Floating Upward

So we’re back where we started: roaming freely across the musical landscape. Aware, now, of three lenses we carry with us, through which we can experience this landscape in different ways. These lenses are abstraction, performance, and diegesis—plus a variation on the third lens (less versatile but more fine-tuned), called audio animation. We’ve explored diegesis and animation, the fiction lenses, in greater depth, because I think they’re the most beautiful tools available to us. But there’s been a glaring omission. There’s another indispensable lens that you may have noticed I’ve never mentioned. And in order to appreciate the fiction lenses, we have to finally take this last lens out. 

This way of listening concerns music’s relation to the epochs of our own lives. Those instances where the work becomes inextricably entangled with the circumstances of the encounter. Intensely personal experiences get pulled into songs through accidental proximity, and live on as musically triggered memories afterward. The music doesn't just evoke fiction anymore, it evokes lived reality. We could call this way of hearing Music as Autobiography. It seems only fitting to elaborate on this lens by recounting a personal experience...

Long before I starting writing this series, I came across Evocative songs + crude photoshop approximations of their aesthetics as seen thru my mind's eye. The page is long gone, and was probably dashed off in a few hours of inspiration. But the basic premise and several images really resonated with my own intuitions, and seemed to validate them in a strange way. A few years ago, I randomly asked the author why they'd taken the page down. They generously explained that while Evocative songs had reflected how they felt at the time, the project seemed embarrassing in retrospect. I wish I still had their exact words, but essentially they felt that it had been a kind of imposition on other people’s subjectivities. The shift was evident in their newer posts, in which music wasn’t discussed so much as used as a springboard for what felt more like diary entries—funny and insightful, but inarguably person-specific. And I'm sure they're far from alone in feeling this way. Many take autobiography to be the ultimate listening lens. The wiser, more mature cousin of diegesis. 

It's true, autobiography avoids the arrogance of the second tense—that tyrannical imposition that I make constantly on this blog of informing you, the reader, what you're imagining and feeling when listening to something. Of all the music descriptions in this series, did a single write-up capture your experience exactly? I'd be shocked if there wasn't a single case where my exegesis appeared utterly wrong or irrelevant. Maybe, unlike me, you didn't hear Diversions 1994-1996 for the first time on the same night that you watched Akira—so my comparison between the two made no sense. As Borges observed, a person sets out to draw a map of the world only to find that they’ve drawn a map of their own face. The beauty of the autobiography lens is that it celebrates the resulting portrait. It acknowledges that exploring music is exploring your own psyche.

But there's something missing from this account. What about... the universal sandwich? It’s a harrowing story, as Luka tells it. Woops was in a Pret a Manger one day when the realization struck him that, across the world, billions of people were biting into the exact same sandwich as him. Yes, it's true that you life is an unknowable mystery to me. I've never been to Pret a Manger. But it's also true that I have been to Panera Bread. Our experiences aren't always so different. And when I'm listening to music, I'll sometimes get a sort of eerie, exhilarating encounter where my subjectivity seems to sync with someone else's. Often it's an alignment with the artist. I'll read some comment in an interview and go, I fucking knew it! Or some small musical decision will strike me as perfect. But it can also happen between listeners, when I hear something the same way someone else does.

Creative mode poses an obstacle for this sort of meeting. Encountering music as part of a real world subculture gives us a shared basis of experience through which to interpret what we're hearing. But if we all take radically different paths to get to a song, our assessments will be more atomized. Under these conditions, someone else's listening experience is only interesting as a window into their life. Not as a window into the art.

The magic of diegesis is that it's sharable subjectivity. Our imaginations are separate, but they can work together. That's the irony with Evocative songs—far from being an imposition, it stayed with me for almost a decade because of how well it aligned with my own psyche. By applying the fiction lenses, we can fumble toward a consilience of imagination. If recorded music is landscape, then this shared space is the shifting atmospheric layer that floats above it. We're simultaneously its vernacular architects and explorers. In an atomized state, perhaps it can be this public domain that makes music magic, that offers a sense of music's importance that we can share. 

END OF PRELUDE