Music in March 2024

March was the Month of Dune. I crammed myself into the lower rows of the theater on Friday the 1st, opening night, to stare up at Chalamet’s comically-exaggerated chin thanks to the curvature of the IMAX screen. I returned twice more, to see it from every vantage point over the course of the month. What stuck with me most from that first viewing was the overpowering sonic experience of Arrakis; when the spice harvester begins its percussive dance, I felt myself physically vibrate in sympathetic resonance. But far more than the sound design, I became obsessed with Zimmer’s score, which I think rivals Interstellar as his best work in a voluminous career. The music truly echoes the course of the story, synthesizing the disparate themes of the first film into a purposeful, majestic, horrifying concert. I’ve put several tracks throughout my playlist, but the final one, Kiss The Ring, opens such a vista as words cannot describe.

But I must move on. But the theme of overwhelming, mechanistic power continues in Sufjan Stevens’ album The Age of Adz, whose titular track sounds like a musical adaptation of Metropolis (although of course we’ve already seen that done, and excellently). And the eponymous refrain of I Want To Be Well expresses what may be the central tension in our lives: do we want to be well? Woodkid’s Iron continues the theme of fanatic, driving force, building and building an escalating tension as it plunges from the clifftops into the unknown.

There are a few other scores in this list besides Dune. Cho Young Wook’s baroque chamber piece tells you exactly what sort of spider’s web Sympathy For Lady Vengeance will be; Amine Bouhafa’s work on The Summit of the Gods haunts the mind and suggests within itself (though I have not yet seen the picture) the first of Everest’s many ghosts joining its spectral chorus; Kevin Penkin once again opens a cavernous eldritch space within a piece of music with his score for Tower of God; Joe Hisaishi, taking a fairly different tone for a very different kind of film than his Ghibli work, creates a fatalistic melancholia in scoring the incredible, bleak HANA-BI; and Carter Burwell demonstrates the worth of restraint and simplicity in his arrangement of What a Friend We Have in Jesus, used to wistfully reconcile the passing of a quarter century of life in the final moments of True Grit. Amid all these, we find the master of sentiment himself, the Great Ennio Morricone, at work on Cinema Paradiso, a film so utterly sincere in its sentimentality that, like its score, it overcomes every objection of trope or triteness and compels the audience to weep.

Sentiment is so often the key for me – I am in that regard, simple. For instance, I am not a massive Lana Del Rey fan, but these tracks she released last year are so fragile and openhearted that they cannot be denied. Returning to the forward current of the musical river, London Grammar’s album Truth Is  A Beautiful Thing rolls on like the Styxian Thames under the cold night fog. And We are the massacre, World’s End Girlfriend’s bizarre elegy, fuses the sense of dark fear (are those screams in the background?) with the somber catharsis of honest tears and a crescendo of noise which brute-forces its way into a kind of alien harmony.

Chick Habit, If You Should Try To Kiss Her, and Trailer Song all appear on the soundtrack of 1999’s But I’m a Cheerleader, and they have a particular mood and moment frozen in warm amber. Then there’s music from Necry Talkie, always upbeat and sunny, and Vaundy, similarly jaunty. Softcult, on the other hand, is a poison-tipped fragment of neo-grunge, whose gall is transmuted by Florence+The Machine’s alchemy into a frenetic spiral, dancing its way up from the dust and into the daylight.

And yes, I did put in ABBA, who I love. There’s nothing like some good old disco. Picking up that spirit of fun is clammbon, who spin it into a melody of gold. Hitsujibungaku are full-throated and warm, while DAOKO is sinuous and cool. Then, of course, there’s Takagi’s album Tai Rei Tei Rio, with joyful dances of life and folkish hymnodies. You And Whose Army? begins lazily, before tipping over into a waterfall of blood.

I stumbled onto Laufey’s album Bewitched, and was immediately captivated by this jazzy time-warp that sounds like it was recorded about seventy years ago, if not more. I’m not an artistic conservative or radical – I’m an artistic omnivore: I want more and more and more of every possible thing, and so it’s a shocking delight to find music that seemed consigned to a past era revivified with entirely new songs, sung by a young voice in an old mode.

Another artist that was new to me this month was Asobi Seksu, whose 2006 album Citrus has all the tart buzz of its namesake. There’s a kind of warm sonic bath created by the liberal dispensation of so much guitar, which reminds me a little of The Sundays, but with a very particular aftertaste. I like it. (<This is the caliber of criticism money can’t buy; you have to get it foisted on you for free, like a brochure).

