Sometimes I picture myself writing in the future tense and I think of it as this no-holds-barred hardcore generative act. I picture myself plowing through words leaving a trail of ash and debris behind me. Each word follows the last: thoughts are composed and meet the page in one beautiful, fruitful act. Words come out like sweat, undoubtedly arriving through sheer effort, whole and good.
Of course, it’s never like that. Writing is more like reading. Picture me trying to get ahold of my own thoughts, losing them and retracing my steps, going back just to move forward. Sometimes an accident happens in the midst of that process and I forget where I was going—I got too in-the-weeds with the syntax or wording of one sentence—and I either give up right there or, if I have it in me, I read what I have on the page. Something new might resonate and ping a new thought and I write that down too. Or, I start a new paragraph, unrelated and hope to come to something new. Later, I go back and chop it all up and tie it back together just to simulate a line of coherent thought.
In this newsletter I’m trying to get looser with my writing so that those syntactical speed bumps don’t disrupt my thought process. But as I write that (speed bump) I’m thinking that maybe I could slow my thoughts down until they come to me at the rate of one word at a time. I could place a word on the page and meditate on it and it alone. Sit with it and let its sound, shape, part of speech, denotation, and connotation emerge to my senses in a new way, a matrix before my eyes. Then, surely, I would know what word should follow it. I would plot the next word (inventing new syntactical relationships and new modes of meaning with it) and I would sit with that word. That could be really powerful. I could be really powerful, like, a really, really powerful writer. You know what I mean? Maybe I’ll try that sometime. Really powerful.
Writing and music are pretty similar and before you roll your eyes let me finish it’s because they’re both temporal okay now you can roll your eyes. One difference between our temporal experience of music and writing is we don’t usually jump back to hear something again when we listen to music. When we read, on the other hand, we sometimes read the same paragraph over and over again because we realize halfway through that our eyes had just been moving and we hadn’t been taking in the text at all. I think it might be because we tend to think of music as experiential and writing as communicative. If we miss a part of music we tend to think it’s okay because our mind drifting is just part of our experience. When writing embraces the experiential aspect of reading (thinking of Gertrude Stein or Samuel Beckett or Fred Moten or this review of the album I’m about to write about) it’s very easy to get frustrated with that piece of writing and to assume that the writer behind it is being intentionally opaque or difficult. When music embraces the constraint that is the wandering human mind of the listener we call it “ambient” music. We can ignore it or listen closely to it if we want. That’s, according to Brian Eno, the difference between his ambient music and general muzak. You’re not supposed to tune into muzak.
Now, this music that I came here to write about isn’t quite ambient music and I don’t know if anyone is calling it that, but, for me, it certainly toys with the faulty instrument that is my own attention span. The album is Kali Malone’s recent monsterwork The Sacrificial Code (thanks to Matty for inadvertently tipping me off with this!). An hour and a half of cycling, looping, and droning organ compositions, The Sacrificial Code grips me with each motif it introduces, pulls me in as though it will reveal its inner workings to me, until, eventually, my focus fades. The result is an addictive, placid and mellow listen that I think I will hold near for a long time to come. I’ve yet to wrap my mind around the album enough to offer much further insight, so instead, I’ll offer Malone’s own words about her process from cookcook’s interview with her over at Tiny Mix Tapes:
My approach to the organ right now is generally very restrained. When I go to the organ to freely improvise, I usually just create static drones. Because there’s no dynamic range with the organ, it’s difficult for me to embrace movement. I’m just entrenched in stasis, and I want to stay there forever. So to sort of combat my immediate desire for stasis, when I sit down to play the organ, I have very rule-based methods. I create canon structures that use number matrices in a sort of serial fashion to determine note durations, and then I usually record the whole canon voice by voice. I’ve come to appreciate the process, but it’s actually extremely tedious and ascetic and not immediately gratifying, because I don’t hear the entire harmony and composition as one. But there’s something in that process that’s very grounding, like I’m slowly working towards this macro structure that I imagine but cannot hear yet. At times, I’ve found that when I play the whole canon as one, I get so swept away and I become too expressive in a way, which is fine and fulfilling for my personal experience, but it’s a different thing when I’m recording and am after a certain restraint and discipline. It’s almost the same thing with singing — becoming so emotionally involved in the music and penetrating its humility with your ego, with your indulgent ego, and potentially spoiling the subtle autonomy ingrained in the composition. So, I have a number matrix in front of me and I have a metronome, and I play these patterns and count from this chart. It’s not exactly a passionate experience, but it is extremely meditative.