In Diegesis

Since I Left You by The Avalanches

In the year 2000, to promote their upcoming release, one of the members of the Avalanches created a mix which served as a sampling for the many songs which inspired Since I Left You. The mix is called “When I Met You”. The songs mixed range from Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” to The Smiths’ “The Boy With a Thorn In His Side” to De La Soul’s “A Rollerskating Jam Named Saturdays” to Fern Kinney’s “Together We Are Beautiful” (by the way, thanks for the intro, Avalanches) to, and most importantly for this writing, Cindy Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”. The track begins with Lauper’s “I come home in the morning light…” Her voice is riding the guitar line from Jimi Hendrix’s “Crosstown Traffic”. Off in the distance, the faint chanting of “Saturday! It’s Saturday!” from the aforementioned De La Soul jam can be heard. Lauper goes on: “Oh, mother dear, we’re not the fortunate ones. Oh, girls, we wanna have fun.” The reason why this is my favorite track from the mix comes up next. Lauper goes on: “The phone rings in the middle of the night. My FA!” Then her voice gets muted. Her crying “My father says ‘what you going to do with your life?’” is drowned out, muted underneath the cryings of “Saturday!” It’s an effect that The Avalanches are so good at, they make it sound easy. They get a good thing going, the listener gets to loving it, and then they turn it way down. From Since I Left You: think “Little Journey” or “Live at Dominoes”. Personally, it works for me like a damn charm. I get to dancing, I fall in love with a sound, and they steal that sound back, and I love it even more for having gone. They have Lauper repeat her line about her father’s inquiry several times, still underwater, until she finally emerges. “Oh daddy dear, you know you’re still number one! But girls, they wanna have fun!”

Such is the reason why Since I Left You is my favorite album of the decade. Like Lauper, I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life. I don’t know how I am going to be able to enact my morality to its fullest extent in my behavior, or what I do. I’ve spent my whole life focussing on my perception and all its potential capabilities. For me, the search for great art has been the search for a perfect perception. Now that I am content with my perception (relatively!), I just want to have fun. If I want to experience art anymore, it is for the sake of joy. I realize that I am not helping anyone or doing any good by listening to a piece of music. I realize that I am stuck in my ego, focussing on my self, when I listen to music. If I am going to focus on my self/ego and my perception, it follows that I should want to nurture that ego so that I arrive at a place of real joy.

And Since I Left You is that place. Every sound is buoyant; every transition, perfect. Every muted note balances another raucous note to create two halves of beauty, in between which is my sublime heart. The closing track, “Extra Kings” shares a similar structure to Fennesz’s “Endless Summer”; each’s sense of the sublime seems identical, or at least very like. The only difference is that in The Avalanches’ vision of the sublime, I can dance. In this way, Since I Left You is a perfect balance between my spiritual learnings from Endless Summer and Sound of Silver.

That isn’t to diminish its individuality, however. Since I Left You is like nothing I’ve ever heard. Its sounds are globetrotting. East-coast-hip-hop. Mariachi strings. Jungular parrot squawks? To listen to it is almost to feel one with the sounds of the world, to plug into the global sound-spirit of human-kind. Case-in-point: the parrot squawks are only included, because a parrot is the only thing a boy in “frontier psychiatrist” can think of that also talks, besides a human. Since I Left You is the sound of connotative communication. I don’t have a favorite song from the album; I only have favorite sounds. For my girlfriend, Erica, it’s the “la da da, la da da, la da da, da da da” of “Two Hearts in 3/4 Time”. Though I can’t be certain, I feel that for me, it might be the split-second in “Extra Kings” where the vocals change from a muted “since the day I left you” to a fully audible “I tried, but I just can’t catch you since the day I left you.” A perfect metaphor for my relationship with the sublime and why I listen to music in the first place.

Bitte Orca by The Dirty Projectors / Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? by Of Montreal

“Definitely you can come and live with us. I know there’s a place for you in the basement, yeah! All you have to do is help out with the chores and dishes, and I know you will!” I interpret this line, taken from Temecula off Bitte Orca, as being a metaphor for the musical listening experience. Emotionally, I’m about to burrow into this guy’s album, or home. He’s going to let me in, so long as I first take care of some physical requirements. Okay, well my rent is paid, I’ve got electricity, the apartment is clean (relatively!); I want to listen to an album.

