In The White Noise In My Head

When I was in high school I read Michael Azerrad's biography of Nirvana and remember being struck by one of the details from its recounting of Cobain's early years: as a kid, he started reading rock magazines which often covered music he'd never heard because it didn't get played on the radio or make it to the record shops where he lived, and he wound up developing a relatively involved musical fantasy world around what he thought these bands sounded like. I don't recall specifics but I think it was along the lines of imagining that New Order sounded like Sonic Youth, or something to that effect. (There's also the implication that to an extent he was trying in Nirvana to realize the sound he'd imaginatively associated with bands that in practice had nothing to do with it.)

This struck me as interesting at the time, but it's an anecdote that stayed with me because since high school it's happened more and more that I'll read about a musician and imagine what the actual music sounds like while going months without hearing it. In high school I voraciously swallowed up whatever I could find, abetted by ease of access to one of the world's great used record stores and the enthusiasm that came with a newly flowered hobby (that was also the first instance of a newly developing aspect of my personality: an obsessive drive to completism and, well, obsessiveness that I've been fighting, for the sake of my own sanity, ever since). I liked music, more or less, when I was a kid, but it only became important in my life when I was already in high school, and it did so then overnight and with a vengeance. Now, ten years later, my stamina has waned and my restlessness waxed, and I'm too fickle to spend energy and money running down some new (or new to me) musical field just because it sounds like I might be into it: I have to be powerfully moved to stir from my inertia, and I have to capture the brief window in which I really want to educate myself re: old school hip hop, because next week I'm going to be wondering about Tuvan throat singers.

Anyway, the point being that I've thereby read about a lot of music which engages my intellectual curiosity but which I haven't yet pursued aurally, which means that my ears have had a long time to gestate their own manifestation of whatever sparked my attention. (The first time this happened was when I was in college, already sliding out of intimate touch with the pulse of pop music, and spent several weeks imagining what dance punk would sound like when I actually bothered to download some mp3s: I'm still recovering from the disappointment of, in retrospect, near-impossible expectations. I really should record an album of what I thought it was going to sound like just so I have it ready and in the can for the next time that collection of trends becomes opportune.) In particular I currently have in mind the Alaskan composer John Luther Adams, profiled in the New Yorker by the estimable Alex Ross.

I've been reading about John Luther "Not That John Adams, And Not That One Either" Adams for some time, mostly at the blog of his friend Kyle Gann, but this profile renewed my imaginitive interest. I purposely haven't yet listened even to the music available at the end of the article because I'm relishing the beauty of what I hear in my head, and fearing the potential disappointment if I don't find his music as transcendently gorgeous as I hope. "The Place Where You Go Listen" is gnawing at my heart as I write.

I'm also taken by Adams' residence in Alaska; I don't share the Thoreauvian fantasy that apparently animated his younger self (in habit I'm as of yet firmly an urban creature, and I have no deep urge to chop wood and carry water), but the beauty of the wilderness, the appeal of isolation, and my own poorly detailed (because of no wood chopping, etc.) pining for cool rural simplicity like I brushed against as a child have me dreaming of settling peacefully in a place like Alaska, removed from the jackhammering pressures of modernity. So long as I can have electricity, and climate control, and indoor plumbing, and high speed internet, and the ability to get to a major metropolis should I want to.

Finally I was stirred by the moment when Adams spies a dog that "had wandered out on the ice and was howling to itself." His phrasing, bereft of the unnecessary words and hesitations and asides and qualifications with which I always, even now, burden my sentences, cuts deep and moves me the more for its simplicity:

"He has some fantasy he's a wolf."

Don't we all sometimes.