30 December 2019
Ambience and Ambient.
Didn’t think I would be able to be get out and write today. However, the work so far today hasn’t been too bad. Once again I am holed up at a table at the Biggby coffee shop on Friendship Circle in Lansing. The staff here are nice and tolerant. They don’t mind some old geezer pounding out his political manifestos while sipping one coffee over the course of 40 minutes. I do try and leave a nice tip.
Right now, life’s challenges, health, loss, all that stuff is tucked away in the back of my mind. Instead I am focusing on the music on my iPhone. I decided I would just play the chill mix and the first thing Apple offered up to me was Moby’s Downhill. Moby is a favorite. The stuff he produced at around the turn of the millennium was just wonderful.
Moby’s music contains a lovely blend of repetition and vocal overlays that just create atmospheres that are more feeling than music. When I hear things like Downhill, We Are All Made of Stars and One of These Mornings I am transported to places beyond the physical constraints of my body. My mind just wanders freely through all sorts of spaces, worlds that are somewhere far beyond what I will ever experience in reality. Moby offers me a short cut to meditation that very few other artists do. Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, they do something similar. Still, Moby is in a class by himself.
Once when I was back at university I was sitting with a fellow student, a guy who runs a jazz record label now, and we were listening to Pink Floyd’s Great Gig in the Sky. We might have been stoned. Scott, that was his name, looked over and said, “Aren’t there times when you just find the music to be something more that just notes and lyrics. Doesn’t it just transcend anything you thought music might be or do?” Back then I didn’t get it. Now I do.
Sometimes a piece of music is something so perfectly crafted that it breaks through the limitation that vinyl or CDs impose on the pure sound. Sometimes a piece of music is so perfect that while you are sitting there listening for the next note, the next passage you have heard a thousand times, you realize that the music has released you from this world.
I offer you a link to someone other than Moby. Listen closely and tell me that you aren’t just moved away from the everyday bothers of this world.
No comments:
Post a Comment