And albums don’t really get funkier than these two. Once you get inside, once you’re down to roll around and play with aesthetic semblance, these albums are about as funkily fun as you can get, straight from the Nietzsche-esque (not my interpretation; Dave Longstreth has admitted to it) minds of “nihilists with good imaginations.” The bad news gets pretty horrifying on these albums, but the good news is “that no one has any good reason to live”, so there’s our perspective, and damn me straight to hell (I wouldn’t mind sharing a hell with Kevin Barnes – picture that for a moment!) if these guys aren’t far from being right – all the time. These are the perfect albums to listen to while trying to restructure your character. When your mind rejects the frequency, when the past is a grotesque animal, when you suffer for fashion more than you suffer for oh – let’s just say, anything worth suffering for – why don’t you try being still for a while? You might find that you’re caught up in a storm that you don’t, in fact, need any shelter from. You might find that you’ve been standing in the middle of your character the entire damn time.

Or you might not. That’s the thing about nihilism.

Endless Summer by Fennesz

This is what Caspar David Friedrich meant by ‘the sublime’. The Field had his own vision, which was incredible, but this album is where my sublime heart rests. The title track illustrates the beauty of this album perfectly. The first half of the song is all underwater static with a beautiful guitar line weaving in and out. High pitched tones bounce around like sonar waves in the ocean. Random low beeps give the impression that the wave of the song is hitting something obtrusive. Then: submersion. We go deeper and deeper into this musical landscape. The sound gets fuzzy, then it doesn’t. Another blast of sonar. I begin to get the feeling that we’re going somewhere incredible. We’re almost there now. I can tell, because the static is worse than ever. Now it’s gone. The sound is ascending, coming back up to the sky. Then, in the 4:46 mark, there’s a split-second break in the music, and afterwards we’re completely submerged in the beautiful guitar line. It’s been released, and so have we. We follow it out until it fades away, without any emphasis whatsoever. At first I felt unfulfilled. Where was my completion? Where was my heart at in that song? Eventually I discovered that the entirety of my emotion was encapsulated in that fraction of a second when there was no sound at all. The sublime is infinitesimal. It’s the point of horizon between the ocean and the sky. We can never fully reach it, but if we ever hope to try, we must first follow the beauty of both halves.

Where they meet is where my soul will rest, where my ego finds peace, where Christian Fennesz’s heart had to go through to make this album. The sounds he has made take me there. Indeed, the first time I ever heard this album, I felt as though I had been to a new land. A land like Avatar’s Pandora, where spirituality is made tangible through aesthetics. That is why this is my #2 favorite album. I have always been addicted to the sublime, and this album presented it in such a way that I felt as though I had never known sublime before hearing it. And in a way, I hadn’t.

Is This It? by The Srokes / Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by The Flaming Lips

These two albums don’t need much more cyber-ink than they’ve already got going for ‘em. I’ll be quick. They don’t share in aesthetic like Immer and Madvillainy do. Rather, they give me a very specific sort of joy. It’s a joy which is achieved through the eschewing of all the world’s bullshit. It’s the joy in a girl named Yoshimi who has the task of saving the entire world. She doesn’t take soma; she takes vitamins. She doesn’t ask “Is this it?” She just kicks ass. She doesn’t have the time to trip on her ego. Julian Cassablancas couldn’t seduce her (she’s focussed!!!!!). You see, there’s something out there worth fighting for. For the Strokes, there’s something out there amidst all that inanity worth singing for. We realize it. We’re all going to die, but we’ll fight and sing anyhow. Shit like this gives me joy.

Thunder, Lightning, Strike! by The Go! Team / Vampire Weekend (self-titled)

If I’m already more than halfway along on the road to joy, this is what I listen to. Have you heard “Bottle Rocket”? Seriously, if you’re out and about, and the sun is out and you’re thinking “man, I’m in a dang good mood”, throw on “Bottle Rocket” on the ol’ iPod or Zune or whatever you’ve got. I will damn near promise you that your heart will leap about fifty feet into the air; you’ll all of a sudden know kung fu; by the time she starts singing “Two! Four! Six! Eight! Ten!” you’ll be asking people who address you when they stopped calling you “Mister President.” Then “friendship update” comes on, you forget all that ego-joy, and you just give whoever’s addressing you a great big hug.

