michelej1
11-29-2007, 04:29 PM
Tango.
When I really want to hear a record, I do listen to it with the lights off. The darkness cloaks the distractions of the world and helps me to listen better. They're right when they say that when you shut off one sense, the others grow keener.]
http://www.scenta.co.uk/Music/1710388/trusting-the-darkness.htm
For much of 1987, to the chagrin of my parents and various babysitters, I refused to go to sleep without listening to Fleetwood Mac's Tango in the Night. It was, you may recall, their big comeback record, full of hits - Little Lies, Seven Wonders and Everywhere. The album begins with Big Love. "Looking out for love," it runs, "in the night so still." And it ends on You and I, Part II: "For you and I/ Oh the phantoms/ Crawl out of the night." Lying there in the pitch black of my childhood bedroom, it reinforced in my young mind the idea that anything, from tango to love to crawling phantoms, could be found in the glorious night-time, in the dark.
There is something lawless and liberating about listening to music in the dark. It swells the sound, of course, frees the listener of visual distractions, while taking away the walls and the structures and leaving a sort of wilderness.
In Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, a poem that recalls hearing birdsong in "embalmed darkness", he observes the song's power to defy even the strictures of time: "The voice I hear this passing night was heard/ In ancient days by emperor and clown/ Perhaps the self-same song that found a path/ Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home/ She stood in tears amid the alien corn". And through this he finds intense joy: "Darkling I listen ..." he writes. "Now more than ever seems it rich to die/ To cease upon the midnight with no pain/ While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad/ In such an ecstasy!"
I was remembering this one night recently, sitting in my darkened house listening to Blind Willie Johnson, the Texas spiritual singer, bottleneck guitarist and preacher, as he growled his way through I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole and Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed, at times his voice swaying and lurching, as if the words were too heavy for one man to carry. Johnson recorded just 30 songs between 1927 and 1930, the most arresting of which is undoubtedly Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground); wordless, with just the slide of the guitar and Johnson's moans and aahs, it is the sound of a man pouring forth his soul abroad. It is an astonishing piece of music, and it has always seemed to me entirely fitting that Dark Was the Night was, along with Beethoven's Fifth, a Peruvian wedding song, and Chuck Berry's Johnny B Goode, one of the 27 songs included on the Golden Record placed aboard the space probe Voyager in 1977 and shot up into space, out into the blackness.
Alone in the darkness, and listening to this one song over and over, Johnson's voice sounded heaved out, excavated, the voice of a bog body risen. It gave me the shivers, brought that eerie feeling, as when you wake in the night and hear the furniture creak and sigh, and you wonder what is out there. Ry Cooder once called Dark Was the Night "the most soulful, transcendent piece in all American music", and based his score to Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas upon it, using those open D notes and plaintive sighs to sum up the enormity of landscape. It has been used countless times since, as a song that somehow denotes space and frontiers - final and otherwise.
That is precisely what listening to music in the dark gives us too, a feeling of being on the edge of the unknown, a frontier feeling. Poised there, on the very edge of something, the darkness may suggest all the greatness summed up in Springsteen's Dancing in the Dark, "This gun's for hire/ Even if we're just dancing in the dark," or all the fear of the abyss encapsulated in Bonnie "Prince" Billy's I See a Darkness, "And do you see this opposition, comes rising up sometimes/ That this dreadful imposition, comes blacking in my mind". Either way, it brings that Keatsian joy, that ecstatic sense of disorientation and uncertainty. "Was it a vision, or a waking dream?" he wrote. "Fled is that music: do I wake or sleep?"
When I really want to hear a record, I do listen to it with the lights off. The darkness cloaks the distractions of the world and helps me to listen better. They're right when they say that when you shut off one sense, the others grow keener.]
http://www.scenta.co.uk/Music/1710388/trusting-the-darkness.htm
For much of 1987, to the chagrin of my parents and various babysitters, I refused to go to sleep without listening to Fleetwood Mac's Tango in the Night. It was, you may recall, their big comeback record, full of hits - Little Lies, Seven Wonders and Everywhere. The album begins with Big Love. "Looking out for love," it runs, "in the night so still." And it ends on You and I, Part II: "For you and I/ Oh the phantoms/ Crawl out of the night." Lying there in the pitch black of my childhood bedroom, it reinforced in my young mind the idea that anything, from tango to love to crawling phantoms, could be found in the glorious night-time, in the dark.
There is something lawless and liberating about listening to music in the dark. It swells the sound, of course, frees the listener of visual distractions, while taking away the walls and the structures and leaving a sort of wilderness.
In Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, a poem that recalls hearing birdsong in "embalmed darkness", he observes the song's power to defy even the strictures of time: "The voice I hear this passing night was heard/ In ancient days by emperor and clown/ Perhaps the self-same song that found a path/ Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home/ She stood in tears amid the alien corn". And through this he finds intense joy: "Darkling I listen ..." he writes. "Now more than ever seems it rich to die/ To cease upon the midnight with no pain/ While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad/ In such an ecstasy!"
I was remembering this one night recently, sitting in my darkened house listening to Blind Willie Johnson, the Texas spiritual singer, bottleneck guitarist and preacher, as he growled his way through I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole and Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed, at times his voice swaying and lurching, as if the words were too heavy for one man to carry. Johnson recorded just 30 songs between 1927 and 1930, the most arresting of which is undoubtedly Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground); wordless, with just the slide of the guitar and Johnson's moans and aahs, it is the sound of a man pouring forth his soul abroad. It is an astonishing piece of music, and it has always seemed to me entirely fitting that Dark Was the Night was, along with Beethoven's Fifth, a Peruvian wedding song, and Chuck Berry's Johnny B Goode, one of the 27 songs included on the Golden Record placed aboard the space probe Voyager in 1977 and shot up into space, out into the blackness.
Alone in the darkness, and listening to this one song over and over, Johnson's voice sounded heaved out, excavated, the voice of a bog body risen. It gave me the shivers, brought that eerie feeling, as when you wake in the night and hear the furniture creak and sigh, and you wonder what is out there. Ry Cooder once called Dark Was the Night "the most soulful, transcendent piece in all American music", and based his score to Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas upon it, using those open D notes and plaintive sighs to sum up the enormity of landscape. It has been used countless times since, as a song that somehow denotes space and frontiers - final and otherwise.
That is precisely what listening to music in the dark gives us too, a feeling of being on the edge of the unknown, a frontier feeling. Poised there, on the very edge of something, the darkness may suggest all the greatness summed up in Springsteen's Dancing in the Dark, "This gun's for hire/ Even if we're just dancing in the dark," or all the fear of the abyss encapsulated in Bonnie "Prince" Billy's I See a Darkness, "And do you see this opposition, comes rising up sometimes/ That this dreadful imposition, comes blacking in my mind". Either way, it brings that Keatsian joy, that ecstatic sense of disorientation and uncertainty. "Was it a vision, or a waking dream?" he wrote. "Fled is that music: do I wake or sleep?"