The Music of the Moment
Listening out for the fleeting sound of perfection
When life is tough, music gets me through. When life is great, music also gets me through. That's pretty commonplace. For many of us, life has a soundtrack.
However, the privatisation of listening - the possibility of listening to music 'silently', using earphones and mobile devices - makes it hard for us to know whether the way in which we listen to music is commonplace or completely unique to us.
So one of the reasons why I want to share a particular idiosyncrasy in my listening practice is that I genuinely don't know how common it is. I would love to know whether the following strikes a chord...
Sometimes I listen to songs and albums in their entirety, from start to finish, and sometimes I do the opposite: I 'mine' music for the short passages and passing themes that distil something perfect, something that hits the right spot, something that I value more than the entire work. Some artists, some works, I appreciate only in fragments.
One of my favourite slices of guitar is a short bridging passage, perhaps only a couple of bars long, that appears twice in Carcass's 'Arbeit Macht Fleisch'1 (off Heartwork, 1993). The following YouTube embed starts exactly at the point where this fleeting moment of brilliance starts:
Heartwork is one of my all-time favourite albums and 'Arbeit Macht Fleisch' is a great track. But, for me, every time I listen to it, I find myself impatient for that one transcendent moment. In fact, I have been know to skip forward in the song just to get to it faster. It's as though that moment concentrates all the song's, the album's, the band's power into a singularity. Why would I need anything more?
Such wonderful moments can be visual as well as audible. There's a YouTube video from 1986 of Suicide playing at CBGBs in New York. I adore Suicide and while the video may be poor in quality, that somehow adds to their scuzzy mystique. The whole thing is great, but it's the last few minutes that bring me back to it again and again. Their final song is Rocket USA. A minimal masterpiece to begin with, Martin Rev's synthesisers - upgraded since the 1977 original - lend the song a brooding, drone-like menace. And while I love Alan Vega as a frontman, the fragment I am obsessively drawn to in the CBGB version of Rocket USA , begins when he leaves the stage:
Rev's manipulation of the 2-note synth riff, constantly transforming it as a it builds towards a blur of noise - could there be anything more wonderful? Crowd members screaming into Vega's dropped microphone all add to the joyful nihilism. Pure perfection.
My love of concentrated musical singularities can redeem artists that I don't normally care for. I'm not normally a fan of Phil Anselmo and his various bands and side-projects (I would like to say that my dislike is purely political, but I was lukewarm at best even before the Nazi salutes). Yet I am repeatedly drawn to the first few minutes of a Down set at a Spanish music festival from 2014:
The lengthy introductory jam that leads into 'Eyes of the South' isn't just a a wonderful slice of NOLA sludge, it's also the only example of Anselmo really making sense to me. His stage patter is crude and lewd to be sure, it's also a bravura lesson in how to bring a crowd to life. Against the backdrop of setting Spanish sun, Anselmo allows you, for a fleeting few minutes, to believe that this crowd was the best place on earth to be.
...and then the song proper starts and I immediately lose interest. It was good while it lasted though, and when skies are grey I often return to this momentary piece of metal heaven.
I very much doubt I am the only person to seek and find musical joy in fleeting moments. I would love to hear from readers about their own momentary loves.
But whether or not there are others like me, I do think that this kind of listening raises some productive questions about what a musical work really is. Why does the song, the album, the complete work have to be the basic musical unit? Why should we collude with the artist's vision of how a work begins and ends? Why can't listening be as narrow as we wish it to be?
Rest assured that ‘Arbeit Macht Fleisch’ - a play on ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’, work sets you free, which was written on the gates of Auschwitz - is not a neo-Nazi song. Carcass are fascinated with the destruction of the body, but the body being destroyed is not a particular kind of body.
I find this discussion to be very interesting as it's something I think about occasionally myself. Personally, I have an 80/20 approach: 80% of the time I'm listening to whole albums, since I think that's how music should be enjoyed, in theory. But that's only the theory, and the remaining 20% goes for those songs that I enjoy just on their own. This is simply my opinion though, I think we already have more than enough gate-keeping the metal community, and I think everyone should listen to music in the way that they enjoy the most. That's the beauty of music, I don't have the right to take away anyone's fun.
While I used to skip to certain parts of the songs that I especially enjoyed (just like you), and replayed those parts again and again, I don't think I've done it in a long time. This approach is inherently very passionate and naive in its nature, as it comes out of pure love for the music itself. I think it needs to be appreciated, and your post reminds me that I should get back to doing is again!
Hi Keith, I’m a big fan of your writing and this piece really resonates with me. I listen to music in the same way, and sometimes I feel absurdly ‘guilty’ about it because to be ‘authentic’ listeners, particularly in metal, we are supposed to listen to whole albums. But it’s often one bit of one song that really gets me. I agree with you on those Carcass harmonies - they are irresistible. Now you’ve got me thinking about all my favourite musical moments... I’ll have to come back to you with examples!