5 Records - A Self Exploration Through Sound

On Friday I received a package. 

To welcome me to my new home I was given a collection of records. Brian Jonestown Massacre, appropriate given my recent obsession with cults again. The opening track makes me thing of Lou Reed and I like it, but by the end of the record I’m sobbing on the floor. The final song is something about moving and feeling worthless because you have no direction and no idea what you’re doing. That’s me. My knees feel weak but it speaks to me. I look at the inner sleeve which says ‘we lost the master tapes so this is the best quality of recording we could muster. Listen to this record as if it was the first time you’ve ever heard it.’ 

The people in the apartment above me are stomping around and it’s a confusing reminder that I’m surrounded by strangers that I’ll hopefully never meet.

The next record is ABBA’s the Arrival. My immediate reaction is ‘Hey! Abba” but the next reaction is an observation of the inherent strangeness that this is in my hands. The cover is Abba in a helicopter, the inside sleeve is them standing outside of it. Abba poses in front of a helicopter, they’ve just arrived, get it? But the title sticks in my head as I put the needle on the record. I sit, hearing Abba songs that I’ve always loved, but I can’t get the title out of my mind. Do they mean ‘the Arrival as in, hello this is our first record, we have arrived, get ready?’ Was this their first record? I debate looking this up but I don’t. Damn this record is perfect, oh to be as musically wise as Abba, be still my heart.

But the Arrival makes me think of Unarius. It makes me think of UFO’s and UFO cults. And here we are, I’m back to my cult obsession again. This album sounds like the jovial UFO’s of Unarius have landed and brought about a beautiful gender and sexual revolution unifying the whole world in an unmistakable peace. We’re all singing as one, in love with each other. In love with our alien race. It makes me feel at home in a weird way. Knowing Me, Knowing You is the last track on side A and as I listen to it I feel profoundly lonely.

The weird thing about Abba’s Arrival is that it’s basically this perfect record, and not really in the sense that are records are kinda perfect in their own way and also not in like...a technical sense, but I mean in this pristine absoluteness of one’s self. Typically the b-sides of a record are just that, the b-sides, inferior tunes that really don’t represent the album or group nearly as well as the initial bangers. But the thing is, Arrival isn’t like that at all. It’s a record that is 100% all the way through, any of these songs could masterfully represent the group. Specifically the song Money, Money, which is an amazing track of genuine just...music. But the powerhouse closing track, simply titled ‘Arrival’ is the song that brings it all back around because as an audience, we’ve arrived, we’re here in Abba world now, a land we will never want to leave, but beyond that it sounds as if the spaceship that Abba came in on truly has arrived on earth and now we are free from our human bondage of hate and inhumanity. The album might not be about that, but heck if it’s about that.

What’s next? Roxy Music’s Greatest Hits. I didn’t know they had hits, who the hell is this? The album opens with a singular rock tune that has some bizarre instrumentation and a vocalist that sounds perfectly fit for the music that he’s singing on. Some electronic stuff starts to leak in to the song about halfway through and it really knocks me out. This really sounds like the kind of music that makes you wanna get up and do other things while you listen, so that’s exactly what I do.

I folded some socks, unpacked a box and- Hey! I’ve heard this song. This song sounds a lot different that the more jam-band sounding stuff on this record. ‘Love is the drug I’m thinking of’ the vocalist is very understated on the track, you believe it. But also it sounds like the kind of music that a lot people would write about doing drugs while listening too, ironically. I have some tea but I don’t think it’s gonna do much for making me reach a new plane of consciousness. I feel like I’m writing about this record in a way that someone like me would read and say ‘wow, what an asshole’ not because I dislike the record, but because I clearly have no idea what I’m talking about that. Even I know that. Anyway, the record is incredible rock music. I feel like I haven’t heard diverse sounding rock tunes in a long time, beyond that the vocals on the record are really incredible and unexpected. The diversity of sound and tempo and timbre is refreshing and is everything that critics of rock music tend to warm up to. But really, I’m warming up to it quickly, does that make me one of those annoying rock critics. Oh shit.

Sometimes I catch my reflection in the mirror and think ‘oh is that me? I see a girl.’ It’s fleeting, and few and far between. It comes and goes in the worst ways. “There’s no today for us.” I relate to these lyrics but I don’t know how. I think I’m in love with this man who sings to me as if he’s at least part-Dracula. The album ends and I feel profoundly lonely again.

