The Set-up

In my bedroom, we have a small Panasonic CD "stereo", an all-inclusive AM/FM receiver with a CD player and a nifty remote control. (I don't think the am/fm have actually ever been used, but since it belongs to my wife, as a gift from her former boyfriend, it is part of a life that precedes me, and therefore has an unknown history, which most certainly adds to its mystique.) I'm sure this thing cost $300 a few years ago, and I could get a new one right now for $50, so it has aged with the depreciation usually saved for foreign cars. (This thing has paid for itself and now actually pays for me to use it, strangely enough....)

-----

"Le Panasonique", as I like to call it, is perched peacefully atop the dresser, to the left of the bed (if you are lying in it, to the right if you are walking into the room), centered perfectly in the middle of the wall, to the right of the door to the hall, about 2 feet below the mirror that I look into and use to make faces at myself about the music I'm listening to. (I've discovered that I make up a pretty loyal audience...) The speakers aren't part of the unit, which is awkward if you need to move the thing, but convenient for my static usage -- you can stretch them out on either side, which we do, so that the stereo is in the exact center from each of the speakers, which stand about 10" high. Since I work from home in the adjacent bedroom, and I like the way this cheap bedroom "stereo" sounds, I usually take one of the speakers down from the dresser and place it on the floor in the doorway, and face it out so that when I go into the next room, I can hear the music I have decided to play aloud on the stereo.

-----

Of course, this setup produces two challenges: 1) That I hear the majority of the music out of one speaker when I'm not in the bedroom (and I'm never in the bedroom except for to sleep or to change clothes or fold laundry; I am certainly never in the bedroom solely to listen to music), and; 2) That I have to predict the volume the music needs to be in order that I can hear it in the next room. "La Panasonique" is notoriously unpredictable -- its sound is generally soft, with smoothed, patisserie-ized corners around every noise that it utters (this is a bedroom device, after all, and in the bedroom, we should have music on only when the lights are low and something "bedroom" is going to happen) -- and it takes the dynamics of jazz or classical music a bit too seriously, as if "quiet" means "silent" and "lively" means "the devil went down to somwhere else". So, I always listen to "La Panasonique" too loud, and I curse myself for not learning to be more patient with the impetuousness of sound. Of course, half the time, I can't tell what is going on, because someone on the record is taking a saxophone solo, and since the solo is coming of the speaker in the bedroom, and I'm in the hall, with my ears attuned to the speaker on the floor pointing into the hall, I actually have the volume just right enough to know what I'm missing.

-----

Now, because new records are the means through which I and my foreshortened sense of the future stave off the inevitable, I hoard them greedily like canned goods in my backyard bomb shelter; I always have at least 25 CD's that I have bought but not yet listened to. (The day I realized I could buy CD's and "save them for later" was a day I believed, for at least an hour, that I had mastered time, like the guy on the Twilight Zone who finds a stopwatch that, when he presses it, stops everything around him, but not him). And these future shares sit in a $1 wire Ikea CD rack on the dresser, between the space of "La Panasonique's" mothership and the traveling speaker. I christen all new CD's on "La Panasonique", such that when I first hear them, it's on one speaker from the other room. (Now, I could bring them into the 2nd bedroom with me, where I work, and play them on my laptop using Itunes, but Itunes is for "tracks" or "files", and while a CD player is certainly not the purist media that a turntable is, it at least factors in the "album" as a default medium of expression!) But I find this "mis-listening" a delight, as the first time I hear a new record, I invariably miss 50% of it. So I'm already forced to relisten, and to factor in my relistening upon first listen, so I can let everything happen to me whilst I listen -- without concerning myself with remembering anything at all of what I hear. And because the music is loud enough to fill the apartment, I can actually think, for a moment, that that record, via the medium of "La Panasonique", is a message from another time and place, from a memory I don't yet have, that becomes part of that space between doorway and hall and room and me. It's an ineffable present, this set-up, for which I am buying a memory at the price of space, estranged, and, yet, wonderfully strange.

