do flying monkeys like post-dubstep?

My older daughter’s at the kitchen table painting and listening to the Wizard of Oz audio book. This is probably her fifth time through the book since she first heard it. That’s awesome and she’s awesome but trying to write while an audio book plays is slightly distracting to put it mildly. I put on some music to run interference. Burial. Burial doesn’t exactly fit with the Wizard of Oz (though now I kind of want to watch the movie with the sound off and Burial as soundtrack to see how that works; I could imagine a lot of his music working well for the black and white parts in Kansas and maybe his newer more upbeat stuff would work for Oz).

I just wrote about how I don’t connect to sad music the same way and yet Burial is very high - possibly in the top slot - on the list of music I’ve gotten into in what I consider the current phase of my life. In past phases for all of my adult life I went to see live music regularly. That was one of my main interests since I was in the middle of my teen years. I have trouble letting go of that, both adjusting to the fact that this is no longer one of my real interest at this point in my life - while I like my life over all a great deal and especially parenting, this is one of the genuine sacrifices - and simply remembering that fact. I initially started the sentence “that was one of my main interests with “that has been one of my main interests”, indicating that it’s still one of my main interests. That is, I sometimes sort of forget that I don’t really do live music at this point in my life, because it was such a key part of what I did with my time and who I was. (I am confident I will again have live music in my life regularly.)

So Burial is in my post going-to-shows phase of life. Burial’s also different from a lot of what I listened to for a long time. I liked some electronic stuff but it wasn’t a main musical interest. My main interests were always in rock music of various kinds, mostly punk and heavier music, but above all mainly in music I associated with being especially strong in a live performance. Lots of my favorite bands are bands I saw perform, there are bands I got really into only after seeing live, and other bands I really liked tended to be bands that were similar enough to bands I had seen that I could imagine them playing live. Most music was indexed to or orbited around live performance for me; I organized my musical thinking, tastes, and experiences in connection to live performances I went to or planned to go to or at least could imagine.

Burial came into my life after all that. I saw Lamb in concert once and they were great but I was 18 and had never heard anything like that and didn’t understand either the music or that kind of performance. Since my kids were born I’ve been to a handful of DJed parties, mostly just making an appearance to be polite, and usually being there because of the people in attendance - I went to see specific people, not for the music and the social setting, unlike performances I went to during my showgoing years these parties were for me only incidentally musical. And so I have basically no frame of reference for this music in a live setting. And so Burial is for me fundamentally headphone music.

I listen to Burial on my headphones when I’m alone, or in moments like these when I’m trying to care out a bit of mental space, to become slightly more alone in the sense of reducing or covering over other sounds to help me concentrate. It’s isolation music. That’s part of what appeals to me in it - it’s useful for helping me concentrate but above all it connects with feelings of isolation, loneliness, and solitude. Those feelings aren’t the same. I’m not always lonely when I’m alone and I’m not always alone when I’m lonely, and sometimes those feelings can be either welcome or unwelcome. Being lonely is always unwelcome but being alone is not, solitude can be nice. Burial connects to all of that for me, it’s part of what I like in the music. It’s mood shaping music and music that expresses moods I don’t fully feel in control of or want. I suppose most of my favorite music is like that.

At a more simple level, I played guitar well enough to have at least some sense of what musicians were doing with guitar based music, whereas electronic music at the composition side sort of mystifies me, especially with complicated or just unfamiliar beats, and so there’s a really enjoyable “oh neat how did they make that sound?” kind of sense of wonder with Burial’s music and other electronic stuff that I like. I also like that there’s a kind of story arc to the music but one that’s less familiar to me than the arcs in songs of genres I feel more immediately at home in (with punk rock and metal songs there’s a pretty recognizable set of song-parts - the intro, verse, chorus, bridge, breakdown, and also stuff like the clean guitar part, the heavy part, the slow down anthemic part, the speed up thrashy part, the dissonant part, the resolution of the dissonant part, the pause, etc). The dynamics in Burial’s music and similarly textured electronic stuff are less immediately familiar to me, which makes them feel more unpredictable. That’s enjoyable too. It’s also just very appropriate to the weather where I live; my friend who got me into Burial says “I think of this as winter music.” There’s a lot of winter here, the season is long and intense, it’s good to have music that sounds like the season feels.

Done for now. The king of the flying monkeys is explaining to Dorothy how he hated serving the wicked witch of the west. I wonder what kind of music he likes.