Unknown Leisures

To follow-up on my own question from this summer, a few moving moments in electronic music:

a. when the glitches flutter and the guitar strums come in on Fennesz's "Endless Summer"
b. when the main vocal sample drops in Burial's "Near Dark," followed by the snikty-snikt beat
c. Aphex Twin's "Rhubarb"

Hm. Still not an extensive list, I suppose. Then again, sometimes the emotional content isn't crystallized in moments. In the case of Tim Hecker it's usually diffused throughout the entire album. And why should form not be subjugated to emotion? Still, I really admire how Fennesz is able to make his music work on a song-by-song basis...being unlikely to release any records anytime soon I would probably do well to crib from him. That, and how he makes seething distortion feel like the gentlest, most intimate sound possible. Nice to curl up under a blanket of feedback noise and drift off, I suppose. Or maybe that's just me. I listened to Plus Forty Seven Degrees 56' 37" Minus Sixteen Degrees 51' 08" last night and for the first time ever "got" it. I also like droning strings on open chords because they allow you to harmonize notes that are far apart in pitch and sound like there's more than just one guitar playing. Barre chords sound tight and all, but sometimes you just want to loosely carve out a space. That's the one thing I miss while playing bass: you can't define a space with it, so much.

I have a leak of the new Beach House album, Devotion. It's quite good; I recognized a couple of the best songs ("Gila," "Heart of Chambers") from their set in the church back in October. Speaking of defining spaces, Beach House always sound like they're transmitting from another place in time, a place you feel like you've been, but can't clearly recall, but somehow know you'll never be again, a space in time that's defined precisely by its inaccessibility to the present, a distilled nostalgia perhaps. The name Beach House is quite paradoxical: the name's all summer but the music's all autumn. Or maybe that's the point. Writing autumn songs about reminiscing about the summer past, at least in a figurative sense?

I'm a real sucker for minimal arrangements these days. Get Victoria Bergman on an organ and Alex Scally on a guitar and throw a drum loop behind them, or put Fennesz on a laptop and Sakamoto on a piano, and I'm all sold.

Anyway, I'm talking a lot about music, because I just got out of my Computational Biology final and am taking a break from what's looking rather like the busiest week of my college career: finals from here to Thursday, and my second round of graduate school applications is due Saturday. The more I work, the more I think about music. That can't be good. Got home at 1:30 in the morning and sure I wanted to sleep, but I wanted to play guitar more, and so I did. Hope that didn't wake E and the gypsy. I'm selling the Music Man Sterling to its namesake (M. Sterling, who is not really its namesake) in a few weeks, and I wonder if I should use the money to buy a Telecaster or something. The Jazzmaster is really good for a full, rounded sound, but it lacks chime sometimes. But I don't suppose that's anything I couldn't fix by messing with EQs or amp models, if I really wanted--have to stop using that AC30 patch on the Magicstomp. I should probably put the money toward a Macbook Pro anyway. Should I sell my bass amp?

It's been foggy in the daytime for a couple of days. Makes it feel like the campus has been transported to some place far away from reality and the rest of the city. Which is probably not too far from the truth; with all our cruising through the city in our white shuttle buses, wearing sharp winter coats and shiny ID badges and all our career aspirations on our sleeve, there are probably a lot of people out there who really hate us. A couple got beat up on a city bus last week by nine middle schoolers; racial motivations have been implicated. Maybe a couple decades from now when the population really explodes they'll be shipping people downtown to the med school in armored vehicles. I don't know.

I met up with Vi for dinner last night. Since she graduated in May she's been wandering the Atlantic corridor--the New York-Philadelphia-Baltimore-DC axis--working whatever jobs she could find, from doing carpentry for theater productions up in NYC to staffing comic conventions in Baltimore, and putting the cash towards travel. Decidedly different from my own post-collegiate plans. She seemed to think that it was better to have some sort of career plan, like I do, and that wandering is a plan B. But I wondered if it's not better to leave oneself hanging in a void before jumping from one system to the next, if it's not better to induce a state completely bereft of any sense of obligation, of what one should do, in order to decide what one wants to do. Of course, were I to do that, I would get shipped back to Taiwan where I'd get hammered into a whole other much less desirable socket, which is part of the reason I'm trying to go straight from here to graduate school.

One of my biggest reasons for studying science, though--a reason that doesn't get put down on record, much less any of my graduate school applications--is that if, at any point in time, I decide to quit science and do any of the other things I do, such as music or literature, I could, whereas the inverse would be much more difficult. I don't believe that I'll ever be able to commit myself to just one thing in life; "everything is necessary" has more or less become my axiom for life, and that means exactly what it says, that everything--whether it's writing research papers, or finding the mathematical elegance of biological systems, or figuring out strange new chord voicings on guitar and zapping them through an array of filters and delays, or drinking tea and reading Kay Ryan, or waxing minimal verse, or walking through the streets listening to Tim Hecker on a rainy day, or meeting friends for coffee and dinner and finding out what's in each other's life--everything matters. Nothing should be sacrificed for the sake of anything else, nothing should so utterly consume one as to make one neglect the others, at least in an ideal world. Time and energy should always be fragmented and divided up among these causes: that is what defines my current idea of a "good life."

This is why I am an irredeemable slacker. Being a well-rounded, multidimensional human being is essential to basic happiness, but nobody is going to pay you for it. Talked to Sarah about this point of view last night. She agreed with most of it, but said that maybe we just thought that because neither of us had been truly inspired in too long, that if something really does inspire one it's acceptable to be consumed by it. Maybe. I can't remember if it ever was so for me.

Still, sometimes I read about certain things--political things usually, sometimes scientific, things that genuinely concern the masses--and marvel at how tiny our personal loves and despairs are in comparison. Those times, I wonder how anyone could ever care about a so-called personal life, or really personal anything, at all. It's hard for me to reconcile the individual with the individual as component. I'm still working on it.