Friday, September 16, 2016

Song of the Day #337 - Elysia Crampton - Lake

Blissful Protohuman Memory Vibes~


I've been on a huge Elysia Crampton kick lately, inspired by her new album Demon City which... I haven't even listened to yet lol. I just thought "oh, I should go back and listen to her old stuff again first" and I've gotten so addicted that a whole new album feels, if anything, gluttonous. The "Moth/Lake" release has from last year has been at the forefront of my most recent fascination; we'll prolly look at "Moth" soon too. It's in a similar mode to her wonderful breakout album, American Drift, but with a more minimal, spaced out feeling... it's like an extention of the feeling I described in my writeup on "Axacan", where the forces that constructed the pan-American medley of the preceding songs now reaches back to the pre-America: crickets, traditional instruments, creaking wood, synths that sound like the collective voice of a people...

It feels very spiritual, in a way that feels amazing coming from the despairing atheism of "Moth". It's like... after all that abandonment, after confronting all that emptiness (more about this later), we're immersed into this beautiful scene, one that feels so natural, that feels like it extends infinitely before all the hubris and tragedy of humanity, and reminds you that... well, I dunno, something. Something primordial is stirred in me when I first hear those night sounds, something that, despite being very contemplative and intimate and distant from my life, flares up in me... I can remember one time, when I heard the crickets come in, I pumped my fists and shout-whispered "hell yeah".

It's a combination of  crickets being one of my musical fetishes (popping up on things like matryoshka's "Noctambulist", a contender for my favorite song of all time), and how I love to death these sort of "hesitant" rhythms, where the pause between the call and response is just slightly longer than you might instinctively guess based on the rhythm (as seen in yesterday's track)... the synthesis ofthis naturally occurring sound and this "natural"-seeming imprecise rhythm leads to "positive drone" deep mammalian (or maybe even lizard) brain-tapping, stirring up images of cavemen relaxing around a fire, the day's work finally done (the ease with which this image comes is sometimes very moving and peaceful for me, even if what I'm picturing is prolly totally inaccurate).

I dunno, I feel like I have a whole lot more to say about this track, but I have a very hard time getting any of it into words. I even delayed publishing it last night cause I thought I'd come up with more. If past patterns repeat, I'll realize the exact mechanics behind its unique haunting peace as soon as its too late, but then I can just use that when I talk about "Moth" ha ha ha good "life hack". And if I don't, it'll just join the many other songs that I've written about, and still listen to, and think new things about, and want to write those thoughts, but probably won't, and that's fine too.

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