Deep Listening Isn't Dead

if i had time to write about this i would but i can’t seem to find it.

I’m working on the first of ten notable-as-fuck albums, and it’s taking some time to really explain how I feel about it well. In the meantime, I received Indigo De Souza’s Any Shape You Take via mail in the shape of a vinyl preorder - technically a bit early! it’s out officially at midnight, 8/27 - and it’s really doing it for me so I thought I’d mention a little about it because what an album!!

Indigo De Souza and her music are like candy in human and sonic form. This album is colorful and everlasting and sweet and sour and fizzy. It’s simultaneously really whole, soft, and flowing while also being fitful and commanding. Those aren’t necessarily two opposing forces, but rather just far from each other on a spectrum. Indigo touches the entire spectrum of feelings with a hand willing to bring you along and show you around.

The whole album is full of the prettiest, sickest stacked vocals that sound like a bite of an overflowing jelly-filled powdered donut. The tone of solo guitar lines throughout a majority of the tracks is clean, smart, and easy. The instrumentation in its entirety, throughout the album, is pretty perfectly weighted.

The opening track, “17″ feels like a homage to Frank Ocean in the beginning. I really like how there are parts where she has her voice distorted in clearly separated high and low harmonies; makes it feel like two different parts of her are singing. It also does a really good job of using lyrics that can be interpreted as something heavy over a beat that’s light and airy.

“Die/Cry” is one of my favorites for the bass and the lyrics. I also love the way it ends with such a fast fadeout.

“Real Pain” is one of the coolest songs I’ve ever heard - this track includes stacked clips of people screaming. A while back she asked for people to send her clips of them flipping out, and she compiled many of them into this song. It’s kind of jarring and honestly frightening at first because it really sounds like you’re just listening to people in crying out in pain, but it ended up getting pretty emotional, and the way the melodic part of the song comes back in from that section is tooooooo gooooood. Documenting here that the first time I heard that sitting in front of my speakers I got such a good chill.

“Bad Dream” has these cries for help that land like giant’s feet.

“Hold U” and “Kill Me” are two singles that came out before this full album, and she couldn’t have picked better representations of the whole project. These two songs are really beautiful sonically and emotionally, and again, successfully on two totally opposite ends of the spectrum of existence. It’s brilliant.

I hope you listen to this album and enjoy it as much as I have. I keep flipping the record over n over. This album feeds my emotional soul with sweets.

Welcome!

This is the infinite internet page where I’ll be consciously streaming streams of consciousness.

The desire to express my thoughts on music in whatever ways possible has been building up inside me since the day I was conceived, dare I say.

Plainly, I plan on writing about sounds I come across, old and new, that strike me. I tend to be oft stricken, and I’m hoping that, on top of these blurbs being fun to read, they’ll offer me a bit of an outlet. A canvas for me to destroy with internal connections of external stimuli. I won’t be quantifying reviews, just expressing personal experience, however that manifests; live shows, 15 second clips in advertisements, full albums, whatever. Leaving things a bit open ended here. It’ll definitely take me a second to figure it all out.

Anyway! Leah Wellbaum, the all-powerful leader of punk band Slothrust, writes and sings in her song “Cranium”,

I don’t wanna be addicted to the noise

But when it goes away I wanna die

When I proverbially got some of my shit together (it’s all relative), I moved to Asheville and pencil-dove awkwardly as fuck back into college. Thanks, Charles, for casually mentioning one day that UNCA has a music program. My concentrations became music (general) and neuroscience, a combo that asked me to use more parts of my brain and nervous system at one time than I’d ever known existed. One of my favorite classes involved vast insight on drugs and addiction, and specifics on what parts of our bodies are involved, why, and how. Therefore, another reason I’d like to dump all of my thoughts on this particular topic in one place is to subtly and purposefully reframe the textbook definition of addiction and therefore the way we exist and see other’s existences.

We all have addictions, yet the definition of that word has become so separate from the self and so commercialized, that it seems that we don’t get the time to explore what it all means. We’re too busy worrying if these things make us stand out or fit in instead of discovering how these things make us feel about ourselves and the world around us, and why.

There aren’t solutions to everything, but there are explanations, paths, answers, answers that lead to more questions, compromises, spaces, neurotransmitters.

So, I think I’ll start this page off with some descriptions: I’ll be writing about ten of my favorite albums of all time, in no particular order. It’s extremely difficult to create a seemingly permanent hierarchy of sounds; perception is so fluid.

That being said, if there’s something you want to talk about together, please let me know! Again, figuring out exactly how to make this a well-oiled situation will take some time, but I sincerely look forward to seeing where it goes.

Until next time, here’s proof of early musical influence and the concentration I was willing to put into it (magic blur is brother). It’s not unlikely that we were dancing to an album called Sanctuary: 20 Years of Windham Hill, one that brings up all kinds of emotions to this day when it graces my ears.