I come to music as an outsider. I don’t play any instruments. I did take piano lessons as a kid but have long since forgotten everything. Thus I can only speak as a passionate but amateur fan; music has helped me navigate the world, especially in recent years.
San Francisco
In spring of 2020, most cultural institutions were declared nonessential. This didn’t mean people stopped consuming culture, however. They just did it in private, via their personal electronic devices.
I was no exception. Though I didn’t binge on Netflix or play video games, I took to obsessively listening to music on my smartphone. At the time I was living in San Francisco and the industries where I worked had been shut down. Likewise the cafés and bars where I’d found a second home outside my cramped apartment. I often had nothing to do all day and night but wander in Golden Gate Park exploring the history of music in my head.
I developed a deep love of Astral Weeks. Before then my knowledge of Van Morrison was limited almost entirely to “Brown Eyed Girl,” a song always playing in the background somewhere. Aural decoration, disposable pop. It seemed inconceivable that the singer might also be a profound artist, but so he was. Astral Weeks is the work of a young man who has already come to realize that the past is irretrievable. “And I will never ever ever grow so old again,” he sings at 23. We may live a long time but we’ll always only have one childhood to contemplate.
Morrison released this masterpiece in 1968, but on the surface it seems too beautiful to belong to that tumultuous year. On the nearly 10-minute “Madame George”, the divergence between form and content becomes unbearable. Morrison sings of a debauched milieu; the scene is almost identical to the one in “Sister Ray” by the Velvet Underground. But while Lou Reed plays it for shock value, Morrison is all melancholy and nostalgia. Morrison is more authentic. Most of the truly desperate characters we meet in life aren’t trying to shock; they honestly don’t know how to be any different.
While Lou Reed plays it for shock value, Morrison is all melancholy and nostalgia. Most of the truly desperate characters we meet in life aren’t trying to shock; they honestly don’t know how to be any different.
Meanwhile, 2020 was turning into a historic year in its own right. The prohibition on public gatherings was suddenly reversed, large crowds declared necessary and good. However this turned out to be an extremely incoherent revolution. My leftist friends who participated in Black Lives Matter protests did not see themselves as rebelling against the new regime of public health: if anything they thought Covid rules should be more stringent. My own isolation was thus compounded by an unwillingness to accept the virtue of isolation. Nothing to do but go on longer walks and listen to more music.
If Morrison suggested the past is eternal, another singer/songwriter adumbrated for me the possibility of change. Bill Callahan had nothing like Morrison’s natural musical genius. He had to painfully construct his art over years. His early work, which he released under the name Smog, is often grotesque. He sings of harming women, not exactly boastfully, but then he can’t seem to bring himself to regret it either. He frequently imagines himself as a corpse. Sometimes it’s morbidly funny, sometimes just blacker than black.
Callahan’s masterpiece is 2005’s A River Ain’t Too Much To Love. It’s a transitional album, the last he would release as Smog. He has put away the deliberate ugliness of his early work, maturing into a more pleasing sound, but still channeling the same darkness. On the second track, he sings of himself as a dead body floating down the river—but the metaphor suddenly turns hopeful: “Well I never really realized death is what it meant to make it on my own”. Among other things, it’s a concept album about moving. By the end, the narrator has relocated to Texas. I listened to it over and over that summer of 2020, in a sense letting Callahan do my thinking for me. I had no conscious plans to move until suddenly it seemed obvious that I should leave California. That November I moved to Minneapolis.
Minneapolis
I drifted around the upper Midwest, mostly waiting for normal life to return. It was during this interminable period that I started listening to Autechre. Words are my element, so the lyrics of a Bill Callahan or Van Morrison provided me with a clear entry point. But as the Covid regime of isolation stretched on another year and more, I found myself venturing into alien landscapes.
I embarked on a tour of experimental electronica, particularly the classic IDM acts. Initially Autechre was my least favorite. The others all had something easier to appreciate: Mouse on Mars their wacky brand of prog techno, Boards of Canada their blissed-out swoons and cryptic messages, Aphex Twin his frenetic explosions juxtaposed with delicate melodies— but Autechre? I listened to their canonical albums from the nineties. They sounded like their peers, but colder, less human. Still their discography was vast and I kept listening, moving in rough chronological order up to the present.
Autechre’s sound has morphed enormously over the decades, but not due to any eclectic influence of styles; rather, a machine was set in motion and continued to grow according to its own logic. Is this music or technology? To my surprise I found that the closer Autechre came to obliterating the difference the more I came to see dancing visions in my head. When the music becomes truly abstract it starts to be about something again. Weird noises are buried deep within. You might not hear them on first listening, but eventually they provide little narrative signposts.
When the music becomes truly abstract it starts to be about something again.
Autechre’s epic release from 2018, the 8-hour NTS sessions, begins with the sound of an abduction. A rotary motor taking you outwards but then also the sound of something drilling into your skull. Goofy sounds that verge on being comical but still retain the terror of childhood nightmares. Martial rhythm and fantastic battles that finally conclude in a purifying electric storm.
Elseq, from 2016, is half as long (a mere 4 hours), but in some ways even more radical. It opens with a cyclone of entropy. Later on, the nearly 30-minute “Elyc6 0Nset” goes the farthest of anything in the band’s catalog towards abandoning music altogether. It is the sound of old technological systems breaking down (sometimes when I listen I think I can hear the dial-up modem of my childhood). Antiquated hardware destroyed from within and reassembled into a sentient new beast.
In cultural criticism it’s common to lament that no radically new art is being made today. We’re told we live in an exhausted postmodern age in which innovation can only take the form of reshuffling old tropes. Listening to these two gargantuan masterpieces, both released in the past decade, made me doubt whether this is true. Perhaps the failure is not that of the artist but of the critic unable to recognize what’s right in front of them.
I discovered Autechre at a time when I believed our technological utopia could bring nothing but further misery and decay. Their music suggested other futures, perhaps even a poetics of the posthuman. On “Foldfree Casual”, a track from Elseq, the universe has swallowed itself whole but in the void something new is being born. It starts to sing, saying: No need to be afraid.
