Budd-ahh

Listening to "The Pavilion of Dreams", by Harold Budd -- while trying to relax and let the mountains fall into the sea, the room dark around me, my wife curled up against my chest sleeping softly and ever more softly against the madrigal's song enclouding us -- I realized something weirdly simple, yet aesthetically profound, so much so it feels like I've stumbled upon an open sourced kernel of worldly truth whose value is located in the following epiphanic API: Harold Budd has devoted himself almost exclusively to producing sounds of utter beauty and perfect consonance, that his music is a expression of the shining sea or the forest in the distance of the sea, of a beautiful smile or the face on which the smile's beauty beholds an even greater beauty. His music is the path of wisdom sounded out through the wisdom of what sounds beautiful.

Strange that I never thought of this before, since I've been listening to Budd's music for 25 years now. But partly (or maybe totally) it's because when I listen to things, I listen to everything I think might be there within the sound, including superimposing what I would think would make me make that sound. But that's the thing with Harold Budd -- like his name, the music is humbly there, almost infinitely invisible, but not because it shouldn't be any more visible than it is. There's nothing to see, almost, there is the wind and the fog and the sky and a tree in a field. There's the loss of your breath when everything, for a moment, is as stark as everything really is. I imagine that Harold Budd sees the world as it may be with the heartbreaking nature of each second running through him, the sea behind the sea, the flower behind the flower, which flows towards itself, and towards you, me, him, too.

-----

But everything does not sound the same, either. The track listed above -- Bismillahi 'Rrahman 'Rrahim -- is a lush pool of deep beauty, some sacred ground found in the middle of an even lusher forest, with still air and the coolness of knowing that everything around you lives and is safe in living where it lives. But these images seem to reduce the music to something seen, rather than something heard whose hearing is also the richness of seeing and knowing through seeing that what you see is what you are. The music is the beauty, too, deep inside you, but it isn't there to make you feel better about yourself. You don't have the right to even exploit the beauty for that purpose. Marion Brown's saxophone lilts across a tidal shimmering of Rhodes, and there are a billion chiming bells you can't have ever heard but which you could only have already known were there, where the world is smiling at nothing, at space, simulating space without the darkness of space. It's weird, because describing the beauty of Budd's music seems to remove the self from everything I'm describing, yet the self seems to be what is experiencing this same beauty. (I write "seems" because we are getting into a precarious place here, with self and other, with "who" knows "what" and "who" is "what is known"...). But, then, check out these other examples of beauty that is the eternal recurrence of the same, the difference that is everything recreated....

-----

 

...The Aperture, from 1995's "Glyph", a collaboration with Hector Zazou, is a more "known" affair, with the signature elements of what we call "downtempo" (or something like that -- I don't get the word even when I know what it is intended to signify) -- a "light" beat, reverberating snare, open space, a repetitive fake bass track, sultry trumpet, and so forth. I hate thinking about it this way, though, because it reduces the music to a style, and the style, while completely present in this track, is very sneaky, and, in fact, the same beauty that is in Bismillahi can be -- actually, is -- found here. It's as if Budd is saying, hey, look man, the Buddha finds the beauty at the heart of everything, whether at the top of the mountain or at the edges of a cocktail bar. And The Aperture is just that -- a cocktail bar that extends into the night, all sleek red lights and flashy glowing tiny gadgets lighting up the pockets of slacks and clutch purses costumed as radio phones for the end of the technological age. Or its new beginning....

