Of pop music's defining attributes, I believe its most essential is its immediacy. It is difficult, if not impossible, to ignore a great pop song playing. It is infectious, it compels us to feel the joy or pain or desire it expresses. And the greater of these heights it reaches, the greater it is generally considered.
And I love that as everyone does - at least I do on my own terms. I often find the most popular pop songs to be emotionally saccharine, leaving the equivalent of a bad taste in my mouth. But the heights of the form that speak to me - the ecstatic moment where melody reaches out from within the musical form - can still take my breath away.
Despite all this, for a long time I haven't been much interested in the 'melodic moment'. For many years, I have been drawn, instead, to ambient music, as best expressed long ago by Brian Eno: "If you leave your personality out of the frame, you are inviting the listener to enter it instead." Indeed, that may be the opposite of that 'ecstatic moment', the moment when our attention is most intensely compelled. (Indeed, Eno has also stated that ambient music is "music you can ignore".)
This may feel like a binary, but I'm interested in it as a possible continuum, because what I'm attracted to lately isn't the magnetic pole of "ambient", but what happens when we turn the dial up ever so slightly, to where form and ego first begin to materialize. What are the 'primitives' that first emerge, and how do they cohere as sound moves into the known realm of music, where instrumental and vocal personas form the familiar framework of songs?
Just as exciting, perhaps, is the idea that we may not know all the primitives that are possible, nor the range of the known, nor the ways they might combine and break apart, or move, or mutate. Can a voice be made egoless, neither embodied nor disembodied? Can we reproduce our own internal monologue as it exists at the liminal state of sleep, or disinterest, neither the language we know, nor incoherent, true to some unexamined form? Can footsteps be neither the sound of walking nor a 'found rhythm', yet without decoupling into 'phantom sound'? Can we hear the sound of breath without presuming a person who breathes? If the ambiance of the room I now sit in were a starting point, what embellishments would make this room both unfamiliar and interesting, yet not simply uncanny? What are the smallest changes to the sound landscape that would tug on my attention, and why?
Can we paint a picture of sound that works like great cinema, to a profound and singular effect with minimal attachment to our existing auditory vocabulary? What I'm thinking of is an aural equivalent to the visual impression of the bedroom scene at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In a world where electronic musicians have now had access for decades to synthesizers and computer-based audio generation and engineering capable of forming most any sound imaginable, is there still a lexicon of undiscovered sounds, and within it something that could be considered a language waiting to be discovered?
Almost all of my creative time over the last decade has been devoted to writing (I've probably even spent more time drawing than making music). If I had taken the path of music instead - or if I were still to veer towards it - the questions above are the ones I would most want to explore.
