Update: I've been informed by a reliable source that, contrary to what Spotify may lead you to believe, 7-grain is multigrain's first album. His latest album is 9-grain, which (to my ear) picks up where 7-grain left off stylistically, but pushes the form to new heights. Listen on Spotify, follow on Bandcamp. Also: Instagram, Linktree.
A confession. I don’t know how to write about music. I’ve been able to avoid confronting that reality so far because usually I can just focus on analyzing lyrics. But my friend Mitch — aka multigrain — just released a new album devoid of lyrics, and it’s a great listen, and it’s forcing me to step outside my comfort zone. It’s called 7-grain, and to hear it as the artist intends it to be heard, listen to it here, on Spotify. It’s available on Bandcamp, too, but the songs are supposed to flow seamlessly into one another, and on Bandcamp there’s a brief buffer period that interrupts the flow. That said, still follow him on Bandcamp — my understanding is that it’s a more artist-friendly platform.
I listened to the album all the way through for the first time on Sunday night. I was lying flat on my back on my living room floor. About 27 seconds into the sixth track, I had a visceral positive reaction to the sounds washing over me, so much so that I sat up to check the title of the song on the screen of my laptop. I smiled when I saw that it was called “warm,” because, whatever feeling the music was evoking in me, warm was a pretty good word for it.
In 2017, Caroline Polachek released an instrumental album of her own called Drawing the Target Around the Arrow. Here’s an excerpt from an interview published on Creative Independent (italics mine):
How did you decide to title the songs versus leaving them untitled?
Using titles at all was tricky. At first I was just naming things by the time of day that I made them, and then I started realizing that they evoked these really consistent images. I actually doubted at first whether or not I should include those visuals because I thought I might prevent people from seeing something else. But then I just realized it’s so much fun! It’s so much fun to bridge that gap between a description and a sound. So why would I not?
This gap fascinates me. I didn’t give Mitch the chance to prevent me from “seeing something else” because I didn’t look at the song titles before I listened to the album — and yet, seeing the title “warm” after the fact, I felt that he’d bridged the gap perfectly. But there’s something missing in Polachek’s phrase. Such descriptions aren’t exactly describing sounds; they’re describing the sensation evoked by the sound. So, really, there are two gaps — the gap between a sound and our perception of it, and then the gap between our perception and our description of that perception.
Here’s a passage from C.S. Peirce, written in the 19th century (and in painfully-19th-century language) that’s useful for conceptualizing the gap between sound and sensation:
Now, when our nervous system is excited in a complicated way, there being a relation between the elements of the excitation, the result is a single harmonious disturbance which I call an emotion. Thus, the various sounds made by the instruments of an orchestra strike upon the ear, and the result is a peculiar musical emotion, quite distinct from the sounds themselves.
For someone who doesn’t know much about music, but who’s interested in writing about it, this “musical emotion” seems like a good place to start. All too often I’m tempted to view music as Caroline Polachek tends to — a view she was trying to escape from when she made her instrumental album:
I’d always approached music as being a narrative or being aesthetic or having meaning by way of reference or being political…
This [album] feels much more neutral to me, and much more open, and kind of much less referential…
There’s a lack of agenda here. I’m not trying to insert a personality in any way. The last two records I made were deeply personal and diaristic and emotional, and it was nice to take a break from talking at the listener with this one…
Usually, when I listen to music, I’m trying to parse its meaning. I conceive of the artist as talking at me, and I’m trying to figure out what they’re telling me. And I love doing that — it’s fun and rewarding — and I have no desire to stop altogether, and I couldn’t even if I tried. My mind just works that way. Nonetheless, something is lost in that approach to listening.
Instead of experiencing the music directly, letting it wash over me and evoke whatever sensations it will, I end up extracting lyrical soundbites and contorting them into some framework of understanding that I’m constructing in my mind. I’ll get lost in thought after hearing a clever or poignant phrase, and then suddenly 30 seconds have gone by and I haven’t been listening to the music at all, only meditating on that one chunk of it. No doubt, I end up missing out on a great deal of experiences that would be available to me if I approached the music differently. What kind of “musical emotions” am I closing myself off to by taking such a lyrics-driven, analytical approach?
Walker Percy, in an essay titled “The Loss of the Creature,” describes how we deprive ourselves of authentic experiences by approaching things with certain “preformed symbolic complexes” in mind. For instance, we go to tour the Grand Canyon. We’ve seen pictures of it, we’ve heard others describe it, we have a certain expectation just on the basis of the name “Grand Canyon.” We have all these ideas about what the canyon is supposed to be, and when we’re finally standing at the rim of the canyon, it’s hard for us not to refer back to those ideas. Is it how I thought it’d be? Is it how the others said it’d be? Does it look how it did on the postcard? It is sufficiently Grand? Am I getting it?
Approaching music as a narrative from which meaning is to be extracted is sort of like Percy’s loss of authentic experience operating in reverse. I may not have a certain idea in mind of what a given album is supposed to be, but I still end up trying to answer the question: what is this supposed to be? Sometimes that’s a fun question to try to answer. But, increasingly, I find myself wanting to put the question aside, let the music wash over me, and pay attention to all the “musical emotions” it evokes in me. It’s hard for me to avoid meaning-making when lyrics are in the mix, so, at least for now, I can only really apply this approach to instrumental albums like 7-grain.
If you find yourself approaching music like me, then I recommend testing out this alternate approach on 7-grain, and if you don’t, then I still recommend giving it a listen — start to finish, in one sitting, in solitude, with no other distractions tainting your experience.
A cleanup fit for a king. Clocking in at just over 23 minutes, 7-grain is about as long as the drive to my friend Aaron’s place in South Philly. Yesterday I listened to it again on my way to pick him up for a cleanup. I pulled up, told him “get in loser,” warned him that these cleanups make my back sore, which is pathetic because I was born in ‘97 not ‘73, but assured him that the mission makes it worth the blood sweat and tears. (Don’t listen to those songs out of context, I’m just entertaining myself here).
We drove to Grey’s Ferry and were trying to make a U-turn to get to our intended cleanup spot when I realized I desperately needed gas, so I booked it across three lanes of traffic over to the Conoco station at the intersection of Grey’s Ferry Ave and S. 34th St. I pulled up to the pump, and then Aaron spotted an MVPIID billboard jutting up over the hedges at the far end of the parking lot:
He also saw, at the base of the billboard, a shit ton of trash:
And with that, he’d found our new cleanup spot. Here’s what it looked like 5 bags later:
As you can see, there’s still more litter that needs picking up, but I’ve only got so much room in my Camry. I was initially planning to hit the spot again this weekend, but there are a few other spots in the area that are as bad or worse, and my Instagram post caught the eye of a certain someone I’ve written about here before… so stay tuned and keep your calendars clear for April 30th — there might be a follow up in the works.
By then, Embiid will have cemented himself as the MVP frontrunner, he and Harden will have honed their on-court chemistry, and the Sixers will be well on their way to a championship. But that means we’ve only got a few months left to prep for the parade. If nothing else, let’s clean our streets for the king (and prince):