Song of the Day #152 - Yuki Murata - a white bird

Invisible warm summer snow!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eI9EsnMErM

I listen to a lot of genres of music (hip hop, trap, drill, bangers, g-funk, Kanye West, denpa) but none are more precious to me than this one, whatever one contains music like this. But also contains everything between this and world's end girlfriend on the metric of whatever element is actually in common. Not "Japanese". Something more. But I dunno. Maybe genre is the wrong term.

There's an aesthetic, though, or maybe some sort of sub-aesthetic, an underlying feeling that seems to motivate the creation and progression of all this sort of music. It isn't a feeling like an emotion, though... maybe more of a belief. It's in some of the music that is closest to me, and I feel it strongest in Matryoshka, who makes my actual favorite albums of all time.

It's kinda like... imagine you have a perfect world. Maybe you can't imagine that (it's actually very hard if you think about it in terms of detail) but try to imagine that you can imagine that. Okay, but now, can you imagine tension? Is there tension in an ideal world? Actually, is there even like... transition? Movement? Progress? Is perfection inherently static?

But no: that sucks: things need to move and have relation to one another. Or something. Like, even in a painting, your eye moves around. Uhh. I'm not sure where I'm going with this.

IN THIS SONG, though, when you hear the piano at the start, that's a perfect piano tone, and if you disagree with me you can get out. Every sound is perfect, and it feels like every sound is infinite, in that its perfection is not necessitated by the context of other sounds, or its duration, or whatever.

Ah, and then the strings come in, and there's movement, there's a sense that some positions are "incomplete" or that some sounds suggest others. This is something that's super intrinsic to music that I can't quite explain but I remember a section in Godel, Escher, Bach that talks about scales and the tonic and how you know when you're not in the tonic somewhat intrinsically, but I can't quite remember how it works... I'm at the point where I read GEB long enough ago that I don't remember the details of a lot of it, but I remember the general topics well, and I end up being like... absurdly uneducated lol. I'd reread it but I lent it to a friend.

ANYWAYS, if you want a super good example of the feeling that I think I remember him talking about, or at least the feeling that I want to talk about, listen to 2:40 of this song, where there's that key shift, and you know, there's something that's unresolved. It feels like you can't stay there. But then... you do! The song exits in the new key. That's I think the commonality among all this music I like so much. Some sense of resolution. It isn't always because of key shifts, of course...

I dunno, I don't think I can explain this very well. I hope at least the appeal of this specific song is self-evident. Augh, this "genre" is one of the big reasons I'm so hesitant to write top favorite music of all time-type lists. It's so hard to write about it, so hard to compare it to anything else, it's just... beyond magic for me.