Same goes for Vampire Weekend. When I was a senior in high school, I wanted the whole damn world to know about this album. I might as well have been walking down the halls, asking random people, “Hey, have you heard of this drug, VW? It makes you really happy. Lasts about a half hour. You got to try it, man. Here, put these in your ears!” The bad part of Vampire Weekend is that it’s really only good for high school. At lunchtime, you can listen to “Campus” all you want, and all of a sudden, that’s what college is going to be like. Then you get to college. So here, I’m going to speak for everyone else who’s thought it: fuck you, Vampire Weekend, for giving me joy which the world can’t.

(Oh, right, yeah, the point of art! Art imbues the heart, the imbued heart imbues the world. Man, let’s get some VW campus beautifying campaigns going on!)

Sound of Silver by LCD Soundsystem

Whew…I don’t know where to begin with this one. This album almost single-handedly taught me how to dance. To anyone who knows me now, it may be difficult to imagine a time before I was comfortable dancing, but that time has consumed the majority of my life up to this point. Sound of Silver came into my life at a point in time when I was extremely stolid, after I had cut myself off emotionally from the world. This time I like to refer to as “senior year of high school.” I had embraced the fact that I was living in a windowless room underneath my father in a house which he shared lovelessly with his girlfriend. The thought of ever moving to Alaska had been finally squashed as I left my mom’s village in a seven-seater plane and made my way back to Erie for my last year. To survive, I created a horcrux in Erica Stewart. From there, I embarked on a long, convoluted journey back to my soul. It began in Nietzsche-esque whoredom, living by the will to cum, the will to college, the will to money.

Cue: Sound of Silver. After I had cut off access to the depression which dominated my teenage years, James Murphy said, “Sound of Silver talk to me. Makes you want to feel like a teenager until you remember the feelings of a real live emotional teenager. Then you think again.” People, it doesn’t get more spiritually perfect. Yeah, I thought again; I didn’t want to go back to depression. Yet, I couldn’t go on much longer (I’m a sensitive soul! I’m a -), so I danced. I danced and danced and danced my dancing ass off. I danced because I wasn’t depressed. I danced because I wasn’t a brick. I danced because. That’s it. I danced in the self-aware emotionally stolid numbers like “Get Innocuous!” and “Time to Get Away” and, especially, “Us V Them.” I danced in the so-earnestly-detached-it-hurts numbers like “Someone Great” and “All My Friends”.

And that was the real beauty of the album. The best songs – Someone Great and All My Friends – are both from the point of view of someone who absolutely UNDERSTANDS emotions and love and hurt, but doesn’t necessarily FEEL them (like a depressed teenager would). James Murphy gets that something has happened that is so incredible, he’s not going to be the same again. But he’s not depressed. Life is. He gets it. He helped me get it. And growing with his album was an experience, for me, that was so incredible, I will never be the same again.

Madvillainy by Madvillain / Immer by Michael Mayer

Possibly my two absolute favorite albums to listen to while stoned, Madvillainy and Immer share a fuzzy, cracked aesthetic. While Madvillainy posits this aesthetic as a dancing partner to DOOM, Michael Mayer indulges in it, carves layers out of it, finds a place to nurture a beat amidst the blips and cracks and fuzzy “you drive me crazy”s. While I could nearly easily replace either album – Madvillainy for Los Angeles by Flying Lotus or other DOOM projects like King Geedorah or Viktor Vaughn, and Immer for other Mayer-repped gems like his wonderful Fabric mix or Kompakt’s Total 3 mix – the beauty of both of these albums is that they manage to stand out as watershed peaks for both the artists and the aesthetic they’re working in. Flying Lotus’s work is too original; hence, he’s working in a post-Madvillain world like 70s directors were living in a post-Citizen Kane world. Nor does DOOM’s other stuff truly compare; my favorite Vik Vaughn tune, “Let Me Watch”, is, in many ways, a reiteration of songs like “Fancy Clown” on Madvillainy. Of course, Vik Vaughn came first, but that’s what’s so incredible about Madvillainy; its perfection eschews time. It, along with Immer, lives in its own self-contained bubble of musical goodness. These aren’t albums that change your life; this is the stuff you listen to once your life is changed, and you’re exhausted from all that spiritual work you’ve done. Enjoy the aesthetic. Groove beautiful. Tomorrow you’ll be a perfect lover; tonight you just listen to the “unperfect love mix”.

