way to take a step back from the true feeling I have about this 'meeting'.
Acknowledging us as two entities with the same sensitivity to Kate's music and lyrics (while English is not my language by nature, it is Dutch).
Oh by the way ;) this is a question I have for you first. While describing Aerial from song to song I notice your focus on Kate's use of language to create her fantasy world. Fantasies originating from harsh or warm realities. But I also notice you do not approach the music itself in the same outspoken manner. I recognise this, because I am always grabbed by the music first, before the lyrics do. I suspect in my case, it is mostly because the lyrics Kate produces do ask a lot of the listener. Especially when not being English. The many, many metaphores used mostly are not always directly obvious to me. This also has impact on the period of time it takes for me to synch with any new album by Kate. But when I do... I had this experience especially with 50 Words For Snow. This album was the first one that made me really aware of what I just subscribed. It actually took me months to let it in, let alone play it in one go. It really was hard work and exhausting at first. But, the most trouble I had with Snowed in At Wheeler Street, although Misty was a tough one too :) This time not because of the complicated lyrics, they were quite straightforward, but because of the music and singing with Elton which distracted me from the story so much. To get a grip on the song I created a video for it showing the lyrics in imagery. This way the song really came to life for me. Disliking it at first, even skipping the song, has changed to affection. A first with Kate's music for me.
But back to the subject. When reading your piece on Aerial, I really was touched with you describing the lyrics to A Coral Room. The song on the album I cannot listen to without heartache. But a pleasant kind of heartache, almost masochistic in a way. I immediately got the meaning of the painful story, but in detail some things just did not come home. Now they do. Thanks to your explanation about the passing of time described by layers of webb, coral. I'd missed that. So thank you. It is very helpful, but mostly satisfying!
Hi Hans,
Thanks for reading and commenting and your kind words. It's always nice to meet a fellow Kate fan!
You've made an astute observation that I tend to focus on the lyrical content and meaning more than the music itself. I've always been very verbal--I spoke and read at a VERY young age. That part of my brain is dominant. I relate to story and storytellers: words and their power.
I adore music as well, but I have an interesting, perhaps unique relationship with music. My husband is a musician so I have come to see how a musician's brain thinks of and perceives music, and that is very different from how I perceive music.
My relationship with sound has always been rather abstract. I took piano lessons when I was young but it didn't take. Reading music proved to be much harder for me than others in the class and I lagged far behind. They say "music is math" and I was horrible at math. There was clearly an intellectual component to learning and playing music that I didn't relate to. I don't respond to music intellectually. Intellectual music does not touch me. The complexity of Bach or Mahler--for the sake of complexity--does not move me. Instead, music for me is something...savage...holy...or I should say rather that I respond best to music that is savage and holy. Music that touches me is a music that moves me beyond intellect.
When I think of all the other music I like, there is a common thread that runs through it. There's a heavy emotional component whether through lyrics (lyrics about these things matter too--I respond to the written word and the subject of a song which also can shift my consciousness by making me think about something...transporting me somewhere) or through arrangement of chords and notes. I can't tell you what it is because I am not a musician, but I know it when I hear it--whether minor (usually) or major, the music that touches me has something to do with that meta-state, with something beyond, with extreme joy or extreme sorrow...with transcendence. It is emotionally truthful. The music I like takes me to a deeper place in myself. And THAT place is savage, holy, pure emotion. Instruments and arrangements support this sense immensely as well, and I find I respond much more strongly to music that is non-traditional. "New" sounds give way to things that are not of this world. I like it when instrumentation is unidentifiable, full of sounds that are not connected to existing percussion, woodwind, string, brass. This is not to say that I do not respond to any symphonic or orchestral music across the board--I have been moved by symphonic and orchestral pieces but I like sounds that are otherworldly, that take me inward (and thus outward...and you know what I mean). I like distortion in instruments and vocals, to approach that wordless state of pure being that can be stimulated with sound vibrations.
So I don't want to break music down to its parts and learn how to make it. I don't want to approach it intellectually. I want it whole. I want it mysterious. I want to feel it like I feel a meadow at the base of a mountain. I want it to connect me to more of what life is, good or bad, up or down, high or low. I don't want it to be "notes"--I want it intravenously. I love woeful, trembling music that is like a thin sheet of ice about to break. I love roaring, storm-like music that is rage and power. I love shimmering, rushing music that is ecstasy. I want to touch the vibrations themselves, to experience the universe and reality, the primal sound, the sound of a circle that symbolizes a beginning and an end. The sound of transcendence.
So ultimately what I need music to do for me is to shift my consciousness. I use music like a drug.
Thanks again for reading and writing to me! It feels good to know that others are connecting with me, and what I think and feel.
Best,
JEF
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