I enjoy walking around when I listen to music. Part of the reason is that I get sleepy when I sit in one place and listen to more than 20 minutes worth of music (I have a hell of a time battling this at concerts, often with little success). The other reason is that I like how the music I am listening to interplays with the environment. I am talking about both the visual and the sonic landscape.
1. Brian Eno, “Over Fire Island”
I’ve always loved the visual aspect of the music I’m listening to pairing with the environment, but I used to hate it when external noise (cars, electrical transformers, birds, etc) leaked in through my headphones. Now I embrace it and even seek out the opportunity for this to happen.
The first time this idea clicked with me was when I was at Trout Lake, Michigan camping with my family. I was sitting in my motorhome obsessing over a biography about Brian Eno. I was listening to “Over Fire Island”. With headphones on, this song is a constant barrage of quirky little noises. There was a moment where I couldn’t tell if a particular noise was coming from the music or if it was caused by a group of kids playing outside on the playground. In that moment of confusion, a magical realization dawned on me: the music and the outside sounds were inseparable. Suddenly my ears extended far beyond my headphones and began to encompass all the sounds in my immediate vicinity. It is debatable whether this is what Brian Eno intended with his vision of “ambient music”, but either way it was a special (almost ‘cosmic’) moment for me.
2. Aaron Copland, “The Promise of Living”
I was listening to a 2009 CDBNA recording of the MSU Wind Symphony playing this song. The song is already powerful on its own: tender and honest, but also radiant and strong willed. There is a moment where the song picks up motion and starts building towards a climax. This section is in the key of Concert F Major. I was walking by Beaumont Tower on MSU’s campus when the carillon started to ring. The bells sounded out the note C. For those of you who are geeked about music theory, that means the bells functioned as the fifth scale degree of the key signature. How much more perfect can you get? It added a magnificent bed of sound and helped the piece thunder with power. It was one of those moments where my body felt like it was going to explode from the inside out.
3. Ten and Tracer, “What the NRPG did for me”
No one has heard of Ten and Tracer. Number one, it is ambient music. Number two, it is free ambient music. But it is good ambient music, make no mistake. I’ve had two experiences while listening to this song. The first was when I walked inside my girlfriend’s apartment while listening to it on a hot summer day. The song is basically one long drone based on two notes: D and A. When I was standing in that apartment, the air conditioner was humming a low D and a leaf blower operated by someone outside was humming a high A. All these sounds interacted perfectly with one another. The spatial effect of 3 different sound sources mixing together (headphones, inside the building, and outside the building) was insane.
Do I need to get a life? Yes.
The second experience with this song was when I was walking home at sunset. The sky was an inky pool of red. There was a plane traveling at a high altitude that left a long contrail in its wake. The contrail burned bright red just like the sky. The song fit the mood perfectly. Now whenever I hear the song, I can’t help but get a visual image of airplanes or airports in my head.
4. Porcupine Tree, “Lightbulb Sun”
Fall 2010. I had just completed my last final exam during my last finals week at MSU. It was a nice afternoon and I wanted to take a walk and listen to an album. “Lightbulb Sun” is such a great album because it takes you on a journey. I put it on and started walking.
I started by walking along a secluded bank of the Red Cedar River I had never walked before. The light acoustic guitar and psychedelic ambiance of the eponymous track “Lightbulb Sun” was the perfect backdrop. During “Last Chance to Evacuate Planet Earth”, I wandered by these old and strange looking apartments on campus. They had red bricks and looked kind of like an insane asylum. The trees around the place looked dark and twisted since all the leaves had fallen off. Since “Last Chance…” has sound clips from the leader of the Heaven’s Gate religious cult, it made for a creepy scene. During “The Rest Will Flow” a hailstorm came out of nowhere. It was a very surreal moment. The hailstorm stopped just as the song reach its climax. During “Hatesong” I walked along the train tracks and saw the MSU power plant in the distance. The dark, industrial nature of the song was a good compliment to the starkness of the factory. During the really heavy section of “Russia On Ice” I walked by a section of campus where a new building was being built. The interior was still gutted and it was pitch black inside (even in broad daylight). There was a single hanging light that illuminated the inside with an unnaturally white color. It was another very creepy scene! The album finished off with “Feel So Low”. I walked underneath the beautiful trees of the Red Cedar to finish out my walk.
5. Radiohead, “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”
I used to have a routine where every Sunday I would take the time out of my hectic life to listen to a music album from start to finish (I really need to set aside time for that again). The albums I picked were personally significant and usually had a transcendent quality to them. I listened to “In Rainbows” one Sunday evening. It was the dead of winter and snow was trampling the city of East Lansing. For some dumb reason, I decided it would be fun to walk outside in this blizzard while listening. I climbed up to one of my favorite hidden spots in East Lansing: the top of the parking lot known as the hamster cage. The view up there is gorgeous.
If you know the song, you know that it is very minimalistic and builds upon itself in layers. The song was heading towards its climax as I arrived at the 6th floor of the parking lot. I went up to the ledge of the roof and saw a vast, nighttime landscape in front of me. Snow was falling in what seemed like infinite sheets. It was an overpowering scene. Something happened that I can never remember happening to me before: my eyelids slid down without any conscious intention to do so. It’s like my body was acting naturally on its own accord. The music was swirling like the snowflakes caught in the wind around me. The song built up to its wonderful climax, only to have the bottom abruptly drop out and glide into another section of music. I opened my eyes and watched as the dancing snowflakes perfectly complimented the suddenly soft, bubbling section of music. I never listened to this song the same way again!
6. Steven Wilson, “Veneno Para Las Hadas”
I’ve already mentioned this song in at least one other post. Don’t be surprised if I dedicate an entire post to this song in the future. It is stunningly beautiful. There was a point when I would listen to this song daily (and I almost still do). It is a song I never get sick of, no matter how many times I listen to it in a row. I have had many special moments with this song, but one moment takes the cake.
It was a warm fall night in East Lansing and I was walking back to my apartment. I was bordered by lots of tall, solemn pine trees. The moon was full and luminous. The stars were out in full force and seemed to ripple across the sky. An airplane had just flown over my head at a very high altitude, leaving behind a long contrail. The contrail formed a long semicircle directly above me that connected one point on the horizon to the other. The moon made the contrail glitter a silvery-gray color. I don’t know how else to describe the sensation, but the contrail made me feel like I was in a snow globe. The length and shape of the contrail made it look like it was pasted onto the outer wall of a distant sphere of stars. I couldn’t imagine something more evocative for this song.
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