Music (that hardly exists) was my first love.
A long long time ago (I'm talking 1984 here in the days of new-romantic flamboyance and post-punk noise fests) I went to see Jonathan Richman and was kind of amazed to witness the lengths he went to to play quietly. During the set, which culminated in an a cappella version of "Walter Johnson", Jonathan asked for instruments to be turned down, decided that the drummer should play with brushes, and then hands, before encoring without even a mic. He literally did go out with a whisper, which made the euphoric applause that greeted his unusual performance sound even louder than it was. This was not then or has ever been since seen as a conventional way to satisfy either performers or audiences in rock music, performances of which are often ruined by an over-reliance on brute-force volume. But it struck a chord with me and what it showed was how lightness and subtle nuance can truly rock your world.
Subsequently I've come to notice that a lot of music I love - and this may sound an odd way of expressing it - seems to barely exist, comprising of tiny ripples of sound with modulations and minute adjustments. It is almost tenuous. I guess it's why I took to acid house and why this year I have gone doolally over the music released on Ghost Box and a micro-genre generally called "drone". It's kind of given that this hazy approach to sound is key in those two. But this is also a defining characteristic of some other, less obvious music too. As noted in a pleased-with-myself earlier post, I just got a pristine copy of Arthur Lyman's Taboo. I was rather cooing about the actual item in that post and didn't say too much about the music, which I've been digesting in the last week. Lyman is very much a key figure in "exotica" and was one of those artists rediscovered during the "lounge-core" trend of the late 90s. This whole scene was very much based around an image of retro fun, frivolity and cocktail playfulness exemplified in titles such as "Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music" and saw a number of great artists like Esquivel, Martin Denny and Les Baxter restored from ignominious (qu)easy-listening posterity. In my mini-post I leapt onto the Esquivel similarities, of which there are many (extravagant use of percussion, lashings of spring reverb and a "kid in the toyshop" application of the then relatively uncommon and novel ability to record and release in stereo "hi-fidelity") but, there is a more potent vibe at work in the Lyman stuff. This guy really plays it quiet. There is an absence of those cartoonesque stabs of whacky percussion that were an Esquivel trademark and instead the music often fades in to the distance as ambient washes of wind, wave, bird or jungle sounds well up. In actual fact this is not a million miles away from the campfire vibe of some of Animal Collective's work and those washes of ambient noise bring to mind Basic Channel's dubby minimalism. This music is simply not "in your face". In terms of my very recent listening it sits beautifully alongside Belbury Poly (Ghost Box) and the beautiful drone ambience of Chihei Hatakeyama (whom I will be posting about soon).
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