Silence | Music+Painting | Time Heals All Wounds, Time Heals All Tunes

I’ve posted this video on Silkworms before, during the Heathrow Airport debacle that ruined poetry editor Phil Brown’s Christmas – I figured then that Peter Broderick’s take on airport travel was more compassionate than, I don’t know, Brian Eno’s Music For Airports. But I’m posting it again because it also represents the most thrilling use of one of the most thrilling tropes available to the intelligent musician that I came across all of last year. Namely, a moment of absolute silence. A moment of absolute stillness that forms the centrepiece of a song – three minutes and thirty six seconds in, to be precise – and which has a profound impact on how one listens to what comes after it, and how one remembers what came before. Over to Peter:

There are a couple reasons why this particular silence smashed me between the eyes (insofar as silence can smash) so effectively the first time I heard it. The fact it follows immediately on from another extraordinary play on dynamics, the whispered refrain of ‘time heals all tunes.’ The fact I was lucky enough to be watching Peter live at the Union Chapel in Islington, a space which doesn’t so much host silence as gather it up, rolling it around its stonework and shadows until it has swelled to three times its original size.

But mostly because it is what it is, a seam of silence cut into the melodic core of a song. That is, a contemporary manifestation of an only-ever-half-expected spirit which has haunted pretty much every genre of music there has ever been, from Gregorian chants to jazz improvisations, blues rhythms to trance anthems – you know, when that breakdown happens, the one that goes beep beep beep beep beepbeepbeepbeep beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep *half-second’s silence* crash crash everybody’s dancing aren’t these narcotics splendid crash crash etc. etc. There’s an excellent piece, indeed, about ‘how a pause can be the most devastating effect in music’ over at Slate magazine, which does a decent job of tracing a chain of creative silences from Handel’s hallelujah chorus through to John Cage’s 4’33” via Wagner and, best of all, Debussy in Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, within which ‘the faun’s burgeoning dream is punctuated by a sultry silence, like a breath held in reverie.’ Oh my.

What’s perhaps most interesting about Jan Swafford’s article is its entry-point, though, a Vermeer painting entitled Girl Asleep at a Table centring on an empty doorway, a ‘void’ that was originally inhabited by a man who was quickly painted out. ‘Vermeer understood the power of withheld information,’ Swafford suggests. ‘Composers have a similar understanding that in shaping sound, a nothing can be just as expressive as a something.’ Let’s have a look at Vermeer’s painting:

Swafford’s point is a good one, but it doesn’t go far enough – Vermeer’s painting is full of voids, from the creamy jug in the foreground to the decoration on the back of the chair, like a torn-out hole. And when one acknowledges that these solidities also represent voids of sorts, Swafford’s reflection that ‘nothing be just as expressive as a something’ suddenly appears shortsighted – surely nothing can itself be ‘a something’, and vice versa. A constant exchange and inversion of something and nothing, nothing and something seems to me to be what generates the peculiar serenity in, say, Morandi’s still lifes, surely in their way inheritors of Vermeer’s peacefully domestic atmospherics (not to mention their overt focus on, well, jugs – see his Milkmaid, for example).

Indeed, Morandi’s work represents proof of the fact that painted silences – white space, basically – can sometimes represent the densest part of a composition, in that he has a habit of plonking a big goddam wall right in the middle of a street-view piece and working panoramas around it. Here is space and silence as obscuring, as deafening even. Silence isn’t necessarily withheld information, it can also be a glut of it.

*

What say we draw upon these brief reflections on painting and music in order to reread some of the great spaces, pauses and silences in literature…

Tristram Shandy

The moment of silence in ‘Hello To Nils’ is so effective because it cuts a swathe of emotional intensity through lyrics that are enjoyably low-key on either side – ‘old news: I like the food here’ before, ‘hello hello hello hello’ after – whilst at the same time abruptly halting a melody that is only just beginning to resolve itself into something genuinely affecting. This latter effect is not unlike one of Swafford’s more effective examples, Haydn’s ‘surprise symphony’, what with

his ability to convince you he’s nice and predictable, while he actually sneaks around to kick you in the pants, and the presence in a slow movement of a pause that ends a rather dinky little tune. As soon as we’ve concluded we know how this tune works, things go boom.

I recommend listening to it over at Slate. It’s the antithesis of Broderick’s technique, but a product of almost identical motivations. Consider, in the light of this, not necessarily the lead-up to Sterne’s infamous marbled page, his most elegant pause-for-thought – ‘you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!) that the world with all its sagacity has been able to unravel the many opinions, transactions and truths that still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one’ – but its extraordinary aftermath: ‘My nose has been the making of me’ etc.

