I love listening to albums at night. It’s the silence, the darkness, the sleepiness induced defocused daze that gets us closer to that “other world”, the world where ears taste, tongues listen and eyes think, I mean our cousins living below in alternative realities and parallel senses; the world of our unconscious, the universe of our dreaming state.
In this other world albums stroke our alternative consciousnesses with their sonic canvasses, tingling our synapses, our neural networks, leaving us suspended exquisitely, blissfully, between dreaming and waking in that “other world”.
It’s the world of pure individuality, where people who could’ve been standing in queues in a bank or depressing their breaks to halts at traffic lights become lords of their universes, creators of aural dreamworlds, the world where Pink Floyd makes The Dark Side Of The Moon or Tolkien discovers Hobbits, wizards, riders of rohan confronting orcs and servants of sauron in the middle earth.
It’s the space where psychedelic guitar tones and strings can create amber glows or impassioned blues make your face grimace with their needlesharp pricks and sharpened knife slices of notes.
Try lining up Floyd’s “Brain Damage”, The Flaming Lips “My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion”, Derek & The Dominos “Layla” and Miles Davis’ “So What” one after the other and you see the individuality the deep uniqueness of our senses, our consciousnesses, our selves, our natures, our expressions. Each piece is made by a person exploring another sonic world another universe in sound which we all tap into and explore like passengers in their realm.
Maybe it fulfills that wonderful Russell essay where he says: “In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces, but in thought, in aspiration we are free, free, from our fellow men free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free, even while we live, from the tyranny of death.”
How do these creators live in their day to day life, when they conduct business, order at restaurants, write cheques, analyze their pay checks, fill application forms; are they conscious of those other universes they’ve created, the parallel worlds they’ve created. Or is it blanked out in the daylight senses of singular, uniform reality.
Perhaps that’s why I like listening to albums at night.
In this other world albums stroke our alternative consciousnesses with their sonic canvasses, tingling our synapses, our neural networks, leaving us suspended exquisitely, blissfully, between dreaming and waking in that “other world”.
It’s the world of pure individuality, where people who could’ve been standing in queues in a bank or depressing their breaks to halts at traffic lights become lords of their universes, creators of aural dreamworlds, the world where Pink Floyd makes The Dark Side Of The Moon or Tolkien discovers Hobbits, wizards, riders of rohan confronting orcs and servants of sauron in the middle earth.
It’s the space where psychedelic guitar tones and strings can create amber glows or impassioned blues make your face grimace with their needlesharp pricks and sharpened knife slices of notes.
Try lining up Floyd’s “Brain Damage”, The Flaming Lips “My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion”, Derek & The Dominos “Layla” and Miles Davis’ “So What” one after the other and you see the individuality the deep uniqueness of our senses, our consciousnesses, our selves, our natures, our expressions. Each piece is made by a person exploring another sonic world another universe in sound which we all tap into and explore like passengers in their realm.
Maybe it fulfills that wonderful Russell essay where he says: “In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces, but in thought, in aspiration we are free, free, from our fellow men free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free, even while we live, from the tyranny of death.”
How do these creators live in their day to day life, when they conduct business, order at restaurants, write cheques, analyze their pay checks, fill application forms; are they conscious of those other universes they’ve created, the parallel worlds they’ve created. Or is it blanked out in the daylight senses of singular, uniform reality.
Perhaps that’s why I like listening to albums at night.
1 comment:
Not entirely connected, in fact, in many ways at cross purposes, yet, for obvious reasons, this post reminded me of something I'd written years ago, when I was in college:
The Final Coming
I wonder if they all make love,
In their civil cords
And crisp cottons.
Do they all buck, and heave,
And peak,
And groan in low united delight?
So strange,
So strange,
The teeming streams
Of islands flowing through the streets
In buses, brushed
And rubbed, and stained
Sharing sweat
And dirty dreams.
Empty dreams
Without vision or sound
Lacking the music of the seas
Could it be?
A huge orgy,
Forever climaxing
Before its time?
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