This Love

When I was around 13 or so, my uncle left a New Age compilation CD at my house when he was visiting from Utah. It was called Inspirational Moments II. Improbably, it started a year-plus-long obsession with New Age music for a very angsty and confused 7th-grade boy in Taipei, Taiwan. (As a side note, this also coincided with the start of my one- or two-year long Magic: The Gathering tenure.) I didn't listen to any rock then, because I thought rock was either pop, or dirty, or both, and that electric guitars weren't "natural," and I played that New Age comp until it skipped (possibly paving the way for my appreciation for glitch music six years later, but unlikely). A few months later I went out and bought some Enigma albums. I'm not afraid to admit it. I won't tell anyone about the Yanni album, though.

Oh, wait, I just did. Shit.

Anyway, on the compilation was a song, "This Love" by Craig Thompson. It's a glacial, stark, tremolo-piano and trip-hop beats piece, with a female vocal that was beautiful in a way my 13-year-old mind couldn't yet comprehend.

Today, purely by chance, I found out that the vocals for that song were performed by Elizabeth Fraser. That's right, the one from the Cocteau Twins. Whose Heaven and Las Vegas, and especially "Cherry-Coloured Funk," I became absolutely enamoured with sometime last year. That's a five- to six-year gap between the first time I heard Fraser's voice, and the first time I realized how wonderful it was. I've listened to a couple of other Cocteau Twins albums since then, but nothing tops the little major-to-minor chord transition in the middle of the verse of "Cherry-Coloured Funk," for some reason.

Anyway...what of "This Love"? It's a good song after all, as can be seen by the fact I just listened to it 10 times in a row, though perhaps less suited to 13-year-old Evangelion-worshipping wishy-washy daydreaming than the songs it came with. There's only one (albeit heavily processed) vocal track for the most part on this song, as opposed to two or three on most Cocteaus songs. I didn't understand these textured, digitized beats when I was 14, but now that I've journeyed through the DJ Shadow and Portishead discographies, they make a lot more sense to me. I've a lot more taste for the bass drum that hits on the second and fourth "ands" of "1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and." And maybe the dissonant, though subdued, string section shriek-up before the bridge was prepping me for Penderecki and Schoenberg six years down the line.

And maybe Robert Miles' "Children" was a latent gateway to IDM and DnB. Sort of like how Tubular Bells was a warm-up for Lift Your Skinny Fists...

Yeah, maybe. If listening to "With or Without You" and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" every summer on the radio when I was 8 meant I would buy All That You Can't Leave Behind without having any clue who U2 were when I was 14 and finally be convinced that rock music was good to listen to and play, then anything can happen, right?