i am forever asking the same questions of myself and of the world.
not forever, though.
theoretically i will some day be a person who has gained a certain amount of wisdom from a lifetime full of experiences and,
at that point,
will i still have the same questions to ask?
will i still be a cup full of cracks?
will i stop looking both into future and past, but rather toward something for which i as yet have no words?
asking questions in question of questions.
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post-rock.
i am actually listening to post-rock again. it has been years! to be quite honest, i am nearly at a point where i am so unused to long and quiet parts in songs by bands that when they happen i feel slightly confused for a second before i realize what's happening.
this is the very first album by Labradford, a Virginia-based all-bass trio active throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
here you will find music that is quiet, meditative and spacey with some really warm moments.
"Soft Return" (@ 3:28), in all its soft sweetness, is now in the running for one of my new favorite songs of all time (which changes often), followed incredibly closely by the Bark Psychosis-esque slinkiness "C of People" (@ 4:58).
which reminds me,
my favorite genre of music in the past 2 or 3 years would belong to a genre called something like "Driving Alone at Night while Stars and Melting City Lights Illuminate Dirty Backstreets and Distant Suburban Trees."
there's something so fascinating about being alone in such a self-indulgently introspective mood, somewhere as isolated yet freeing as within your own car on an empty highway at night.
American Football, Mogwai, Slint, Bark Psychosis, Talk Talk, Suicide, Rothko.
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In The Pulse of an Artery (2001)
~sadly no track available~
Wish for a World Without Hurt with Blk. Bear (2003)
Track 4, "Dropped From Clouds"
Not Gone. Not Forgotten. (2001) live album
Track 12, "Time Out"
Rothko was a UK-based post-rock/minimalist/field recording/noise artist, primarily (if not exclusively) instrumental, and active during the end of the 1990s and throughout the first decade of the 2000s.
i listen to albums like these by Rothko because of the same reason that i listen to a lot of music i enjoy - without words, the mind can truly be free.
music, when not overlaid with words or concepts that conjure pre-configured associations, naturally speaks this wordless language. when this unspoken language is given a world in which it can thrive it communicates in a very similar language to the one i have always spoken in my head (if that makes any sense).
some of my favorite music that i listen to and find to be a completely soul-drenching experience (where all senses and mental energies are focusing on what is being heard) like Debussy or Frey or Bach or Scelsi is almost exclusively wordless instrumental music (a term which does sometimes include vocals sung in a foreign or nonexistent language).
i prefer these wordless sounds because to me they convey the purest expression of music - sound. like noise. or silence. this freeform existence is the truest state of "music" because it -is- despite being heard and comprehended. it must only be heard to be identified with by any sentient being, to be felt.
// i realize i'm speaking in rather abstract terms but the subject of emotion is a highly relative one anyway - how can one's emotional response to a piece of music be exactly the same as that of another? how could two disparate beings agree on a definition of any emotion in totality? //
the way that Rothko's wordless instrumental sounds speak to me is peculiar, perhaps, because i am a wordless instrumentalist myself. i much appreciate their indeterminate repetition of bare musical ideas, which always seem to be stripped of any excess.
Forty Years to Find a Voice (2000)
"Shock of Self"
do you see what i mean now? if a band were to take away everything but the beating heart of the beast, perhaps along with some shadows of fire and emotion, it would sound something like this.
"A Search for No Answer"
and this, THIS could easily be seen as something like a Bach fugue. it is pretty much identical in form - a canon, if you will, of two crystal-clear guitar voices intersecting at precise angles, looping around each other - unmapped twists and turns of both harmony and melody. what more could you even want?
in addition, the track's title - "A Search for No Answer" - strikes me as descriptive of what composition essentially is. the search itself is what is heard or not heard, experienced or not experienced, but it always occurs within a duration of passing time. whatever answers that do exist are never experienced - the end of all is indeed silence, nothingness, absence but... not relating to sound or time.
true silence and nothingness occur when there is no longer silence or nothingness.
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