Music

Sunday night at work. Work? Yes, work. I monitor test equipment. Once an hour I walk around and record pertinent data. I have to monitor changes and keep an eye on tests that may fail. Otherwise, alarms take care of that.

In the meantime, I have several hours to use productively (or not). I listen to music no matter what I am doing. It's an opportunity to really listen to music and experiment with new music. I have a good pair of over-the-ear headphones for those intricate pieces of music that require attentive listening (the alarm is really loud, in case you are wondering). I have been using this type of headphones since the early 80s. It's interesting to see they are making a comeback. A few years back, a guy asked me where I got them as he had been looking high and low for a pair. Hang on to something long enough it will come back (or you can sell it on ebay).

A pair of ear buds does the trick otherwise. It is rare when anything I listen to requires attentive listening, although tonight I listened to Alan Lamb's Night Passage, a recording of abandoned telephone wires whipping around in the wind in the Australian outback. Music? It sets a mood, that is for certain. It's quite addicting and I find myself drawn to it repeatedly. It draws me in, quiets my restlessness and keeps me grounded in the present.

Chemical Brothers We Are The Night (advance copy...check the date of my post to its actual release date) has just begun. So far, so funky, quite different than Exit Planet Dust and Dig Your Own Hole, two albums that really changed my view of what music can do, with the extra heavy emphasis on BASS. I have a Bose system at home that can handle the bass so it is great to hear the walls of my house vibrate and to actually feel the bass.

I have been through Hernan Cattaneo's Sequential 2, Boozoo Bajou's Satta! and Porcupine Tree's Fear of a Blank Planet. My most recent discovery has been the alt-country of Jim White and Johnny Dowd, both featured in the documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, a tall tale about the religiosity of the Deep South.

I was raised on a heavy dose of Motown, outlaw country of the Willie and Waylon variety (Ol' Waylon was my very first LP; I still have the vinyl), a little Gordon Lightfoot (Gord's Gold is still one of my favorite LPs), the desert sounds of the Eagles/America variety and some classical music on Sunday mornings.

The first album I remember, aside from Ol' Waylon, was AC/DC's Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap (told mom "Big Balls" was about ballroom dancing) and Van Halen's Diver Down. Somewhere in there is AC/DC's Back In Black and Kiss Alive II. The big hair "heavy metal" sounds were my childhood companion, dispelling my angst more by the volume of the music than what was being said. Motley Crue and Guns 'n' Roses were about as heavy as it got, though I got into Metallica when they had crossed over into the mainstream. Of course, there was the obligatory interest in classic rock, a la Led Zeppelin, a rite of passage if there ever was one.

Even then I went to concerts as diverse as Jimmy Buffett and The Monkees. Scattered in there was an interest in early rap, listening to it through an old clock radio in my bedroom late at night, Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" scaring the hell out of this suburban boy with talk of "junkies in the alley with baseball bat."

Somewhere in there, however, came my one true band that I followed, Pink Floyd. The Wall became my companion. When I was depressed, it cheered me up. It became my voice. I dissected that album inside out, going through a cassette and two copies on vinyl. It would be the first CD I bought. This was my life. Over time I worked through all of their albums from Dark Side of the Moon on, losing interest post-Roger Waters, though I did see them from the nosebleed seats of Cleveland Stadium in 1987. It was around this time that they no longer held relevance for me.

In college I went through a heavy Beatles stage. I also discovered the alternative music "scene" with the Violent Femmes, The Smiths and a host of other bands along those lines that were just hitting the radar screen. It was also my freshman year in college when Beastie Boys' first album hit. It was huge and was on constant rotation for an entire year.

I began gravitating toward "New Age" music (hate that name, sounds wimpy...come to think of it, most of it is). Though I had been exposed to Jean Michael Jarre in high school, it was a roommate who turned me on to Kitaro and the Windham Hill catalogue and they became mainstays. I was seeking sleeping, bliss out music. I was looking for escape. The alcohol wasn't working. I was looking for drugs.

This faded into deeper, moodier music the likes of early Melissa Etheridge, Toni Childs and Concrete Blonde (one of the most underrated bands ever), artists with meaningful lyrics that got at the roots of the rage I was feeling. I was getting deeper and deeper, abandoning the shallow and superficial music of my youth, looking for substance, looking for a place to land.

Over time bands such as Smashing Pumpkins, Morphine, Mazzy Star and early Nine Inch Nails crossed my path (with a dash of Grateful Dead sprinkled in). I was drawn to the moody atmosphere these bands created. There was some grunge and I ended up in Seattle for a year but about the only lasting effect of grunge was to make thrift stores and flannel shirts popular and pricier.

As the drug use became heavier I gravitated to trance inducing techno music, a phase that has lasted more than ten years, though I am gradually leaving this behind, finally. I think that music saved me from going off the anger cliff and at least provided some outlet, some sense of being able to leave it all behind.

But the drugs weren't working anymore and I found religion.

Nowadays I listen to most anything, as long as it is good. The music I listened to in my past is but a memory machine. When I hear it I am transported back but it has no relevance today. It's a snapshot of time.

Put all that together, shake it up and you have a musical mutt. I have almost 100 GBs of music (update: 10/09/15, over 2TB!), most of which I'll probably never get to. With nothing but an AM/FM radio in my car, very little opportunity at home to listen to music and the few hours on the weekend, most of this music is going to wait. Though I do drive with my ear buds in (looks like a cellphone headset anymore) it isn't the same.

Now that I'm thinking about it, perhaps interstitial is a better word, more functional. The view of what is happening is better from in between the cracks.