Lolita

You want a literary equivalent of Debussy’s pausing faun, written into the very cadence of a sentence, physically tangible whether you read it in your head or with your mouth? How about the tiny silences of this:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

The Dream Songs

You want a literary equivalent of Morandi’s big fucking walls? Try reading the following as though you would read, I don’t know, smoothed iambic pentameter:

–Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes

downcast…The slot beside her       feasts…What wonders is

she sitting on, over there?

See, I always used to read these Tab­-like holes in the Dream Songs as gashes, as chunks of language that’d been taken out of Henry. But now I see Berryman has placed them there, as extra obstacles besides the awkwardness, futility and so on that haunt Henry’s experience. Berryman is making life difficult for Henry at the conception, rather than the expression stage. It’s all gloriously self-defeating, rather than self-lacerating.

Cummings

Or is it? Is it not also therapeutic? As Peter Broderick whispers, time heals all wounds. Time heals all tunes. Silence heals wounds. Spaces heal tunes.

E.E. Cummings is capable of sculpting a ‘body’s idiom’ in a way his peers are not because he composes ‘curves’ out of ‘yellows, angles or silences.’ He is repairing the failures of his prolix predecessors by allowing for the spaces beyond which, ironically, ‘nothing is.’ He is changing and saving himself:

some ask praise of their fellows
but i being otherwise
made compose curves
and yellows, angles or silences
to a less erring end)

myself is sculptor of
your body’s idiom:
the musician of your wrists;
the poet who is afraid
only to mistranslate

a rhythm in your hair,
(your fingertips
the way you move)
                             the

painter of your voice—
beyond these elements

remarkably nothing is....

It is this concept that makes Broderick’s use of silence so breathtaking, I think. For having established that it is precisely time – or perhaps time stopping – that changes art for the better, that heals, that forges lasting friendships, he stops himself for a couple of seconds. And sits. And listens. And in doing so, changes his song from within, in ways he couldn’t possibly enact from the irrelevant silences without.

Sam Kinchin-Smith
Music Editor

Snow | Music | WHINDIE (Whimsy + Winter + Indie)

Can’t remember who it was, so I can’t credit them unfortunately, but a month or so ago, on Facebook (yeah, sorry, it’s going to one of those articles) somebody wrote something like the following…

the one upside to it being this cold: i can start listening to bon iver again

…and I was really bloody happy to see that somebody else saves up a certain type of music for the winter. This time two years ago, I spent the vast majority of December listening to Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, Sufjan, Yeasayer, Jen Lekman and very little else. This time one year ago, it was Midlake, Grizzly Bear, Iron & Wine, Mew, Talons’, Jen Lekman and very little else. This year it’s been Peter Broderick, Perfume Genius, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Jens Lekman and very little else. For me, in short, an essential component of my cultural experience during the winter months, particularly those preceding Christmas, is a soundtrack of unambiguously wintery (and often enough, somewhat unchallenging) American and Canadian guitar music – both accompanying and redefining my romanticed notions of winter’s special poetry, loveliness, importance.

Now, a certain amount of this connection speaks for itself insofar as, say, Lekman’s Cold Swedish Winter…

We went home to her place
and cooked up some chilli
Warmed us from the inside
'cause the outside was chilly

…is, explicitly, a whimsical romanticisation of winter, whilst his being Swedish, along with Mew’s being Danish, Broderick being adopted Danish, Fleet Foxes being from snowy Washington state and so on, are all clear pointers as to why this music makes sense – is pleasurable to the point that it’s the only music worth listening to – in the colder months. But actually, a lot of the songs by the above artists explicitly about winter aren’t actually very much in love with it. ‘A man can be happy with the weather / As long as it doesn’t snow / There’s a price to pay for summertime,’ explain Yeasayer in Wait For The Wintertime, and as for Fleet Foxes:

I was following the pack
All swallowed in their coats
With scarves of red tied around their throats
To keep their little heads
From falling in the snow
And I turned around and there you go
And, Michael, you would fall
And turn the white snow red as strawberries
In the summertime

Bleak. Lyrically, anyway. But not aesthetically, which to me is a point far more important than apparently obvious lyrical or, I don’t know, geographical explanations: the reason for the connection between winter and a certain kind of music is about music, rather than ‘meaning'. For me, the way Phil Spector produced his glorious Christmas Album is much more Christmassy than its banal and, in the case of album highlight I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, frankly sinister lyrical content. All scratchily galloping Little Drummer Boy snares, backing vocals melting into strings and back again, layered instrumentals. It’s a winter sound that makes its way into Grizzly Bear, Sufjan, and many more besides.

