I’ve been thinking lately about wonder

(originally posted to Substack)

One of the occupational hazards of growing older is losing touch with feelings like wonderment or curiosity, and that goes double for our current collective hell era. Even given the utter grimness of present day life in America, there must be some small amount of room, somewhere, for such things. I’ve been thinking about the dimensions of that room.

I was going to wait on this one and write about something else instead, but Calley and I just watched Topology of Sirens, and that set a few thoughts in motion for me. The whole thing is on youtube for free, and it’s really good – a delightful movie about a person who discovers a collection of microcassettes, which lead her on a strange trail that points both onward and inward. It is perhaps the most gentle mystery film I’ve ever seen. And, being a story in part about weird instrumental music, it was doubly easy for me to let in, as someone who spent a couple decades working on that music. I don’t want to spoil the experience of figuring out how to watch it, but it is a really nice one. You should check it out.

About halfway through, I started thinking about this abundance of curiousity in the movie, and this lack of awe or amazement. A slow burner, it spends a lot of time lingering on beautiful things. But crucially, no one is falling to their knees in reverence of beauty here. There are no tears or dropped jaws. In their place, there’s just a lot of watching and listening.

It makes me think that, the same way we often confuse inspiration with motivation, I think I’ve also come to confuse wonderment with awe, or amazement. One feels easy to cultivate, whereas the other seems to want to arrive on its own terms.

Meanwhile, I just spent a few days with the bud Andrew Weathers, recording and performing as Tethers for the first time since 2018. We came into these sessions without much of a plan, but with fifteen years of collaboration behind us, we weren’t too worried. We’ve both gone through a number of different creative phases in the time we’ve been hanging out and working together, and we’ve both collected a few past lives in that time as well. It’s a deep thing to have those kinds of friendships, and I think that’s reflected in the music.

In my own creative trajectory, I’ve recently backburnered instrumental music, favoring band life and songwriting. One major shift in this process has been that listening feels totally different. Obviously it’s crucial to listen to your bandmates, but… it’s different from the sculpturesque process of building weird instrumental music.

As Cas, the protagonist of Topology, moves through the film, she spends a lot of time listening, and it reminds me of how so much of the “experimental” (I hate that word, it is not true) music that I’ve concerned myself with over the past twenty years has involved a great deal of very intent listening, oftentimes more than it’s involved playing or writing. In a lot of these musical scenes, playing can be just an excuse to listen more.

When I think back to times in my youth where I carried the most wonder with me, it was also caught up in awe and amazement. Awe seems to become more difficult to cultivate as you get older, because you (ideally) just experience more stuff, and (hopefully) develop a wider and deeper framework for understanding and dealing with the stuff you come across. Awe and amazement seem to have a lot to do with expanding yourself to contend with the unfamiliar. Wonder, by contrast, feels more like letting things pass by or through you. When I think of wonder, I think of holding curiosity. It’s the range between “Huh.” and “Huh?” You know?

And that’s something I’ve personally watched slip away a little bit with age, perhaps as I’ve coupled it to and conflated it with the feeling of “Whoa holy shit oh my fucking god wow!!” I feel like as the latter has waned naturally, I’ve accidentally allowed the former to do the same. (No matter, it’s easy to pick back up, like a practice routine.)

Since AW was only in town for a few days, our recording time was limited. We worked quickly on getting ideas for tracks down, taking care to refine each tune only just to a point where we felt like we’d be able to finish it remotely, then moving on.

One piece was based on this Lydia Davis poem, Notes During Long Phone Conversation with Mother:

for summer     she needs
pretty dress    cotton

cotton               nottoc
             coontt
             tcoont
                         toonct
             tocnot
             tocton
      contot

We came up with this track pretty quickly, starting with a very simple idea:

1. Choose four notes each that will correspond to the letters C, O, T, and N.
2. Play those notes in the order dictated by the words in the poem.

We tried a take, playing in rhythmic unison, and sure enough:

On it’s own it was fine enough, but in the context of the other tunes we were recording, this one sounded uncommonly carefree, light, like walking to the store or something. Nice, but not quite there yet.

We then tried playing in unison for only two words, and otherwise rhythmically drifting apart from each other. Sure enough, that sounded a little better, but it still needed a little something before we could set it aside and be confident that we’d be able to finish it from different time zones.

We tried slowing the recording down. Now we’re talking:

It’s still gonna need a little something, but we decided this was a good save point. It was clicking.

I had written myself a note last month to write something about wonder this month, but I didn’t really have a thought ready to go right then. It took a month of daydreaming during my commute, saying the word out loud, and staring into space about it before anything came together. I’m glad to have spent my time this way (slowly), and feel like that’s a pretty good way to get better at making things. Daydreaming, a little at a time.

talk soon,
B