-----

 

...Not Yet Remembered, from 1980's collaboration with Brian Eno, "Plateaux of Mirror", shows another side of this beauty, or maybe the same beauty seen from in a new light, the light of the repressed past whose repression is known, meaning what exists within it is something to become unknown. The piano trembles like someone terrified of what lies beneath, but who is being held gently in a space such that their terror, too, is warm and dry. And when, in the bridge, a voice wordlessly rings out over higher chords a melody curled around the edges of fall(ing?) (en?) leaves, -- "ahhhhhhhhhh; ahhhhhh-ahhhhhh" -- we know the light of the new day is the light of the afternoon fading from view and into a colder night, a night that we must know, a night we may have always had to have known through our fogged forgetting. I wonder, too, if what is hidden from us is always in plain view as in Poe's "Purloined Letter",  and the game we play with ourselves (or that our mind plays on our brain) is the game of swimming to the surface and taking a breath of that deliciously cool air we need in order to become ready to dive more deeply beneath the earth. This sound of our breath hitting the air is the sound of the voice at the center of Not Yet Remembered, which is always remembered when sung, and always not yet when listened to again.

-----

....As Long As I Can Hold My Breath, from "Avalon Sutra", Budd's (almost) final album from 2004 (he stopped and then started again after publicly declaring he was over, how perfect, as if he knew exactly how his music making was to the world outside of him while staying inside of himself) -- which, on the double disc set, is given a 73 minute remix, the same gorgeous phrase, repeating over and over, although the repetition is hardly known, you feel when you listen to it that you keep remembering you've heard this slowly ascending violin repeating itself before, that within the 73 minutes you are remembering something -- seems to hover and settle, then realign itself with the air around it, then float away, then hover and settle, then realign itself with the air around it, then float away, then hover and settle...But on what does it settle? Does a feather -- or bit of dust, for that matter -- settle upon anything at all, or merely air itself? A feather seems only to have already settled, that its process is an end result that results in nothing but the result you can't observe anything from, since the position of the result is situated in time before everything else happens. To observe things would mean to slow down time to infinity, would be to stretch each note out into an everlasting phrase that wraps around the earth and ties it up that is the beautiful eternity of every moment.

-----

...Fragment 2, from "Music for Fragments from the Inside", a 2005 collaboration with Eraldo Bernocchi, a meandering melancholia piano fragmenting and rolling over a snapping snare drum. In a way, that's all that happens, for 8:35, although, really, it's all that happens for the 70 minutes of the record. Budd improvises his lushness, spinning webs of empty space, piano notes sparking the darkness with the light that is inside us all. I imagine Bernocchi creating electronics around all of this, while unable to perforate the bubble of Budd's winding world, which seems to move right through the heart of the wicked machine and collapse it in a pile of wind swept stardust, whatever that all is.

-----

I know nothing of the Buddha. I may know the exact nothing of the Buddha needed to know what I hear when Harold Budd's music plays. My mind is empty, my heart cries out for the emptiness to continue, my mind empties itself even further when the beauty around me is completely, complacently, extant.

Ta(l)king Stock

Talk Talk's Laughing Stock. Such an incredibly weird and unexpected album, full of silences and pauses, explosions and estranged river winter sounds. Listening to it is an experience alienated from "culture" -- it doesn't relate in any fashion to the time and place around it; it follows no cultural signs, it represents nothing of "pop" music or culture. I don't know if I know anything as far from pop that seems to still be linked to the notion of its existence. If Laughing Stock evokes, say, Miles Davis' Bitches Brew -- the first "fusion" album (not true yet who cares, it is still a recording that evokes a watershed moment, partly because, looking back at Bitches Brew, it doesn't sound anything like what you might expect something that is a landmark recording in a particular genre) -- it does so in a way that we, as listeners, hardly ever really consider, which is the tone of the record. It sounds like it is made -- and that listening to it, we are there while they are making it -- along the edge of a swiftly flowing and soft grey river, and the sky above us is filled with soft grey clouds, the sun sleeping beneath (or behind?) this lush blanket. But the sun is there, since its absence is an absence that evokes a whispered presence, a hushed, yet heightened present. This swift river pours into the center of the music, flooding it with a liquidity that pushes the distance between each instrument yet blurs the boundaries between them, too, so that you don't really know what you are hearing, or what it is you are hearing, or who is is that you are hearing be what it is they are being. It's a uniquely disoriented experience, and you adjust yourself to it. Perhaps you think they made a mistake, that the instruments spilling into each other, bleeding sound into other sound, shouldn't be like this but they let it somehow slip past. But that slipping, too, is part of this waterlogged world, a world that is waking up under the sea, a world that looks up from the bottom of the ocean through a cracked rain spattered windshield at the empty green grey valley.