I’m fudging together winter and Christmas here because it’s the easiest way – obviously they’re different things, in music and in life, but as a general rule most Christmassy American and Canadian guitar music fits into the winter music framework I’m trying to define, whilst most winter music doesn’t fit into whatever Christmas frameworks do exist. Incidentally, one shouldn’t underestimate the impact the OC and, more specifically, its Chrismukkah compilation has had upon the now entrenched relationship between commercialish indie music and a sorta kitch love of Christmas stuff. See Sufjan’s Songs for Christmas. See AV Undercover’s recent set of ‘holiday covers’ featuring bands like the Walkmen – who, you knows it OC fans, actually appeared in an episode of the show. The OC defined an entire generation’s relationship with alternative music. Underestimate the OC at your peril. Incidentally, the opening track on the Chrismukkah record is the Raveonette’s The Christmas Song which tries really, really hard to sound like a Spector creation. Just sayin.

Anyway, this aesthetic blueprint, this makes-sense-in-wintertime blueprint, what are its ingredients, beyond those contained within Phil Spectorism? Firstly, quietness – many of the artists I’ve mentioned already are solo outfits, many make creative use of silence, Peter Broderick’s pauses and Samuel Beam’s Iron & Wine whisper particularly good examples. And the association between winter and quiet isn’t too hard to work out – for me, the most striking thing about snow is the way it flattens urban noise into a cushioned, swaddled silence, as uncanny as it is wonderful. Second, a certain type of vocal, invariably layered into harmony, á la Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes, almost always male, yet frequently verging on falsetto – so King’s College’s Nine Lessons and Carols, then? Well perhaps that’s going a bit far. But the relationship between one of the most-sung strands of choral composition and winter is long-established and still going strong – think Morten Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium, his Mid-winter Songs – and so it’s inevitable that other modes of music which adopt choral-ish tropes will appear, well, wintery. That’s what Fleet Foxes are like: choir boys.

Thirdly, there’s storytelling whimsy, a Christmas/winter tradition that has dominated Western culture from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’s ‘Christmas game’ to Good King Wenceslas via the tradition of old wives’ winter’s tales immortalised by Shakespeare – who’s Mamillus warns us that ‘a sad tale’s best for winter,’ a notion adopted throughout, say, Perfume Genius’ particular take on meandering wintery songwriting. Here’s Mr Peterson:

He let me smoke weed in his truck
If I could convince him I loved him enough

He made me a tape of Joy Division
He told there was a part of him missing
When I was sixteen
He jumped off a building

In short, this thing I do, this thing I was so excited to see somebody else do, actually makes perfect sense, buys into existing seasonal cultural frameworks, traditions, trends – that were, indeed, erected and established in my cultural life at a ridiculously young age via weather patterns, carol services and 19^th century poems like A Visit from St. Nicholas. Winterous indie music is a fact, not a thing. A prevalent fact, indeed. These ingredients are utilised by an enormous spectrum of bands, ranging from Crosby, Stills & Nash to My Bloody Valentine to TVOTR to Deerhunter via the Beach Boys. Make that half the Beach Boys – for a lot of their most well-known singles are, naturally, summertime tunes. And that Beach Boys dichotomy introduces us to the most compelling proof of wintery guitar music there is, the fact that there is a parallel strand of summery guitar music – one, indeed, that we all take for granted. Just one manifestation: that difficult to summarise genre we call surf that one can trace all the way through from Brian Wilson to Wavves.

The truth of this is evident in three examples: the fact that Springsteen released a single in 2008 called Girls In Their Summer Clothes – and then released a different mix that he felt the need to entitle Girls In Their Summer Clothes (Winter Mix) in order to differentiate it as a fundamentally different song. For as anybody who has seen The Promise will know, Bruce cares about production. And as Spector has taught us, production can be a basis of winterousness. Two, the fact Pavement did exactly the same with Summer Babe which, when it appeared on Slanted & Enchanted, became Summer Babe (Winter Version) to designate a completely different, wintery mix. And finally, the fact Yeasayer’s debut record All Hour Cymbals was constructed around a counterpointing pair of songs, Wait For The Summer and Wait For The Wintertime, each representing a checklist of the different components that made up the two strands they’d spend the rest of the record attempting to fuse – a lightly cascading sunny worldbeat on the one hand, frostily gothic walls of sound on the other.

It makes me wonder whether all (guitar) music can be broken down into wintery and summery headings. Whether it is indeed fair, as I suspect it is, to describe a label like Bella Union’s entire roster as winter bands – they put on a hell of a Christmas party after all. And this in turn makes me wonder whether it reflects badly on (guitar) music that it can be so tied to seasonal extremes, rather than the more sophisticated liminalities that so much literature and visual art seems to get its kicks out of. Oh wells, I’m still going to spend tomorrow (today) listening to as much of it as I possibly can whilst decorating my tree. Yeah, I decorate it on Christmas eve. That's what you're supposed to do.

God bless everyone,

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor