Cover art for ‘A Mountain Is A Mouth’ by Bruce Peninsula
what a year. i couldn’t be more grateful for the musical education that 2019 brought, the inspiring people i was lucky to meet through music, and their encouragement. it’s just a week into 2020 and already i get the feeling that this will be, on every scale, a watershed year. but before getting carried away by the latest happenings, i wanted to make a small moment as a sort of reflection on this past year in music, on this blog in particular. i really do find myself to be very lucky: first of all to live in a city with so great a variety of music so readily available, to encounter people with whom i can appreciate and appraise local performances, some of whom are like-minded enough and gracious enough with their time to collect a little journal of experiences on here. and so i wanted to reflect on the main thing or two that i recall from last year’s musical journey, and what in turn 2019 has taught me to want most from music.
to get to the bottom of that i might risk venturing too far up the road of why i’m keeping a musical journal to begin with. my persistence doesn’t stand to reason: i’m not musically trained, nor proficient in an instrument, my ability to read music has been referred to as ‘adorable’, and the results of my efforts on here are not directly connected to the publishing stream of a musical or academic institution. nevertheless i persist here because i believe none of the above holds the monopoly on the musical experience, and even combined they still fall shy of the awe and spectacle of the experience. aside from the joy that comes with being a link in the long chain of sharing good music, one of the things this blog has helped me to do is keep track of, through the grace of retrospect, the inclinations of my ‘taste’ in music. what i mean by taste here is not the kind measured by the metric of genres, but by the undergirding current that makes it possible to have just as intense an experience in one genre as the next. i think that’s a worthwhile exercise to perform, to ask yourself: how would i describe my musical taste barring reference to genres or artists? a pluralistic answer will, of course, sound more convincing, more intuitive; tastes rather than taste. our tastes in music are more often than not inclined towards a particular perception and aesthetic view of the world, and how music communicates that perception and aesthetic. so that is the premise of this retrospect, to better understand and articulate my musical inclinations, better understand whatever it is i mean by good music——in hope of fairing better at finding more of it in the future, and of understanding what other people mean by it.
it seems not much has changed this year: my first priority in music is still to melody, melody above all else. i confess there is a bit of ‘just desserts’ mentality to my musical instincts. perhaps that might explain in part my infatuation with orchestral music as a remedy...how it dilutes the melodic line, mixes it with other musical materials that develop, nurture and contradict the main idea...delivers it at relatively less narcotic concentrations. and not much seems to have changed in regards to what i anticipate in music: is it beautiful? no? then it should be invigorating. no? then it must be intoxicating——the list ends there. i’ll add to in perhaps another life.
but this long year has inspired the addition of another criteria to the list. to think about a subject frequently as i do about music on this blog necessitates a kind of anagnorisis, inadvertently stumbling unto the true nature of what one anticipates in music, the absence of which is made up for only by surprise at the discovery of altogether new and unexpected sensations——the domain and endless charms of new artists. rather than just blurting it out——and risk confusing you and therefore myself in the process——i’ll get to the point, the fourth criteria, by way of a couple tangents, extrapolations and anecdotes that begin to scratch at the surface of the tremendous wonderment that music can inspire…
In one of its innumerable forms music is a powerful drug, partly stimulant and partly narcotic, but wholly alterative. No man, however highly civilized, can listen for very long to African drumming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn-singing, and retain intact his critical and self-conscious personality. It would be interesting to take a group of the most eminent philosophers from the best universities, shut them up in a hot room with Moroccan dervishes or Haitaian voodooists, and measure, with a stopwatch, the strength of their psychological resistance to the effects of rhythmic sound. Would the Logical Positivists be able to hold out longer than the Subjective Idealists? Would the Marxists prove tougher than the Thomists or the Vedanists? What a fascinating, what a fruitful field for experiment! Meanwhile, all we can safely predict is that, if exposed long enough to the tom-toms and the singing, every one of our philosophers would end by capering and howling with savages. “” aldous huxley, The Devils of Loudun
