The Year of Magical Listening

Willie Costello

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MUSIC COMMENTARY
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The Year of Magical Listening

Reflections on the joys of discovering new music

OCT 28

037 :: OMNES

FEATURING "Viderunt Omnes" by Pérotin, performed by The Hilliard Ensemble, recorded and released by ECM in 1989. Listen TRANSCRIPT In the beginning was the word – a mere syllable – a solitary tone. And then, there were several. And just like that, there was music: harmony, rhythm, dynamics – but more than that, a strange, otherworldly beauty that seems to appear out of thin air, suddenly floating above us and gracing us with its presence. What we are hearing is arguably the genesis of music as we know it, one of the earliest known pieces of polyphonic music in the Western musical tradition. It may in many ways appear rudimentary, its harmony of the simplest kind: a sustained drone in one voice while other voices bob and weave around it, producing a series of resonant intervals circling round their tonal center, and creating an utterly hypnotic harmonic soundscape. Simple, perhaps, but what majesty there is even in this. This music is captivating precisely because it doesn't seem like it should be possible, to pull such beauty out of thin air. How wondrous, that the mere arrangement of sound waves is sufficient to create something like this, so awesome and astonishing, as if it were always there, just waiting for us to tune into its frequency. It's like a tear in the fabric of the universe has been discovered, offering a glimpse into another world. Of course, this is all apropos to this music's raison d'être, seeing as it is literally sacred music – music of worship, music of the church, music designed to exalt an otherworldly being. But what I hear in this music does not seem tethered or limited to any particular religious tradition or faith. What I hear is music that is putting us in touch with the divine in the most universal sense – a divinity that is revealed to us through sound. And the most remarkable thing is that this divine revelation emerges from the most mundane elements. In other contexts, it may arise out of strings of catgut or rawhide skins; here, it comes about simply from the human voice. And to be sure, these are exceptionally beautiful voices, a paradigm of purity and discipline, moving in perfect coordination, and reverberating in an exquisitely sonorous space. But still, there is nothing supernatural in the mix; everything we hear is the product of human vocal cords and human vocal cords alone. The same instruments we use to talk and yell and argue and curse can also produce this. And that feels like magic. That feels like something that shouldn't be. How incredible that all of this would be present in music this primeval. But take that as a lesson, that music's revelatory powers have been there from the very start – that for as long as there's been music, it's had the capacity to fill us with wonder in this way. And the history of music is not some long march towards the perfection of this capacity, but rather an eclectic chorus of voices, all realizing this capacity to the fullest, but in new and singular ways. Which is to say, the history of music is like a series of worlds revealed to us, a sequence of curtains drawn back, none inherently better or truer than any other one, and all equally sublime. This piece of music may be one of the oldest extant examples of the art form, but its sound is timeless. Timeless, and also strange: the haunting swirls of voices, the glacial harmonic movements, the uncanny synchronicity. But this strangeness is precisely what makes the music so captivating, as if by holding it in our gaze we will spot how it works its conjuring trick. But of course the music resists our efforts and remains inscrutable. We can't ever truly explain it; all we can do is take it in. But that's why we listen. That's why we can't look away. And if this piece teaches us anything,...