Ys by Joanna Newsom

Is it the way her harp playing builds suspense in “Sawdust and Diamonds”? Is it the line in Monkey and Bear that goes, “The hills have grown in excess like a table ceaselessly being set”? Is it the way she sings in Emily, “I’ve seen your bravery, and I will follow you there”, in that voice steeped in earnestly tranquil sincerity? I don’t know what makes this album relatable. To some, it comes off completely and utterly foreign, but for some reason, Miss Newsom found a way for me to make it to her foreign land. And once you get there, I promise, you don’t ever want to leave. In the land of Ys, magic is possible; in the land of Ys, we might have a world-wide spiritual revolution tomorrow. We might get rid of money, we might be sensitive to emotions, we might be good to other people, we might never feel existential dread again. We might live perfectly.

The stories in Ys don’t express anything like that. In fact, they’re sometimes emotionally devastating tales. But Newsom’s sensitivity to that devastation suggests a spiritual understanding so inspiring that the best of my own sensitivity comes out. What more could we ever ask of art?

Hercules and Love Affair (self-titled)

The album opens with the line, “Don’t lie to me” and ends with a song called “True False / Fake Real.” In between, we feel blind, travel by rainbow, heed the advice to “stay with [our] family” because “there is nowhere to get to,” open our voices and say “this is [our] love”. It’s all we have. So don’t be false, don’t be fake, because the stars will only get brighter. Being straight or gay only distorts our vision of the brightness of individuality. The human spirit knows no boundaries, and sexuality, as one of the more intimate venues for spiritual expression, ought know none either. To belong to anyone is its own sort of imprisonment. You are yourself. The most you can ever do is say “this is my love.” Be content. Turn on “Hercules Theme,” which by my standards is one of the most ridiculously raucous disco-dance anthems ever crafted by man, woman or man-woman.

The Glow, Pt. 2 by The Microphones

“I took my shirt off in the yard.

No one saw that the skin on my shoulders was golden.

Now it’s not.

My shirt’s back on.

I forgot my songs.

The glow is gone.

My lakjdflj body stopped.

I could not get through september without a battle.

I face death.

I went in with my arms swinging.

But I heard my own breath.

I had to face that I’m still living.

I’m still flesh.

I hold on to awful feelings.

I’m not dead.

There’s no end.

My face is red.

My blood flows harshly.

My heart beats loudly

My chest still draws breath; I hold it.

I’m buoyant.

There’s no end.”

And to think, the most riveting part of the song is the way he sings “blood.” Sends chills up my spine.

Untrue by Burial

This album is too long, for me anyhow. Tones get repeated. A lot. But listen to any one song by itself, and I can’t imagine how the rest of the album could be anything but perfect. This, like all my ranked favorite albums, has a feel to it which is absolutely individual. It sounds like your loneliness, even though you’ve never felt the way you do when you listen to it. It is at once immediately foreign and at home in the soul. It burrows into the familiar (in my case, lonely individualism) and quickly branches out into emotional frontiers. In the daytime, I feel the anxiety of a useless street lamp. At night, I wish the lamp were off, because the music is too much mine, ought not be illuminated for anyone else. I don’t know if I’m the street lamp or if Untrue is, nor do I care. That’s only a single metaphor that comes to mind when I listen to this incredible album.

Person Pitch by Panda Bear

This album is perfectly named; it’s the sound of humanness. Like Merriweather Post-Pavillion, there is an obsession in this album between inspired beauty which makes the individual feel his or her humanity completely and the realm of the absolutely regular physical. In “Ponytail”, Panda Bear sings “When my soul starts growing, I get so hungry, and I wish it never would stop growing.” Beauty of the soul can be just as transient as hunger, yet so much more difficult to achieve. However, in this album, Panda Bear manages to make the hunger for beauty as regular as the hunger for food or for any normal, every-few-hours need. We wish we could get to that beauty any time we wanted, but we can’t, so we take pills. We wish we could feel our selfs at constant, but our brothers affect us too much. We say, “Come and give me the space I need.” Our perceptions are paradoxes between what we want and what we need, between our soul and our body. My common fix? Smoke a bowl (recognize that you’d be stronger if you didn’t need to), listen to Person Pitch, and let the munchies have free reign.