The last LP is Love and Rockets Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven. The record has one of those paper sleeves that are impossible to get back inside of the fold of the paper. Initial impressions are that it sounds as if a really groovy beat met Luciferian chants. I kinda wonder if I’m summoning something. There I go with another one of those generic music writers stereotypical responses. Either an album is about drugs or the devil and that’s it. Anyways, this record is a nightmare of experimentation that feels like it came from nowhere somehow. It’s difficult to imagine someone having made it. The second song reflects a change, we have the ghostly vocals of one or several of the people haunting the record. It’s fun to think of vinyl in this fashion, a medium by which it can only really be explained by the claim that a physical group of ghosts haunt the physical disc. This is something we’ve lost in contemporary times I think. Digital music feels like digits in such a weird way, something existing physical in an un-pristine condition is a haunted reflection of a memory. On clay pots from 0 AD the spinning wheel created vibrations on the outside of the pot and if you put a needle on it, you can hear the voices of those that have been dead thousands of years. It’s a reminder of impermanence but also of the idea that we can haunt physical objects after we die. Just like a ghost that can only do a repeated pattern in the hallway of a haunted hotel, when you spin a record, it always does the same thing. You can observe it’s behavior.

This record is somber and calm but also powerful and loud in a weird way. I don’t really know how to classify it. Luckily we really don’t have to but this doesn’t sound much like anything I’ve ever heard. This song makes me feel like I’m watching a funeral sequence in a movie, I guess that can somewhat relate to cults again. I imagine the soul of a space aged traveller being lowered into the ground yet floating out of the hole and ascending to space free from the awkward knowledge that we are somehow attached to a human body. Those Heaven’s Gate people wanted to die, ya know. That’s the weird crux of that whole cult, it was a suicide cult because it was easy to push everyone to suicide. Their ideas were all apocalypticism. It was never about living forever because what kind of life does a repressed person even have? The cult was all about repression, of gender, sex, anything human really. Applewhite wouldn’t allow any of it and either though endless conditioning or though easy convincing, death was desirable beyond the idea of living forever on a spaceship. The point was that he made it feel like the suicide wasn’t a risk. It was a pure nihilism where nothing mattered or was good at all, thus death was an escape even if it was absolutely meaningless. That’s the fucked up thing about it, Applewhite designed a no-win situation for a bunch of sad, weird people like him, and then just pushed them over the edge. 

Sorry I diverted to that but it’s important to say these things out loud for me because they’ve been in my head for months and I don’t know how to just say them in a meaningful way. They’re just words about a tragedy. The lyrics on the record state ‘to lose is to win’ but I can’t decide if I buy that.

This album got awesome. I mean it was really cool but now it’s that typical experimentation I was referring to but now it’s got this killer rock edge. Maybe it’s just side B but it sure has a different feel. Then all the sudden here comes the song Haunted which I am very familiar with. It’s an incredible song that kinda perfectly sums up the way the whole record feels. It’s perfect in ways I couldn’t describe. I used to listen to this track every day when I was in my early 20s and very much in my goth phase. Oh no am I back to my goth phase? I kinda like it. This song fucking rules. This album fucking rules.

I’m at the final record, it’s a 45 single of Syd Barrett’s Dark Globe. I’ve never heard this song before. I only know of Syd through his work with early Pink Floyd and just sorta...the fact that he’s historically known as being insane (whatever that means). He died recently, yet he haunts my speakers tonight.

The song ends in nearly two minutes, by far the shortest record I’ve heard in awhile. I immediately put it back on. With a song like this it’s nearly impossible to listen to without thinking of the tremendous pain of the voice belting it out to my ears. I don’t subscribe to the idea that one must be miserably in pain to make great art, matter of fact in my experience that notion is radically bullshit. Whenever I am in the greatest pain, I make the worst stuff. However here we hear a man clearly asking many painful questions. ‘Wouldn’t you miss me at all?’ It’s not hard to imagine what those words mean in a grander sense. But this is supposed to be about me, right? This whole gig. These records in this box, thumbing through them and connecting to the sonic truths? Perhaps this has something to say about transition. ‘My head hit the ground, I was half the way down. Wouldn’t you miss me at all.’ it’s almost as if Syd’s voice is my voice talking to myself, but it’s a version of myself falling that I can’t hear anymore. The me that it’s in pain, in a cycle of self doubt and self hatred. A version of me that is falling, it’s head has hit the ground, but the ground is only half the way down. There’s a pit even lower where I want this self hating void of me to go, and no...I won’t miss it at all.

<3 May

PS: This is my first of many blog posts I'm going to start doing here. I've been busy moving into my apartment this last week, it's going good and I'm nearly done. I hope you enjoy this and I'd love to hear your thoughts.