14 min
SEP 30

036 :: WHO

FEATURING Passage Du Desir by Johnny Blue Skies / Sturgill Simpson, released by High Top Mountain Records in 2024. Listen / Buy direct "Swamp of Sadness""Who I Am" TRANSCRIPT I know it may not sound like it right now, but I'm here today to talk about country music and a masterful singer who knows just how to play it and how to play with what we expect it to be. Now that sounds a little more like it, though there is a surprising amount of French in the lyrics. But I'll come back to what's surprising; for now I want to focus on how the music sounds and how it's doing everything just right. What I love about this music is the soft-spoken emotion that runs through every beat and measure. You can hear it in the singing, in the way each word is delicately phrased and the whole song is practically whispered. You can hear it in the instrumentation, with its bending guitars and warbling organ, weepy pedal steel and fluttering mandolin. Even that weird accordion from the beginning doesn't sound so out of place, in this context. Which is just to say that this music, like so much country music, is music of the heart, giving voice to its quiet aches and pains. If it doesn't reach the histrionic heights of other styles of music, that's because it's expressing an ordinary kind of heartbreak, the kind to which we can all, sadly, relate. And that's why the vocal delivery here is so essential. When done right, we can hear in it the singer's honesty, sincerity, and conviction. They're not trying to impress us, they're trying to tell it like it is. But then here's the irony: For all its straight talk and musical swagger, this is a song about the singer's own confusion, isolation, and instability. It's a song about the distorting effects of temptation and the "sirens" that keep luring the singer out to sea. It's a song that sees the singer likening themself to Odysseus, that wily man of many turns, the sort of shapeshifting persona that would seem antithetical to country music. But that's the beauty of this song. The singer takes this plain-spoken style and uses it to tell a different, deeper kind of truth, which might run counter to what we expect to hear from a song like this, but is in fact an even more honest statement of what it's really like to exist in this world. So what do you think the singer is gonna have to say in a song called "Who I Am"? Well, the first thing the singer tells us is that they've "lost everything I am, even my name". In an even more stripped down and straight-ahead style than before, they remind us of the wisdom that "nothing ever stays the same". Or, putting it more starkly, "they don't tell you until you die it's all a sham". And the singer shares their relief that God doesn't ask your name when you arrive at those pearly gates, since, as they say, "I couldn't tell Her if I had to who I am". That's this singer's self-introduction. That's what they have to say about who they are. It may seem like a rebuttal of the question, a rejection of its very premise. But a better way to look at it is as the only answer they know how to give. Because what this song really is is a song about aging, and how, as one gets older, it only becomes harder to know oneself, in part because of the traumas and tragedies we all suffer, and in part because of our own avoidance. It's about reaching that age where therapy can't reach us. It's about being...

10 min
AUG 31

035 :: BRAT

FEATURING brat by Charli XCX, released by Atlantic Records in 2024. Listen / Buy direct "360""365" TRANSCRIPT It had to happen. I had to talk about this album. It is brat summer, after all. And you know what's so great about this song? It's not giving voice to some universal feeling, like the thrill of romance or the exuberance of youth. It's not even trying to be relatable. It's just a song about the singer's own preeminence and ubiquity. It's a song about how the singer is "everywhere". If this song makes us feel anything, it's the vicarious satisfaction of a self-fulfilling prophecy or a self-evident proof. And you know what else is so great about this song? It's a total bop, even though it has no right to be. Like, what is this beat? There are hand claps and a bass line that's both rhythmically and harmonically jolting – and that's about it. But by some kind of magic, it works, and worms its way into your head, forever on repeat, drowning out all other musical memories until it becomes the only song you ever hear, the only song you've ever heard, the only song you'll ever need – until we're all just "bumpin' that", as indeed we are. But this song isn't done with us just yet. Really, it's just getting started. It's time for the remix. That same jerky beat is back once again, but pitched up and sped up, and somehow that makes it a good beat for the singer to now rap over. It all makes even less sense than it did before, and that's kind of the point. This is music that revels in its own irreverence, music that's high on its own supply, music that is unafraid of doing something dumb, on the off chance that it may end up being something brilliant. Like, what if it went all techno on us? To which the only reasonable response is: What if went even more techno? Another way to say all this is that the artist is treating their own music like a meme, something to be repeatedly twisted and warped and transformed into increasingly unexpected and ridiculous shapes. And we are being treated to the artist's infinite scroll, an endlessly unfurling mess of musical ideas, a nonstop party that we can only hope will never end.

