Archives : all posts by Sean

Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld - "Won't be a thing to become". It is possible to be so stuck in your own story, so mired in it, that you do not notice the most obvious thing: that there are others here too. In sorrow, in bliss, in pain or fury - there are others on their own paths, before their own windows, beside their own lakes. We are not in it together but we are all in it, and almost always within shouting distance from one another. If you are not shouting then cock an ear. If you hear shouting, go there, help. If you are stuck in your own story, mired in it, try to remember that it is so; for three seconds; for two bars; for the time it takes a violin bow to pass across the strings; for the time it takes two lovers to take their separate breaths. [buy / I also write about this song in Saturday's Globe & Mail]

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Shura - "2Shy". The strange fragility of wishes: so fabulously powerful, transformative, and yet they must not be spoken aloud. A wish must remain behind closed lips, or if it is uttered it must at most be whispered. Before coins and fountains, before flagging candles, we think our wishes. And sometimes we sing them, in songs that pretend to be dreams.

It's not real, we pretend, lip-syncing into a microphone. Somehow a song can still be a thought, unspoken; somehow the sung wish retains its magic, its glamour; somehow it can still enchant. Shura never said her wish, never gave it away - she merely sang it out, aloud, onto tape.

[soundcloud]

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Francis Bebey - "Binta madiallo". I keep returning to this song; as if it's a place, as if it's a beguiling place, somewhere impossible to resist. Every day I take a detour to visit "Binta madiallo". I ditch my friends, defer my lovers, feign illness so that I can take the shortcut back to Bebey's song. To spend some time here. To watch the plants grow. To watch the plants grow, the sky change, the sky change, the plants grow. I have yet to dance to it but I feel like I am always on the verge of dancing to it, microscopically close, held back just by the thinnest part of myself. Some cowardly part of my soul is still too frightened to slip under the curtain and into this song, a song which feels like a place, to move among its lights and darks, under all the leaves, where the nighttime is and isn't. [buy]

Tom Rosenthal - "Don't You Know How Busy and Important I Am". Rosenthal writes a song for all those dumb bozos with "important" jobs, lacing his monologue with irony. "Don't you know how busy and important I am? / I've got soooooo much to do." He's too busy to know, too busy to see his son, to finish this song. But what Rosenthal gets most right is the song's jaunty pace. Jaunty is what capitalism pretends to be. Capitalism would have us think that its system is light and upbeat, full of forward momentum; that it will progress and progress, easy and trotting, with a grin on its face. Let's all jauntily repress ourselves, for the sake of an inflated mortgage. Let's smile as we're clobbered, dreaming of upward mobility. Let's drown out the gasps and shouts, the suffering shrieks, with a jaunty piano and oh god yet more cowbell. [buy / thanks jez!]

Suuns and Jerusalem In My Heart - "2amoutu I7tirakan". This music so full of movement: down, or up, or forward; or moving but staying in place, atop an advancing floor. Perhaps I will imagine it as a rearing skyscraper, a tower that rises up from breakwater, past sand into air, widening and narrowing, windows and balconies, razorwired parapets, an ascendant empire forever. Or else as a person falling - plunging down through black air, ever and ever, doomed or flying. No no: a machine, an engine, running on water. A heart pumping with fuel. A crane pushing its frame through clouds. A synthesizer's blinking light, on and on, as the earth spins on axis. Together, Montreal's Suuns and Montreal's Jerusalem In My Heart have conspired to describe a kind of motion, like a physicist and his formula. Kinetics rendered in gleaming groove, repeated beat. Perhaps it is not the sound of movement but a sound for movement, the soundtrack for whatever your body is about to do. [buy]

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Gaps & Spaces - "Oration". Gaps & Spaces call this an oration, which is to say a speech. There is no speech in it. Instead, the piece begins with a strain of plain violin, dipping and persuading like the opening sentences of a-- well, a speech. There are already signs of discontentment: crackles and drones, electroncis that bring to mind the flecks on an old photograph, the sepia melt of antique film. But then all of a sudden the drums are coming, a mob of drums that crashes into the strings' weak speech and overwhelms it, tumult everywhere. It's the sound of furious progress, and as soon as there's a pause some new voices cast out from it: saxophones singing, hooting, cheering, and finally simply fading, while only the dumb mob lives on.

[On Synoptic Optiks, Gaps & Spaces' Caleb Willitz and Greg Ward are joined by Jeff Parker, Dave Miller, Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello, Makaya McCraven and Dominic Johnson. / buy]

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In case you missed it, I've begun writing about songs in a weekly column for the Globe & Mail newspaper. You can see my recent articles here: 2/20, 2/27, 3/6, 3/13, 3/20, 3/28, 4/3. I also recently wrote a profile of national treasure Michael Feuerstack.

If you're interested, I also have a few appearances coming up where I'll be talking about Us Conductors (full dates always on the website):

• April 8 • Québec City - Imagination Writers Festival
• April 15 • Montreal - Westmount Public Library
• April 17-18 • Picton, ON - Prince Edward County Authors Festival
• April 24 • Ottawa, ON - Ottawa Writers Fest

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Safe Home - "Leda". I have been meaning to write about this song since 2006. Nine years it's been sitting like a neglected letter in the folder called blogpost mp3s. Luckily it is exactly the kind of song that does OK amongst the dusty hours, waiting and waiting. It's well-crafted, Dutch-made, with ambitions as humble as Young Marble Giants' Colossal Youth. It's twinned voices, clean claps, guitar run forwards and in reverse. There's the whirr of a synthesizer or of an old film projector. There's a sing-song story like a fallen kite. I imagine this song like a present sitting wrapped upon a table; beside a green potted plant, under a Danish modern fixture, from someone long-loved and distant. Nine years to get here, but the song's not gone stale. It's still good. [buy]