-----

-----

It was 20 years ago that I found this silence, actually stumbling upon it accidentally as a birthday present for my (then (first!)) girlfriend, my (now (long ago (ex-)))wife -- I knew she liked music I didn't know and didn't think I'd ever come to know or ever come to like (both of which ended up as being weirdly true, perhaps prophetic, perhaps predictive, perhaps predicated on my willingness to keep things between us boundaried, perhaps caused by my unwillingness to move towards things around me that were not what I knew), but I thought, since it was her birthday, and she was my first real girlfriend, and there were used record shops everywhere around me (this was Boston, 1991, too many shops to count, but just enough shops to frequent daily), that I could give things a chance, since I wasn't yet anywhere far along enough to give up on anything, yet.

-----

-----

She'd showed me The Color of Spring, Talk Talk's 3rd record, a mixture of 80's synth pop and brooding emotional season tones -- a record clearly produced in a studio, with layered sounds of various instruments placed in mid to late 80's context, but with a larger sense of sound itself, guitars sounding like guitar, piano like pianos, choruses of voices choruses of voices shouting out and making contact with the heavens. I liked it, and I was surprised to like it, since 80's pop wasn't what I liked then, and the fact that I liked it and was surprised to like it made me want to engage that surprise even further when I bought my girlfriend something for her birthday. In the record store, I came across the image of Laughing Stock's cover, and thought it might be nice to buy her this, something I thought she'd like, something that reflected our commingling tastes. She smiled widely when she unwrapped it, she seemed delicately touched that I had reached out to her taste rather than simply reflecting my own, which, at the time, was quite dominant, a voice too loud in a public space to acknowledge the space as public. A few days later, however, when I came over to her place and saw the CD case sitting next to the CD player (but something else was in the player, not this), I asked her what she thought. "That's the worst thing I've ever heard," she said, turning towards the wall. "I hate it."

-----

-----

Later that night, while she was sleeping, I quietly glided out of the bed and slid along the wall to the CD player resting on the dresser. I extracted Laughing Stock from its cover and silently slipped the disc into the player and pushed my thumb down on the play button. I held my breath. What could she have hated so much? What could Talk Talk have done on Laughing Stock that could turn such an ardent fan so definitively against them? Surely aesthetics are forgivable throughout history, and this forgiveness is what we, as consumers of creative product, are what we use to make up for the distance between what those who produce give us to experience and what we actually think of these art objects, right?

-----

I could quote lyrics as a way to explain the profundity of the sentiments, the deep humanist philosophy that Laughing Stock proposes. But the lyrics are intended to be unheard -- the words that Mark Hollis sings seem only to be sounds that allow his voice to move between one moment and one other. I almost wonder if the lyrics are actually written down in retrospect, as potential visions of what these sounds could signify in a world in which signification means more than empty thought. If you get the CD (or cassette, possibly, or more possibly) the lyrics are handwritten on the inside in a script that is nearly illegible, neatly and essentially organized, as are the actual words sung. I've often wondered if lyrics exist in order that we have the option to no longer listen to the sounds of the music we are hearing, that if all lyrics were actually sung in a language foreign to us, or if they were sung in order to obscure the words we are hearing and not clarify them, we might actually have the opportunity to hear the human voice in its true place amongst the distant lands of the instruments that always approximate it. We might actually hear the person shining through the rain spattered windows to the outside world, which crowds in from all around us, which is always speaking to us of our difference to it, its indifference to us. The world floods into us, and we withstand it by speaking back to it in the voices that dazzle it with ineffable alienation.

