writing is the only way to exist for me

bright reaction

it smells like cigarette smoke mixed with a hot spring breeze

out here on the verandah i sit on a thin futon-shaped piece of foam, covered in a white sheet on which dirt has been scattered by wind and stray feet

i just woke up from a nap in which i listened to spiderland through speakers

the song "good morning captain" woke me and sent my mind spiraling back to a day buried deep in my past

something about the guitars and the atmosphere created on that album makes me feel like it has integrated itself into the fabric of my being somehow

i don't really like listening to it often

.

an album that accompanied me through the final horrific days of my most recent job was this:

polvo's exploded drawing



every song is weird, asymmetrical, at times humorous, then endearing; one moment the chorus of jangly guitars is intense like punches to the stomach and then the next they regress into an introspective calm. upon listening for the first time you might get seasick, or, it will be the most enjoyable, wild ride of your life.

for me i can say with every ounce of honesty and truth in my body that this album has saved me from many a sad day.

they are actually from a city only about a half hour away from the one where i grew up, a place i thought was (and still think is) the squarest and most mind-numbingly uncultured place on earth, a creative and topographical dead zone.

i fucking LOVE YOU, POLVO

the sun slants in like a golden sword as the odds grow shorter

i am in the great country of AUSTRALIA right now. it is hot and the sun is dangerously strong. two olive-backed sunbirds construct their dangling nest off of a clothesline each morning and i watch as they pay my close presence no mind. at night three or four geckos crawl slowly across the ceiling of the verandah in the candlelight, then stop at mysterious intervals and are completely still. kangaroos of varying sizes stare me down from afar and, when i have been deemed not a threat, continue about their scavenging and general mischief. bright green flies and the tiniest bees i have ever seen along with butterflies of every color constantly fill the air with their delicately-humming, swirling presences.

my time is spent reading misanthropic stories and poems and

strangely enough

not thinking

when a thought i admire does come across the horizon of my mind i try to write it out as coherently as i can so a future self, if she so needs a helping hand, can find the little encouragements i like to put out for her

like cookies little kids put out for santa

or something like that

...

when one ceases to think one calms the storm of thoughts, passions, emotions that usually battles itself out during every waking moment

you'll find that the cessation of thought is not equivalent to the cessation of life

lay down and immerse yourself in sound! become enraptured in the ideas and themes and art that bring you closer to a constant dream state, that place where life suddenly feels less like a re-run of the same cardboard people saying the same cardboard things and more like an endlessly vast field


RUN with a fury to the highest peak of your consciousness and never look back

let love flower

hello.

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.

-

l a b r a d f o r d   Prazision (1993)


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.

-

r o t h k o

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.