Hide, Seek, Refrain

I started this post with every intention of bringing you all music I've created. Then I realized that uploading things to Soundcloud at 2 AM isn't the greatest idea in the world. It's like buying concert tickets while drunk; seems like the greatest idea ever at the time, but you end up going to see a poor performance of a band you used to love with some awful openers. Personal experience, of course. I'll never look at Edguy the same again.

But I digress.

In my mental exhaustion from fine-tuning projects for the past 2 hours, not to mention the huge chunk of time I put in being my brother's score copyist (a 14 year old composing modern sounding classical music for string orchestra and piano? My family's completely fucking nuts), I sit here listening to Imogen Heap. It's brought up a memory of a conversation my friend started with me completely out of the blue one day, where he asked if I had ever been moved to tears, or close to it, by a piece of music. Eerily enough, it had happened the day he asked me, while listening to Palmless Prayer/Mass Murder Refrain by Mono and World's End Girlfriend. Why I chose to listen to that particular album on such a shitty day is beyond me; it truly defines and explores the term "beauty in desolation". I could go on for hours about Palmless Prayer, but that's neither here nor there.

What does this have to do with anything? Maybe it's the exhaustion I'm feeling, but sitting here listening to Imogen Heap made me realize how... manufactured everything sounds today. I've been so involved in the mathematical, calculated formulas of writing a pop song lately that I've missed the raw feeling of music. Ke$ha, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, what fucking have you, I've been listening to them all for a while now, mimicking styles and lines and song structures. Not to say I don't like those artists at all, but they're all so EMOTIONLESS. It's all about the pounding drumbeats and hooks. There's no soul in the vast majority of today's pop music.

But maybe that's what makes Palmless Prayer so fucking moving. Maybe that's what can cause my former roommate to not say a single word the first time we listened to "Hide and Seek"by Imogen. The dancefloor rhythms of today must exhaust our ears and minds, making something so simple as a woman with her vocoder become a masterpiece of subtlety, evocation and composition.

I ask you. Find something musical that moves you. It's a feeling too few of us experience.

Thanks for listening.