6 min
JUL 29

034 :: CONFUSION

FEATURING I Am Toward You by How To Dress Well, released by Sargent House in 2024. Listen / Buy direct "New Confusion""Crypt Sustain" TRANSCRIPT From its very first notes, it's like a beatific vision. Almost laughably so, with its arpeggiated harp, ethereal synths, and lush reverb. It welcomes us warmly, sweetly. But before long it will overwhelm our senses. The first voice we hear sounds tiny and distant, dwarfed by the enormity around it, as if singing into the void. And then the voice modulates and duplicates, in the first of many transformations. Quickly the voice mutates even further, pitched up to new heights, until it starts to deteriorate. And then it is distorted beyond all recognition, right as it is delivering its most soulful plea. It's like the song is trying to discover the limits of what music can be. How much can a melody be manipulated before it loses its tune? How much can a sound be bent before it breaks? And what's remarkable about this song is that, despite all its sonic chaos and distortion, it remains a thing of beauty – sparkling, shimmering, and diaphanous. These voices should seem terrifying, like a demonic cabal, and yet, they feel like an angelic chorus, delivering us to another world. And this is only the beginning. The artist is about to push things even further, packing as much as possible into a single sonic moment, producing an experience that's somewhere in between ecstasy and obliteration. It's like this music wants to bring its ensemble of sounds to the brink of annihilation, distorted almost to the point of incomprehension – but not quite. Throughout it all, it remains a thing of beauty. And maybe that's why the music can seamlessly shift between its opening cacophony and these interstitial moments of delicacy, as if a whisper is not the opposite of a wall of sound but just another way of revealing the divine. It's like the song is trying to become as noisy as possible without ever falling into atonality or darkness. It's like a brilliant beam of light, so brilliant that it blinds our vision, without ever making us wish to avert our gaze. And just when you thought nothing more could be added, there are drums. And not just drums, but a stampede of percussion. It's like the Rapture, leaving us guessing as to whether we are being destroyed or saved. It's like every sound that has ever been heard is here in this one moment, and it's beautiful – irresistibly, oppressively beautiful.

9 min
JUN 30

033 :: STILL

FEATURING Sti.ll and Stil. by Taylor Deupree, released by 12k in 2024 and 2002. Listen (Sti.ll / Stil.) / Buy direct (Sti.ll / Stil.) "Snow/Sand (For Clarinets, Vibraphone, Cello & Percussion)" (2024)"snow/sand" (2002) TRANSCRIPT There's a story behind this music, and I'll get to it in time. You can't discuss this music without going into it. But to begin, I just want to take this music in on its own terms, simply for what it itself presents: its sounds, its warmth, its hypnotic repetition. There are only four instruments at play, as the song's title tells us: clarinets, in interwoven harmony; vibraphone, with its single well-timed chime; cello, providing a low ostinato drone; and percussion, in the form of a lone thumping downbeat and a persistent background hiss. Listen closely, and you can pry the different instruments apart; but listen more sensuously, less mediated by thought, and all the instruments blend together into one: a single, breathing organism, pulsating with life. I'm no stranger to ambient, minimalist music. And so, I find it difficult to explain its appeal to someone who doesn't already see it. It is, at first blush, music that is stripped of so much of what we typically appreciate in music: dynamism and contrast, thematic development, the individual expression of emotion. But in fact, all that is still here, but just in miniature. This is music that makes us hear the slightest shifts in pitch and tempo as momentous; music that develops gradually, almost imperceptibly, across time; music that is still expressive of emotion but an emotion that is a cool, contemplative mood. It is music whose drama unfolds over the smallest intricacies of sound, and so makes us newly alive to all those details – to the way that even the simplest sounds contain within them a symphony of ideas. We could, at this point, continue to appreciate this music for what it is – how its original loop is now starting to phase, as the clarinets bend and the chimes recur more rapidly. But like I said at the top, there's a story behind this music, and I can't neglect to mention it. Because this music is not, in fact, an original composition, but rather a reimagining of an earlier work by the same artist – an acoustic rendition of resolutely electronic music. So let us momentarily break the spell of this piece and flip to hear its original counterpart. What a strange and familiar new world, like a parallel universe to what we were hearing before. Sonically, all the same elements are here, but the winds and strings and chimes are now all synthesizers, and the "percussion" is the glitchy crackle of mechanically looped tape. Yet the overall effect of this change in ensemble is a radically altered soundscape that I can only describe as subaquatic, as if the first performance we heard has been submerged underwater, and what we're hearing now is a distant echo ringing out across the ocean's depths. But of course, this piece is not the echo but the original, and what we originally heard is the echo of this, but an echo that brings it into sharper focus and breathes into it new life. So let's snap back. At this point, you may...