the first tangent is by way of albert camus——the above huxley quote being only a palate cleanser——and his relatively recent philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus. to avoid being bogged down by details, i’ll only make reference to the general outline of the myth and camus’s consolation regarding. the plight of Sisyphus is quite similar to that of Prometheus——the guy who allegedly stole fire from the gods and was condemned to eternal damnation whereby his liver is to forever be part of a vulture’s daily diet, thanks to miraculous overnight hepatic regeneration. Sisyphus’s torture is comparatively less gruesome, despite his much more ambitious crime: he throws death in jail thereby granting all of humanity eternal life. the gods are absolutely miffed. his punishment is to roll a large boulder——picture the one from Raiders Of The Lost Arc——up a steep hill, and just as he is about to crest the hill the boulder must roll back down to its starting point, and the exercise continues ad infinitum (at least with Prometheus you can hope for a bit of variety, a different vulture on tuesdays for example). this myth is employed for metaphorical purposes in the fourth and concluding chapter in camus’s effort to come terms with the absurdity of the meaninglessness of life——that is, the atheist’s life——and the monotony that it necessarily contains. in the final analysis, after three chapters that explore glitzy specimens of variously absurd ways of coping with monotony, camus concludes that the only consolation for Sisyphus is to fall in love with the boulder, with the act of rolling the boulder up that same hill over and over——hence the most famous of sentences by camus, that ’all is well…one must imagine Sisyphus happy’. the obvious extrapolation he makes to modern life is that: with no God above, and no corresponding Shaitan below, peace an joy is only available to those who come face up to the meaninglessness, and nevertheless take up the work. incidentally i’m writing this on the 60th anniversary of camus’s death from a fatal car crash in france.
another one of those tangents brings me to an anecdote: a tenant in the house of a room i rented when i was seventeen, seven years ago, on st. clair street. i liked him automatically because his name was the same as my brother’s, and then immediately decided against that when he introduced himself as a professional hypnotist. three or so months of polite hellos and goodbyes went by before he left to perform his dark arts on a cruise ship filled to the brim with unsuspecting retirees (though hypnotism apparently works just as well on the suspicious). the last night before his departure we had a couple beers and so on, and i in turn loosened my reservations. as his profession necessitates, he’s a magnificent small-talker, fleeting from one harmless topic to the next without warning, and before you know it you’re spilling your guts out to this mustacheoed-mesmerizer. at the time i had just freshly written a poem i was quite sure would be the end of all poems——no more paper need be wasted!——i gave it the dramatic title of ‘A Luminous Catharsis’ and tucked it away in my desk in sympathy for the livelihood of publishing houses near and far. it took less than a month before falling out of the mood and seeing it for what it really was——a very very shit poem. thankfully no one would ever read it, and that would’ve have remained the case were it not for the prying questions of my resident hypnotist. reading it out loud i realized it wasn’t a poem, it was an image that i tried to stretch into a poem, thereby ruining both in the process. that image, however, till this day is one that i cherish. the image comes into view, after some unreadable stanzas, with the last line that reads something like ‘A man comes over a hill / He might as well sing’. we spent about an hour going over the potential playlist of songs this said man might be singing and just what this hill looked like, and arrived at a scenario that subconsciously plagiarized a scene from The Sound of Music. i had conveniently forgotten all about that poem until i ran into that roommate on bloor street three years later. though his maritime ventures had been lucrative (you don’t pay rent on a cruise if you’re a performer) he had since abandoned his craft and moved on to a promising career in graphic design. i remembered that poem again when, shortly after that, i came upon camus’s take on Sisyphus.
