kidaSo my point in doing this is not to hone my skills for a gig with Rolling Stone, or even the indie pages for that matter, but to capture what I have been experiencing in music over the past few months.  I want to write about it so I can keep on a roll. Keep feeling something good happen and evolve.  Change is good, right?  This is a renaissance of sorts for me.  I have not listened to music this actively since I was a teen.  I don’t get to listen to music deeply anymore; there just isn’t enough time to let it steep all around me, but I do get to let it wash over me and drift me around for a bit most nights and my Centro’s playlists are pale reflections of one another on a week by week basis because I am seeking new and different all the time.  It is fun.  It is trashy.  I don’t think it is really respectful of the music I am listening to, but it is an act that makes me feel like life is happening rather than habit.  It is participation.  This comes from someone who has a tough time participating.  It is good for me, and the tide does strange things to me.

Last October I couldn’t bear to listen to Radiohead’s latest offering In Rainbows and now I have been lulling to sleep with it as well as  OK Computer and Kid A.  I think it all started when I read a snippet somewhere of Kid A being compared to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side as the ultimate trippy album and I was piqued because I had dismissed it years ago as a snore.  Well Kid A caught me at the right time because I have been craving electronica, with little gurling noises spewed out by tiny diodes and resistors in near silent cacophony, and that album delivers.  It wasn’t until I read the liner notes of a Vibraphone cover disc of Radiohead Lullabies that I learned this album is a theme record hence the Pink comparisons (duh!).  Perhaps it is because Jude is sleeping next to me as this experience unfolds, but I keep returning to it over the last couple of weeks. It does seem like the sort of subject matter an infant would create.  The music is rarely pretty but it delivers something I never ask music to give me before.  The ideas are beyond the reach of my reason…of my judgement.  For instance, I like the two Gnarls Barkley albums I recently got.  I like the Franz Ferdinand album I picked up as well.  But I spent a lot of time skipping tracks because the ideas are easily judged, or I just wear out the story too fast.  I have been trying the Killers too, and I do the same thing SKIP.  SKIP.  SKIP.  I always loved Cocteau Twins for their abstract Elizabeth’s Glossolalia but it always had this hard and fast structure to it.  It was like listening to the Smiths with the voice track muffled.  For some reason I am not doing that with Radiohead and it is exciting.  It is passing the filter of my skip test only because I am letting things in without high hopes of finding a new classic album for my fold.


Comments are closed.