Wednesday 12 November 2008

Listening To Music (2)

Last Saturday, accompanied by some members of the cast of Howard’s Way, I went to see a tango orchestra. No dancing, just the music. It as a free concert in a community centre on the west side of the city. The woman from the opening trio might have fit the bill of a working class teen mum in a British sitcom airing at about 7.30pm.  When she began to sing I lost my breathe a little. Quite amazing. Tango is the most melancholy, raw and simultaneously sophiscated music I can think of….(I don’t claim to understand it but I think I’m falling in love with it).

I continue to be naively amazed by listening to music on the mobile walkman, amazed as if it had only just been invented. Again these observations will be so obvious to most people I probably shouldn’t bother but sometimes a song and a location perfectly coincide, the music soundtracks'  the moment so effectively you feel as if you are in your own biopic, like your life is being directed. 

The sound of a passing train seeps seamlessly into the ambience of Alva Noto/Ryuchi Sakamoto’s Logic Moon in perfect stereo. As the aisle of a bus transforms into a catwalk for an unconnected stream of exceptionally beautiful women, Jacques Dutronc’s J’aime Les Filles strikes up (and makes me grin like an idiot). On disembarking the same bus I get the geek proto-punk of the The Modern Lovers' Someone I Care About -  as if it were a cold shower or a cautionary reply for its predessor. 

Sometimes it is an orchestrated collision – I select Richard Youngs’ Summers Edge and bliss out for 16 minutes in the Jardin Botanico in Palermo. If only for the title, Will Oldham’s Southside Of The World would make sense I suppose, but there’s something else there too.  I don't know if Juana Molina fits because I know she's Argentinean or because well, it just fits. 

I still haven’t visited the Cematario De Recoletta. Perhaps I have a knee jerk reaction to the prospect of seeing the final resting place of the obscenely rich and famous in a country that is full of poverty. I guess eventually I'll go (but really only to listen to Pavement’s Grave Architecture at the same time).


No comments: