Earworms
Music moments that won’t leave my head this week:
- The rhythmic riffing that opens Fugazi’s Red Medicine (my first ever Fugazi album, but it definitely won’t be my last). Catchiest thing I’ve heard since Bye Bye Bye. :P
- The eight note sequence in Ana (Bossanova, Pixies). You hear it for the first time about 30 seconds into the song, and it starts with four ascending notes. I have no idea how to write about it other than referring to the notes that make it up, and just listing the notes doesn’t come close to explaining the grip that little sequence has on me. The best I can do is to say that those last three notes seem to almost chime.
- The trumpets in Wagner’s Tannhauser March. Simple, sunny, jubilant.
- “Plaaaaacing fingers through the notches in your spine” (Two Headed Boy, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel). This album is a universe of wonderful moments, but this one stands out this week, simply because I like the line, and it reminds me of a line from one of my favourite poems.
And I am learning him, learning
the journey of him, the journey of the
cobbled spine and the contours of muscle,
of tongue and lips and teeth, of the old scars and
the steel-toed heart. His warmth winds around me
and his voice binds me with a whispered word.
I trace his veins to their fire source and
dissolve into them, and find the shape of him
in the heart of a flame.
He is the poem I travel.
— One Winged Angels, Koh Tsin Yen
I might see Yen later today if she goes to the poetry reading I’ll be at this afternoon – it’s to promote onewinged, an anthology of young Singaporean writing named after her poem. I’ll ask her if I can put the whole poem up here.