Recently, I learned of the death of the musician Sd Laika. I remember listening to his 2014 album That’s Harakiri a lot when it was released. Though made from synths and samples (I assume), the music felt tactile, lived in, and idiosyncratic. Otherworldly yet grounded. It’s a combination I’m often drawn to. After his death, Robin Carolan, who ran Tri Angle Records which released the album said, “I don’t think Peter ever quite comprehended how good his music was, which is part of the reason I was so happy we were finally able to get That’s Harakiri out into the world, especially now given what’s happened.”
Listening to the album again, it’s clear to me how important perspective is when encountering a piece of music. Is something naive, confident, unique, or basic? It depends on how you look at it. It’s easy to imagine people listening to That’s Harakiri and thinking it sounds a bit unfinished.1 But it’s also distinct.
Listening to the album got me thinking about musicians whose work I don’t often listen to these days, or who I only listened to for a relatively brief period, but who completely changed the way I engaged with the art form.
Ben Frost’s By The Throat is another, especially the song Híbakúsja. Again, it’s a mesh of organic and synthetic. Lion’s roars and synthetic bass sounds glued together with extreme, pumping compression.2
Then there’s Pop Winds, a Montreal-based band active between 2009 and 2012. The members went on to form various other projects, including Majical Cloudz and She-Devils, but Pop Winds were my favourite. I remember seeing them live in all sorts of random, makeshift venues.3
A couple of years ago, I was listening to my music library on shuffle (far superior to any algorithm — try it!) when the Pop Winds tune Met Some New Colours came on. I had this sudden feeling that much of my musical output had inadvertently been an attempt to recreate the feeling of listening to the kind of wild, blown-out climaxes the band often used.
When he first heard my music, my friend Sam said I was good at creating moments of eucatastrophic catharsis. I had to look the word eucatastrophe up. It was coined by Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy-Stories.” It describes a fairy tale’s,
sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist,’ nor ‘fugitive.’ ...[I]t is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and inso far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
Love that.
Music feels like a great medium for those types of emotions because they are so time-bound, just like sound. They’re the moments before or after something, the anticipation and possibility and the climax. Throw in my natural inclination towards some melancholic uplift and chaotic “forests of sound” and you have yourself some eucatastrophic catharsis.4
Well, this week’s is another to add to the list — finished yesterday. I suppose this particular tune wound up being a break-up song, which seems an appropriate use of catharsis. It was originally inspired by Irish folk music but took on a life of its own. I keep trying to pull myself away from the ‘it builds’ arrangement style but……..5
I waited for you, And you waited for me, The smell of orange blossom Soaking our sheets. I waited for you, And you waited for me, I know hope doesn't kill you, But it won't let us leave. I waited for you, Like you waited for me, Well I guess if you wait long enough You always taste defeat. I waited for you Like you waited for me, Will lover by another name Still sound as sweet? Tell me It's over, now.
Maybe the creator felt the same way.
Though most of the music I’ve shared on this blog so far doesn’t sound much like Frost’s or Laika’s, I do think the thread of influence is there. And I have older music a little more obviously in line with their styles, which I’ll get around to sharing here eventually.
At one memorable show in Montreal’s now defunct (burned down) Green Room, the lineup was Grimes and Pop Winds and the audience was something like Grimes (whose album Geidi Primes I adored at the time), Pop Winds, the trio of friends I went with, and the bartender.
I like wild, swelling moments that feel as though they’re trying to burst out of the speakers. Sometimes that sounds like over-compressed lion's roars, and sometimes a swelling pop crescendo. It’s also fun to painstakingly try and make something that feels like a spontaneous cacophony.
I suppose the benefit of working with familiar structures is you can tweak them slightly and try different variations. This one builds but then thins out again before building to the final climax. How many builds will I get in the next one?