Silver Linings

Particularly noisy night last night, and the shock of sudden peace at half past one was almost overwhelming. Terribly, terribly hackneyed of course, but I became so aware of the little noises, the friendly noises, the ones that nourish rather than eat away at us. The wind, the old house's pipes, my wife's breathing- the familiar stuff made something to cherish again. And with moments of calm being as elusive as they are for me at the moment, part of me wanted to fight sleep and enjoy the sounds of the ordinary for a while. Of course another- far more sensible- part of me was well aware that I had to get up for work at seven and that I had just come off the back of another night with less than two hours sleep. Appreciating the aesthetics of the commonplace is all very well, but time and place, time and place.

Klaus Lang- Einfalt.Stille.

You'll have to forgive me, I'm dipping my toe into unfamiliar territory. This is a CD from four of five years ago, a very pretty CD that I've seen mentioned in despatches, and I've been playing it, and I've been enjoying it. Though there are, at a push, similarities to Feldman (and also Charlemagne Palestine's 'Karenina', though I may be hearing similarities just because I've played that through once or twice this year as well, in a smilar state of mind), it's hard to pin a label on, and to feel you've truly placed it.

A fifty minute piece for delicate instrumentes played softly and hesitantly- the trouble is, lovely though the music may be, and it truly is lovely, it becomes background music. Inexorably and inevitably background music. Background music of the highest order perhaps, but all the same I've played it through perhaps seven or eigh times now since the turn of the year, and I can't say it has engaged me from start to finish even once. Now that's no particular problem- if I'm going to play music while I'm reading, I want it to be something like this, but I'm not sure Klaus Lang set out to write a piece of rarefied ambient music, and damn I feel like I'm letting him down. But there you go.

---

In a sense, the ongoing problems I'm having with our neighbours has eased, in that I'm starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel, albeit a light five or six months- at least- down the line. In another sense the problem has deteriorated. We live in a ground floor flat- a comfortable and spacious one, and one that we've turned into a decent family home, but there's no getting around the fact that we have people living above us, and people living above us whose standards and ideas of responibility don't tie in with our own. On one occasion this week they finally hit the sack at 4:15 AM, but there have been a couple of other occasions in the last few days perhaps more relevant in regards to music, and concepts of peace and silence.

We sleep, my wife and I, directly below a bedroom, and below, I'm afraid, a bedroom with no carpeting, just bare floorboards. Ocassional creakines then, only to be expected. Alas, we are being subjected to prolonged periods of walking about on bare floorboards, backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards, for two hours or more at a time. With occasional breaks of perhaps five or six seconds of rest. Odd behaviour, unfathomable behaviour, and a quite dreadful form of torture. But our problems, not yours, imaginary reader, I don't want us to have to dwell on it...

Over the months we've been living here I've tried to develop various strategies for dealing with this though, and one has been the judicious use of the ipod- 'Live in Seattle', black metal, Cecil Taylor at his most energetic. My night-time listening is perhaps not what I would necessrily opt for in an ideal world as I drift off to sleep but, again, there you go.

But 'Einfalt.Stille.'? No. This won't do at all. This music has uses, but it will not block out the noises of inconsiderate humans. A warning, just in case you find yourself in a similar situation.

Don Cherry- Eternal Rhythm

Since the turn of the year my listening activities- aside from the half hour commute to work- have centred around the very wonderful Admirable Restraint radio shows up at archive.org. There's a whole world of music going on here that has apparently passed me by completely, and I suspect I'm going to be spending a lot of time and money investigating it further over the coming months. Always nice to have a plan. When you start discovering subcultures within subcultures you can find yourself in some dizzying places, and they are the kind of places that suit me just fine.

I've also heard Don Cherry's 'Eternal Rhythm' a handful of times too, a scratchy old vinyl rip lifted from the dark side- Don Cherry has always been just a name to me, a name on a list or hidden away in a review: I had no idea he had made music quite like this. Admittedly, my relationship with jazz has always been a secretive, sordid thing- brief passionate half hours in the photocopying room and then we don't talk to each other for months. All sorts of wonderful thing have drifted beneath my radar I'm sure.

This starts like a sunrise- flutes, bells, all the sounds of waking. A crash and then in come the percussion, the piano, and all the while the flute bold and liquid. Cherry the multi-instrumentalist then- he seems to be playing everything he can get his hands on here, and with a graceful calm abandon that will bring light to any room you play this music in. Yeah, it's that kind of record- it invites bad poetry. This is such happy, invigorating, creative, joyous music, ful of themes that dance round your head and an inexpressible sense of well-being that you really have to savour- you find it so rarely.