the last of these tangents is for the sake of an artist whose work i’ll never shut up about, as it has been an endless source of inspiration. before Netflix gave her a show of her own, and thereafter cancelled it for failing to enlist enough new subscribers——fuck you forever Netflix——writer, actor and filmmaker brit marling made a name for herself with feature length films that would have been ambitious even for a seasoned director, let alone a fresh twenty-something who ditched her cushy job offer at Goldman Sachs to take a chance at story telling. Another Earth remains my favourite of her films, though i still can’t find a way to describe its plot without making it sound like bad sci-fi. of relevance here is a scene from it that is referred to as the Russian Cosmonaut. it’s a myth she either fabricated or reworked from some other source. i’m almost sure that, eight years after the act, there are changes she would make regarding her acting and shot-selection in the scene, but even as it is it is a thing to behold:
both Sisyphus and the Russian Cosmonaut suffer from the same torture: monotony. inexhaustible physical strength propels the former and the sureties of space engineering the latter; but the frail countenance of psyches are unaccounted for. it seems in both cases that the turning point, where things get really interesting, is had at the decision to longer be at odds with monotony, with constantly being on the way even though there’s no hereafter to ascend to. the boulder rolls back down, year after year, day after day, week after week. but there’s nothing too interesting in that correlation, it’s merely a hop and a skip to get from Sisyphus to the Russian Cosmonaut. what is interesting however, is the difference between the remedies afforded for the suffering greek and distressed russian. what a beautiful image, that of a happy Sisyphus, moving slowly up an down the hill——but there’s something so much more appealing about the Cosmonaut, it’s not just happiness, he’s ecstatic. his peace is not just the tranquility of Sisyphean exertion, peace isn’t enough of a word. what do those twenty five days he has left on his journey compare to the eternity of the melody he’s just invented? it’ll be passed on through generations, the national anthem of peoples yet unborn, perhaps there’s already in it the phonetics of a language yet invented. our greek hero, that tireless worker, is happy because he learned to love the monotony of eternity, but how much more would his happiness be if he became more like an artist. i figure, if a person has to come over a hill, they might as well sing——we must imagine Sisyphus as an ecstatic.
and so that brings me to the fourth category on that on-going list of what it is i anticipate in music: that it is beautiful, invigorating, intoxicating——otherwise——ecstatic.
perhaps like attracts like, perhaps a certain nervous disposition is attracted by ecstatic melodic lines in music. the wild and insatiable things that crawl up my spine when i listen to the fiddle in andrew bird’s Ethio Invention No.1, for example, prove my inclinations as such. or perhaps the explanation arises from less artistic origins. i was after all steeped for so long in the bubbling broth of religious music as a child——and not of the lukewarm european catholic variety ———but the local african flavours of christianity, peppered with that peculiar excitability of the mythical figures of my native region. i left all of that behind and took nothing but the music, the fervent and combustible gospel of the destitute and desolate. i’ve been wondering where to put it ever since.
consolation: aside from the religious kind, there are perhaps other more secular kinds of gospel. music for the ecstatic, simultaneously free and clasped, for those ‘who’ve fallen in love with the sound’ as marling’s character puts it.
after the long year in music that was 2019, i think i’m a bit better at finding that type of music, or at least recognize better the importance of doing so. i hope that is your takeway from my little meltdown here, to find your inclinations in music: there is, so to speak, an electric worm wriggling at the core of each of our unique psyches, and we do it a tremendous service when we find music that is oscillating at the same frequency.
altogether 2019 was an amazing year for that purpose: i attended more musical performances than in all of the past combined; Bon Iver released a new album and i’ve since been in a perpetual autumn. but, in the final analysis, if i had to pick an album that is most like the music i’m inclined to at the atomic level, a work so joyously free and so deliciously clasped, i end up not too far from my neighbourhood. in 2009 a band formed in toronto, Bruce Peninsula——named after the peninsula in northern ontario——and constituted by a eclectic roster of musicians, who’ve since made a name for themselves in and out of the city (tamara lindeman of The Weather Station; taylor kirk of Timber Timbre, misha bower and so on), recorded an album in various locations in city and called it ‘A Mountain Is A Mouth’. in all my searching i’m yet to find an album that does what it does for me, i hope to find more of its kind. it was in that same house that i lived with the hypnotist-cum-graphic-designer that i first heard the opening song of the album and have been bewitched since:
Oh, something's out there screaming like a kettle
Something's howlin out in the backyard
A racket, a racket, uproarious revel!
Something's howlin out in the backyard
Could be throat-worn ghosts, lost stalking rebels
Something's howlin out in the backyard
With one voice raised as a devastating treble
Something's howlin out in the backyard “” Inside/Outside
ending this on a bit of good news, for myself and fellow fans of Bruce Peninsula: word on the street is that they’re releasing a new album after a near seven-year absence. i hope it means they’ll put on a couple performances in the city, would be nice to catch some of that.
at any rate, i’m very excited for what 2020 will bring in music. in the meantime, to celebrate the new year, here’s the official Blue Riband playlist—