16 min
MAY 31

032 :: RACKET

FEATURING This Ain't The Way You Go Out by Lucy Rose, released by Communion Records in 2024. Listen / Buy direct "Light As Grass""Could You Help Me""The Racket" TRANSCRIPT I thought I had heard everything the piano could do. And then I heard this. What a way to announce yourself. It's a deceptively simple accompaniment, keeping time like a metronome and moving between just a few chords. But underneath it's playing wildly with rhythm, shifting between measures of 5, then 4, then 4 again, then 3 – quietly destabilizing us, but all the while still sounding like a pop song. And then the whole song opens up into billowy synth pads and ascending arpeggios and a new, dilated half-time feel, as if everything we'd heard before has evaporated and we're now floating on top of it. And then, just as quickly, we snap back down to earth, and fall back into the stumbling staccato of the verse. And in fact, this back and forth is what the song's about: the experience of shifting between two different modes of moving through life – on the one hand, the struggle of mundane existence, with all its discomfort, doubt, and pain; and on the other, this ethereal vision of a different way of being, without worry or care – though not necessarily a better way of being, for it only achieves its lightness by, as the singer says, "quietly hiding from reality". But as the singer continues, "There's a greatness in our view." Neither vision tells the whole story or offers a full perspective on life. Rather, the truth lies in holding these two different visions together, side by side, as only our minds, or this song itself, can do. But let's not stop there. Let's jump into another song, another feeling, and yet another inventive riff – this jaunty, popcorning, syncopated duet between the keys and the drums. It's not revolutionary, but man, does it ever groove. And then, yet another left turn into the chorus, which reverberates with new sounds of open chords and spectral harmonies. And then, the song starts to tear itself apart, disintegrating into a heap of distortion and halting rhythms. It's all so perfect for a song that's about the incommunicability of one's own pain. It's like the music itself is reaching out for a new language, to express something that mere words cannot. And maybe music can't really express it either; maybe nothing is sufficient to "ever really feel it for you". But music like this is at least enough to make anyone take notice and listen up. So let's do one more. The piano part is now an inversion of the previous two songs, rhythmically simple but harmonically dense, counting out the downbeats with a jazzy chromatic figure. The rhythm section fills things out with a punchy backbeat on the drums and a funky melodic counterpoint on the bass. And as things go on, the sounds get fuzzier, more raucous and resonant, a euphonious cacophony of instruments and effects blending into one. And that brings us to the song's central metaphor: "Cause I'm still picking up the racket / And I hit the ball". Except the song's central metaphor is not actually a metaphor. The singer is quite literally describing their own process of physical therapy after a debilitating illness, which turned the simple act of tennis into a momentous...

10 min
APR 29

031 :: I

FEATURING Tigers Blood by Waxahatchee, released by Anti- in 2024. Listen / Buy direct "3 Sisters""Right Back to It" TRANSCRIPT This is an artist who knows exactly who they are. They know exactly who "you" are, too, the second person in all their lyrics. Every song on this record feels like a frank conversation that needed to happen. It might seem accusatory if it didn't sound so sweet. But that's the grace of honesty that only a clear-eyed observer of life can bring. So let's pull up a chair and hear what this singer has to say. This song, like so many of the singer's others, traces out a relational dynamic, here between a "you" who is selfish and self-centered, to the neglect of others' feelings, and an "I" who has been burned one too many times, and describes their relationship this way: "All my life I've been running from what you want". It's an all too familiar situation, one person taking everything except for responsibility for their actions, while the other is left questioning their complicity as they struggle to break free. We don't know if the "you" of this song is a lover, or a friend, or a parent, or a sibling. But that's kind of the point, as we can see them all in its story and in the beautifully enigmatic imagery that it uses to get at this feeling, with lines like "am I your moat or your drawbridge?" or "it plays on my mind how the time passing holds you like pocket change". Yet what I find most remarkable about this song is not its truthfulness or its poetry, but how the singer doesn't sound at all jilted, or heartbroken, or even just fed up. They're not giving voice to the anger and frustration and sadness that's surely there. Rather, the song feels like it's coming from a place of understanding, of knowing yourself and knowing others, and of finally being able to see a relationship for what it is. And that feels special. It's rare enough to reach a place like that in our own relationships; rarer still for a piece of music to commemorate that achievement, and to encapsulate a glimmer of how it feels. But now let me be honest for a minute. Because as extraordinary as I believe this music to be, I do have to admit that it is just folk music at the end of the day. At first blush you might think that you've heard it all before: the common chord progressions, the easy melodies, that familiar country lilt. So why, then, is this the most affecting song I've heard all year? First, to state the obvious, music doesn't need to be original to move us. And second, it's all in the details: that pristine voice; the perfectly tuned guitar tones; the uncanny harmonization of its chorus duet; and these gemlike lyrics that are like poems unto themselves, like "you just settle in like a song with no end". Other songs may be similar, but no song is just like this. But there's another reason that this song is so affecting, at least to my ears. For me, this music has the special, ineffable quality that comes from an artist making exactly the kind of art they're on this earth to make. What I hear in this music is an artist who has found their voice, an artist who is less interested in writing the "best" songs and more concerned to write the songs that only they can sing. Because, in the end, that's all an artist can really ever do. It just takes some artists longer to get there. Every sound on this record just feels like it's in its right place. And there's nothing quite like that...