Merriweather Post-Pavilion by Animal Collective

The most obvious precursor to Merriweather was their (awesome) 2008 EP, Water Curses. Musically, the bubbly underwater effect is definitely precluded in Water Curses, but spiritually, I think the more appropriate starting point to Merriweather isn’t Water Curses, or Strawberry Jam, for that matter. Rather, Panda Bear’s Person Pitch gives a great introduction to Merriweather. Where Person Pitch’s “Good Girl/Carrots” explores the point of making music to begin with, Merriweather Post just assumes that music is a pretty good thing. Having the presumption under their belt, they explore what their music ought to be about. Cue: “My Girls”. Music is good. Family is good. Music about family is even better.

In my search for my own solid soul (the blood I bleed was already taken care of), there were few albums more integral to me than this one. Even the albums which I rank above this one are not as earnest, spiritually, and appeal to me more on an emotive or aesthetic level. But this album has a message, and that message is so simple, it hits home on every song. Yes, I wish I could lose my body for a night. Yes, I’m also frightened. Yes, my lion of a libido needs to be exercised every now and again. Yes, I’m tired of running, and when I listen to this album, for about fifty-five minutes, I’m not running; I’m dancing.

Microcastle by Deerhunter

Listening to this album is (for me) kind of like taking mushrooms. It transports the listener to a place where all decisions, or acts of behavior, begin to ring false, effectively wrapping the listener in a cocoon of comfortable perception. You perceive the album. That’s it. You could bob your head. Or not. “Nothing Ever Happened” gives you the opportunity to dance, though often I don’t. Where does the self, or individuality, come from? Empirically speaking, it must be what the person does that makes the person unique, but where does behavior come from? For me (and in different ways, for Bradford Cox too), it comes from this album – hearing it, feeling it, and then going about my day.

Note: Maybe someday I should listen to this ON mushrooms? I might just dissolve into nothingness completely.

Here’s a Ginnsberg-esque poem for ya’ll. Personally, I think it’s best to read while listening to “ring the bell” by YACHT.

“we”

we are the grandchildren of serious men.

serious men are still making decisions for us.

we are not activists.

we’re just good people.

we are the might-as-well-be-gay, straights.

we’re not even straight.

we have sex, because we love.

sex makes us feel un-loving.

if we asked kant if we could give him head, he might say, “only if you love me, for i cannot treat you and your lips as a means to an end.”

we love kant. and nietzsche. too bad they’re dead.

plato and hobbes are interesting like a dictionary is interesting.

dictionaries aren’t interesting.

they’re right. rightness isn’t interesting.

righteousness is.

we think, therefore we’re righteous

and sexy as hell.

it’s a shame we’re losing our libidoes

cos we are fine.

we admit, we’re addicted to pot.

we still want to be president.

we believe that’s the point.

we don’t want to be the dalai lama.

we already are.

that’s why we want to be president.

we know about you, capitalism.

as kids, we licked the cocaine off the back of food stamps.

we all of us love ‘merriweather post pavillion’.

we don’t understand how ‘the soft bulletin’ came out a decade ago, and they still voted for bush.

the internet didn’t have torrents yet, but it did have lots of porn.

the internet was young, like us.

we didn’t know we had libidoes. we were ten.

nine-eleven marked the beginning of the end for our sex drives. we started masturbating that year. it felt transcendant.

it doesn’t feel like anything anymore.

we’re earnest.

we’re not poets. we’re just talking.

we’re not artists like we’re not activists.

we’re done perceiving, man.

perception is too heavy, and besides, we’ve figured our taste out.

now we just want to be good, but you won’t let us.

we’re not going to kill ourselves, despite our good instincts.

no,

we’ll keep cumming,

and we’ll keep cumming,

and we’ll keep cumming,

and we’ll keep cumming,

and we’ll keep cumming,

and we’ll keep cumming ’til the day

we stop.

My mom is a crazy person.

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