Wednesday evening I was sitting on our terrace after a workout, it was twilight, I was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt (it’s Southern California). Under me was an old yoga mat. Above me were six power lines, three streaks of white jet stream on the darkening sky, some clouds to the north lit orange-purple by the sunset. All day I had felt a little anxious over a dental problem and the money required to solve it, but the nervousness disappeared the moment I put on headphones.
By music we mean sound shaped toward beauty, in form, harmony, emotion, some sense of color that suddenly develops through pattern into a shape atop the silence. But my music can be your noise, your clangor. Noise is the absence of perceived melody, I think. And noise is typically undesirable. The discordance of free jazz, for instance, or the drone of dark metal. A student of mine several years ago said he liked to fall asleep to speed metal, bands like Pig Destroyer, all the guitars and screaming were for him so much white noise.
I find nearly all types of music beautiful, but I have a special place for techno, it allows me to react depending on my mood, the hour, the need. I can play it and dance, or sulk, or think through a problem. I can play it and actually not hear it except occasionally, when a rhythm shifts, when silence shades in and I hear the synthetic surfaces rubbing on each other differently, then I’m briefly lifted out from whatever I was doing before the music disappears again. It’s impossible for me to have such reactions to Martha Argerich, or Billie Holiday, when I’m more at one with the melody, rising and falling, or the performer’s emotional experience. Techno doesn’t give me emotions, it gives me patterns. A soft muffled throbbing. A faint hissing. A low boom like a frozen lake cracking. Jagged high-hat noises like black trees in a forest at night—and all of that endlessly repeated with slight shifts. To me, as weird as it sounds, techno sounds like nature, a place of nuance and repetition. A place to get lost.
The music listened to here was episode one of Charlotte de Witte’s BBC Radio 1 residency mix from this past spring.
What is this? A weekly newsletter by Rosecrans Baldwin consisting of (very) short essays about beautiful things. Any books mentioned can be found in this Bookshop list. Rosecrans’s next book, Everything Now, is available for preorder.
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