-----

None of the above is within the music I listen to, but it is an effective framing device -- or, possibly, an elaborate method of simplifying my perception such that there is only the moment where I hear something arising in the hall, coming towards me from the other room.

Mist = missed

I woke to a misty morning, and over coffee, decided my wife and I should unfurl ourselves amongst the approaching hour to the music of Susanne Abbuehl, a Swiss/Dutch "Jazz" Singer, Composer, and Teacher.  She has two records out on ECM -- "April" (2001) and "Compass" (2006), both with a curious instrumental lineup of voice, piano, clarinet, and drums. I say curious not because a band of those four elements is by definition "weird" -- I mean, you have the rhythm aspect (drums), the harmonic aspect (piano), and the melodic aspect (voice) and the support aspect (clarinet) -- all the basic bases appear covered -- but because the "band" never really all plays on each record (if they do, I didn't hear it, which is probably intentional on their part - there are private things recorded here they don't want me to hear). Susanne sings a good deal, even when there are no words to sing, but that's probably the most prominent and consistent "sound" on these records -- the half-melted mist of her voice (there's an out of print record by a similarly silent singer, guitarist Bill Connors, from the later 70's called "Of Mist and Melting" that fits in narratively here, a similar evoking of a misty land slowly surfacing -- where?). Sometimes you forget there's a drummer. Sometimes the piano seems to have been lulled to sleep by Susanne's liquid equanimity, the solid yet fluid hum of her words and non-words in the misty space. Sometimes the only thing besides the vocal is the voice of the clarinet, like some ancient animal awoken in the midst of grey clouds, an animal instantly singing behind Susanne so as to hope to join her, wherever she comes to us from, to sing something for us to weep against.

-----

I could call these records quiet, and I would be describing them pretty objectively if I were to do so. But that would then be my assumption that it is the sound of the records, that the sound of the music on these records, is a quiet sound. If you think about it, that's nearly impossible. A sound just is, almost without quality; even adjectives like soft or hard are implied, applied, determined, weighted and given applicable context. And yet, sound is all quality, evoking characteristics of every world we bear within us or might soon know in the coming moment. Susanne Abbuehl's music is the sound of quiet at the center of something severe, as though all there is to do is mourn slowly, evenly, like the mist that passes and that, once passed, you cannot imagine. Susanne Abbuehl's music even mourns the moment that is to come soon, almost too fast, which is what makes that moment an inexplicable object of loss.

-----

Like anyone else who had a mother, I dream of being comforted by a voice that might surround me and warm me forever, that might always renew me when I feel the misty chill of dawn upon me. But I also want that voice to tell me that sometimes it is cold outside, that sometimes the sun is underneath the clouds, and that these things are part of the mourning of the day, and the day is the strongest thing we have to lean our lives upon. I hear this voice in the music of Susanne Abbuehl -- (here, this voice). But I also hear what she brings of music that is behind us. This is "jazz" only because it can't be any other music, since jazz affords a freedom of harmonic and improvisational form that is simultaneous with its categorizing totality. It is ancient music, but it does not hearken back to a time that is lost to us. It hearkens back to a timeless pause of things. A timeless pause of the space that defines where each thing ends, where each thing won't have ever been. The music that is behind us was played by musicians who were their own music, who carried it across each chasm, who knelt in the sand with it at their breasts. They soothed it, and it in turn, like an infant stretching its arms towards the sun, grew into a giant, and it walked the earth with silent steps.

-----

I was drinking my coffee and looking out the window at the mist, and it occurred to me that the mist would just be gone at some point, and that I wouldn't be able to watch it leave. I would have only known that it had left, that the mist signified the patience of the day that I lacked in watching it. I felt gloriously, almost proudly sad at everything that I could know of my losses. Suddenly Susanne reminded me that "Black / is the color / of my true love's hair". Which, weirdly, it is, for me. How could she know, I asked the room where my wife sat, listening, too, with me, amongst the music. I have a feeling I would ask the same question in the same way if my true love's hair were white, too.