island sounds

Hi guys,

So like I mentioned before I’m on an island now. A few pictures of life can be seen on my Flickr page, should you care about those kind of things. The show has started airing in the Britain, and I hear it will air in the New Zealand at some point, but since the America doesn’t like accents that aren’t its own in its entertainments I don’t know when/if most of you will get to see it, or if you care. Avid readers of my blog, should any of you exist here, probably know most of this, but anyway.

One thing that’s very disruptive about this kind of travel is the way in which one interacts with music. Consider all the places I normally listen to music:

In the car. None of the people at our flat (in scenic but semi-remote Okupu, should you care to investigate GBI have cars, so needless to say, there’s no driving. I may rent one on my next day off, but having forgot to bring a tape adaptor, I doubt it will increase the amount of music in my life. I do hear music when the shuttle (slogan: “We Get Everywhere Eventually”) drives us to work, strictly of the “only music radio you can get on GBI” variety: most of it’s so forgettable I can’t remember it now, but I do recall Stevie Wonder’s “Part-Time Lover” from yesterday’s trip. With grace, this song shall never appear on a podcast, or in your life ever again.

Bumming around the house. Turn the stereo on and wander around while you cook, read, clean, whatever. Or don’t, if you’re here, not mostly. There is one boom box with pretty crap sound (and gratuitous “bass boost” setting, which provides too much bass when on and not enough when off) in the common area in the 4-bedroom giant big barn I’m living in, but there are different shifts and so the odds are if you’re awake someone else in the house is asleep. Every once in a while, schedules intersect, only to raise the new problem: musical compatibilities. My Kenyan-cum-Kiwi flatmate, for instance, can’t stand “that music with the guitars over and over that rattle in your head”. Which means I’ve been listening to a lot more roots reggae and jazz when she’s around. Another flatmate generally defaults to the news station.

Lying in bed. There’s no boom box in my bedroom. There is a laptop with crappy built-in speakers. This isn’t the same as, say, putting on an Explosions in the Sky album on the stereo while you stare at the ceiling and relax.

Live. To the best of my knowledge, two live music events have happened and/or are scheduled here. The first was some metal band whose photocopied flier showed the band rocking, complete with shirtless singer spinning his dreadlocks while tilted toward the camera. I presume a great deal from this, and don’t regret missing them. The second band I know even less about except that their band name (already forgotten) was in a cursive font and they had a cellist, which could mean really anything. Either way, I believe they’re playing tonight while I’m at work, at a venue I couldn’t get to even if I wasn’t. Conversely, I’ve missed NOFX in Auckland (who apparently performed their magnum opus, “The Decline”) already, and will be missing Comets on Fire, The Slits, The Rapture, plus any number of local shows, and that’s just what I know of in March. (April features Deerhoof’s Australian tour, which while bypassing New Zealand is an event I’d seriously consider crossing the Tasman Sea for were it even a passing possibility for me to do so.)

This is not meant to be an extended plaint or “woe is me, I’m getting paid to live on an island”. All of this is a long way of saying that in lieu of all of these normal routes, I’m spending a lot more time with my headphones on listening to the iPod. Which is difficult, because I don’t like being antisocial, but you do get your alone times here now and again, like right now lying in bed typing this listening to the Slits at 2:30 in the afternoon, wondering when and how I’ll fall asleep again before my night shift.

Listening with headphones is certainly with its discomforts (especially for somebody who eschews ear buds, likes listening to music while drifting off to sleep, and tends to sleep on his side), but it has its interesting revelations. Most of my music listening is in situations with either crap sound (in the car) or that otherwise don’t reveal much stereo separation, so it’s amazing to put on a song you’ve listened to dozens of times, like New Order’s “Ceremony”, and listen to how the drums are panned across the stereo space in a way I’ve never noticed before. It’s depressing to listen to other things and realize the limits of whatever bitrate the particular MP3 has been encoded at, or to listen to the remaster of Bruce Springsteen’s BORN TO RUN and realize how gratuitously loud it is, to reference Justin’s recent post.

But being attached to an umbilical cord to your music isn’t just an avenue for exploring fidelity; it also means you have the chance to endlessly fidget, listen to songs over and over, flit from song to song until you get just the right song for that moment, explore the nooks and crannies of your iPod and the things you’d forgotten you’d put on there. Yesterday I was lying in a hammock trying to drift off, and flipped through lots of my spacy music, Mum (too glitchy), Fourtet (too busy), and Mono (too rocking) until I stumbled onto Fourcolour’s WATER MIRROR, an album gentleman musician and ex-Houstonian Philip Gayle introduced me to and which I basically had ignored for the past two years, my only exposure to it being the intermittent appearance on shuffle play in the car, which basically consisted of me realizing after a minute or so I couldn’t hear what was playing and hitting the “Next” button. But here, somehow, its minimal and tranquil electronic textures have found their perfect home, and part of me wonders how I could have been so blind to its charms for two years.

The other part of me, meanwhile, will never bother even submitting it for a Podcast, because its charms are so fragile and gossamer that they’d probably be lost in the shuffle. It’s music that may only have one place, quietly on its own in an isolated but beautiful place that despite my minor plaints I am thoroughly enjoying, and I hope that in my time here I make many more rediscoveries and recoveries from the gigabytes of music strewn across my iPod.