Celebrating 30 (and a half) years on the planet with a six-part series on the 30 songs that changed my life and blew my mind. Here we go:
1. El Topo – HANDLINGNOISE
Two. That’s how many times I’ve listened to ‘El Topo’ in my lifetime.
I don’t recall how I found HANDLINGNOISE or where I was when I first heard this album, but I recall my heart coming to an abrupt halt at the clap that falls at the start of the track. I remember it staying that way for the next few seconds before picking up and racing ‘El Topo’ all the way to the end.
I listen to ‘El Topo’ sparingly. I wait for stars to align, darkness to fall, and for people to leave. Doors are locked and devices silenced. There is likely no other track that I am as selfish about. I’m an overzealous parent, forbidding it from reaching the ears of those unworthy of its magnificence.
Perhaps I should learn to share.
Is the rest of this album as good as the first track? I have no idea. I’ve usually ceased to be a sentient being by the time it ends.
2. Zoë Machete Control – [The] Slowest Runner [in all the world]
Another album opener that had me at first listen. I don’t remember my first [The] Slowest Runner [in all the world] experience either, but I do remember the smug satisfaction with which I killed a party when I played this track. Drinks paused, phones drooped, eyes glazed over. Someone tried to be cool and I heard them attempt to croak their approval but their voice was puny and insignificant, whipped into oblivion by the tornado in the room. If there’s another group that carries the label ‘neo-classical’ as gloriously and as genuinely as this one, I am yet to meet it.
3. Prodigal Summer – Snow in Mexico
‘Never gets old’ is the new ‘awesome’ – a phrase reduced to flippancy through overuse. But use and overuse it all you like when you’re talking about this track, and tell me – how is listening to ‘Prodigal Summer’ every time like listening to ‘Prodigal Summer’ for the first time? How does it compress every ASMR-trigger the world has ever known into just four and a half minutes? How is it so flawlessly composed of a thousand analogue childhoods when it was released in 2012? How is this song so new and, simultaneously, so, so old?
Here’s another overused word in shoegaze circles – ethereal. Again, use it all you want here. ‘Prodigal Summer’ doesn’t give you anything to grasp. There’s nothing by which you can pin it to your memory, no catchy hooks or sticky riffs. So you listen to it again, and again, and again, hoping that this time – maybe this time – it stays.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psTtUvwfX2w
4. Fake Lights in the Sky – Last Leaf Down
I remember this vividly. It’s 10 am in the office. Under stark white lights I decide to listen to a track a friend of mine has assured me I will love. A minute and a half in and I can see the world around me slowing to a crawl. By 2.30, the earth has stopped spinning, time has stopped (naturally), and the outside world is frozen in place. Two minutes later, it’s all over. I’m looking at the post-its on my pinboard and I could swear I had only just blinked.
See also: Discover: Last Leaf Down
5. Symphony No. 3 – Gorecki
Pet peeve – people talking during concerts. I don’t go to many gigs in Delhi, but I remember timing a trip to Paris so I could see Ulrich Schnauss perform. As I stood in the audience, I stood out as the lone foreigner, watching as the young’ns around me raised their voices so they could carry on their conversation uninterrupted over the din of Schanuss’s set.
Fortunately, I didn’t see much in the way of such interruptions in Melbourne, except one time – the gig was Mono and it was at the Forum Theatre. Seating was unconventional with the audience in intimate booths looking out at the stage. In these booths, groups and couples chatted merrily all through the opening act and would have carried on through the filler music ahead of Mono’s performance if it wasn’t for what Mono (I presume) had chosen to play between acts.
Flashback to when I was 9 years old and playing video games with my grandfather in our den in the basement. He plays classical music while we play Battle City, and I suddenly stop, transfixed, by what I hear. My eyes tear up, my skin breaks out in goosebumps and my heart feels like it’s breaking. That was the first time I heard Gorecki’s ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’.
A roomful of chatty concert-goers went through the same life-changing experience before my eyes. Undeterred through most of the first movement, one by one, they fell silent to the second. Mono, and I will forever be grateful to them for this, played the composition in its entirety – the entire 56 minutes. When the third movement ended the room was noiseless, and Mono stepped out. No one spoke again.
See also: Gig Guide 2011 #3: Mono
No comments