10 min
MAR 29

030 :: KNOWER

FEATURING KNOWER FOREVER by KNOWER, self-released in 2023. Listen / Buy direct "Knower Forever" "Do Hot Girls Like Chords?" "It Will Get Real" "I'm The President" TRANSCRIPT I'm ashamed to say it now, but I didn't think I liked this music at first. I resisted it, even. It seemed, to put it simply, too much. And by the way, this music, what's playing right now: it's nothing like the rest of the album. It's nothing like the songs I actually want to talk about. Then again, no song on this album is like the rest of the album. If there's one constant to this music, it's a refusal to stay in any one place. So maybe this, a sumptuous orchestral overture, is the most fitting introduction to an album that never ceases to subvert our expectations – like this. See what I mean when I said that this music seemed like too much? What do you even do with a riff like this? It's so intense and sludgy and just kind of dumb, that it's hard to know whether it's meant in earnest or in jest. But one thing's for sure: the band is playing the heck out of it. And then the song flips on its head, opening up into these bright jazzy harmonies and pillowy synth pads, layered on top of an absolutely killer bass line. It's so ridiculously groovy, it almost feels like a joke, like a spoof of a jam band. And the lyrics don't make things seem any the more serious, being just a list of things that the singer "[is] thinking while you are talking", like "does purgatory have snacks?" and "do hot girls like chords?". But just as the band has us thinking that they're just goofing around, out comes this explosive solo, which is no joke. This is some seriously sick shredding. It's moving faster than I can even hear it. It's the sort of virtuosity that puts a grimace on your face, that feels like it's bringing us to the bleeding edge of what music can be. This is music on overdrive, music that exists to be over the top, music that wants to show us that it can do anything. So perhaps it's no surprise that this next song is something totally different, a sweet, singsong melody addressed to none other than Death. "Hey Grim Reap", sings the singer, as the keys chime in with a syncopated house rhythm and the band gets ready to move. And then, with the verse, the band pulls back, the drums subdividing the beat into almost infinitesimal segments, with the keys and the bass interjecting in a playful unison. I don't know if this is the band doing hyperpop or glitch or chiptune, but whatever it is, it's never grooved so hard. This is music that relishes in being stylistically all over the map, but if it has one consistent quality, it's an aesthetic of flexing, of showing that it can take any musical idea, no matter how wacky or crude, and make it sound like the coolest thing you've ever heard, just by sheer force of musical will. But let's go even bigger. And what's bigger than a punchy bass line? How about a bass line played by a full brass section? How about a song about what it's like to be the President? Yet again, this music is a ludicrous mash-up. The singer's mellifluous voice is paired with impish lyrics, as funky rhythms are...

11 min

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Reflections on the joys of discovering new music

Creator

Willie Costello
Years Active

2020 - 2024
Episodes

37
Rating

Explicit
Copyright

© Copyright Willie Costello
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The Year of Magical Listening