-----

-----

Of course, my girlfriend was right, as any pure Talk Talk fan had to have been in 1991, 5 years after The Colour of Spring (although, to be fair to both history as well as their audience, Talk Talk did release Spirit of Eden in 1988, which clearly opened the path through a misty musical forest, on the other side of which is Laughing Stock, along the banks of the sopping river; this essay COULD be about the radical step Spirit of Eden was from The Colour of Spring if the goal was to talk about the relationship between an artist and their audience, but that's another topic for someone with a larger sociological mind than I. And, for the record, this essay is not about the value of Spirit of Eden as opposed to Laughing Stock -- it is simply about the total oddity of Laughing Stock as an object of art, and I refuse, for the moment, the applicably progressing context of Talk Talk themselves.) She was right because this record was totally unintelligible, muffled, mumbling, hesitant, definite, cloudy, obscured, fogged, elongated, diffused. It was everything you don't want to hear in pop music. It was all the content that pop music has nothing to say about, all the waste pop music discards, all the words pop music never uses. My girlfriend hated it because she couldn't recognize anything in it that was what she knew to be "Talk Talk"; but, more than that, she couldn't recognize anything in it that was what she knew to be what music was supposed to be or had been.

-----

-----

It was dark and quiet in my girlfriend's studio apartment, with the parking lot streetlights peering in through the half-closed blinds. It was as if they were seeking me out; as if they, too, wanted to know what I would hear, as if they wanted me to tell them what I heard and explain to them what my girlfriend heard that freaked her out so badly, what jarred her and upset even the simple order of a man in a dark room listening to recorded music on headphones in the middle of the night with the light of the street illuminating the corners of the walls. And then, in the distance, at the edges of the headphones, a sharp pulsing like a tape machine, interrupted by a deep, clean, trembling guitar chord, soon echoed by wind instruments and the whimper of a snare drum being righted and set in place. The chord rumbled a second time, and the elongated notes of the woodwinds lighted up the night air beneath this liquid thunder. Everything was of a depth, submerged in something full, something invisible, something to be seen later. "Place my chair at the backroom door" sang Mark Hollis, the words less sung than chanted, less chanted than lamented, less lamented than flung to the floor with the energy of a man tired of everything, especially that which he has to say, especially that which he says and which no one hears. My eyes were open. My heart was quick, then quicker. I understood immediately what my girlfriend did about this music, but from the perspective of someone with no expectations, with nothing of the future, with nothing but the moment in which everything is being heard and will continue on in its hearing. I understood that what I heard at that moment was something that had never been in any moment I knew; I understood that I knew less about what I was hearing than about what listening was to mean for me later, after I knew what I was hearing. 

-----

-----

If whoever you are that is out there could meet me, I'd choose a coffee shop where the coffee is fresh, dark, and strong; where there are not too many laptops to clutter up the silence; where at least a few conversations are punctuated by passion, gesticulating hands, perhaps even gazes towards the sky evoking the real world of the false god; where the windows are filled with either sun or rain and the chalkboard menus reflect the nature of the day outside. If we were to meet, I would say more about Laughing Stock and how it still, to this day, if I am able to listen to it, makes me rethink what I think about things in general, and things in specific -- about what I say and what I see, about what I hear and what I know. It makes me reconsider what luck is and who has it; what fortune is and where it goes. Who men and women are and how they interact. But none of this seems relevant to the actual content of the recording, which is the content of something other than what you may or may not be willing to know. And willingness, we know, is where aesthetics imprint themselves on the name of the world. Willingness is how we know what we may love, and why we can decide to hate something dear. I'd tell you about that girlfriend I once had, who then became my wife and then became my ex-wife, and how her hating this record impacted my experience of music more than almost anything, and that the rabbit hole of exploration down which it led me does not yet end, even when I remember her being gone, long ago, in the future that is ours to dream in time, the rain softly beating back the soft waves of the grey river.