Confess feels like raw sugar cut with pine sawdust, snorted entire. 2 Cool 2 Care sounds very Canadian (complimentary) for some reason – but it turns out Burch is from Detroit, which is almost Canada. In Losing My Mind, Montaigne’s usual raw vulnerability is set to an amazing souped-up tune, impossible not to move to. And Making It Through voices a proposition that I have started seriously considering – that perhaps “just making it through is the lesson” – perhaps the Gospel we’ve received is not one that demands glorious achievement, but simply living, as time runs out, as it should, could be enough.

Finally, I became enamored of the score for the video game Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (which I have not played). English composer Jessica Curry managed to create a haunting, elevating, and ultimately transcendent choral work, which adapts from scripture the lament of those who wait in suffering on the relief of the Lord, hoping in fear.  

Alaskan Autumn 2023

Now that the snow is weeping itself into the sod and spring is haltingly underway, it’s time to post some pictures of my first Autumn in Alaska. Seasons are generally either astronomical and exact, or subjective and circumstantial, and I prefer the latter. So in my reckoning, fall began in the last week of August, when the air first felt crisp on a grey day, and the grass began to attain a reddish tint. On that day I went to Reflection Lake, a modest pond ensconced in the naith formed by the confluence of the Knik and Matanuska Rivers. I must admit to a degree of nostalgia – the light and the weather so reminded me of North Bend.

The following week was Labor Day, and pressed by the lateness of the season, I forced myself to cross two things off my list, without which I would have felt anxious I was too cowardly to properly enjoy Alaska, but which were nonetheless occasions for some anxiety. The first was to camp by myself. Now, I have a great deal of experience camping, and am very comfortable in a tent; I am even quite comfortable in a tent by myself, including in places with large fauna like Yellowstone. But it's still difficult to sleep when you’re worried, and the middle of nowhere in Alaska is very much outside my experience.

Driving up the Glenn highway revealed a wilderness of sepia, exhaling vapors even on a sunny day. After turning North on the Richardson, the ruddy tundra grass leapt to meet the declining sun such that every field became a glory of color. The Gulkana River cut through the red like azure floss, and its Glacier attained an almost Tibetan cast in the saffron robes of fall. Yes I know – the grass is red, the rivers are blue, my prose is purple.

Rainbow Mountain is a whole palette, of course, and I arrived at exactly the right time of day to see it fully illuminated. I dipped over the pass just to see the Alaska Range up close, and it was wonderful how different the scenery looked from just two months before. A simple change in color, lighting, atmosphere, and a small lowering of the snow line, transformed the mountains into a country entirely strange.

I turned back south, and then west onto the Denali Highway. The tundra this road cuts through is BLM land, and can be camped on essentially at will. The first time I had driven it, in July, the road was enfolded in clouds down to the hilltops; but this first evening the gilded fields unrolled all the way to mountains whose only limit was haze and my decrepit eyesight.

I found a spot to camp just east of Tangle Lakes, on the north side of the road. Below, you can see the view from where I set up my tent. It was chilly on the tundra at night, but by carefully wrapping myself in a burrito of fleece and down I quickly became quite cozy and comfortable. The night was bright with moonshine, and I was mostly untroubled by fear of the bears (or drunk moose). I will say, however, that just before I rose, shortly after waking in the early morning, I heard a sound near the head of my tent, perhaps a few yards away in the bushes, that sounded like nothing so much as a large animal sneezing. I never did see what it was; I struck camp shortly after, and didn’t go poking around to find out.

The second thing I crossed off my list which challenged my comfort zone was going paddling. I love canoeing on tranquil sloughs and lakes, but I have always gone with other people. In the absence of anyone else, however, I had to content myself with a solo kayak rented from the friendly owner of Tangle Lakes Lodge, where I was also able to procure a plate of pancakes. I don’t have any pictures from the boat, but you can see from what follows that the day was grey and wet, and it was with trepidation that I allowed myself to be thrust onto the water. The worst part was the beginning, because to enter the main body of the lake I had to paddle through a gentle, but still noticeable current where the lake flows through a narrows. As you can surmise, I’m not used to being on water that moves at all. From there, though, I spent about an hour wending my way around the lake, enjoying myself more and more as I went. After returning to the lodge, I set off down the foggy highway toward Cantwell, chariot covered in grime from the road which snaked its way up and down fir-covered rises and above the braided Nenana River.

I had meant to camp some more, but between the tent and myself we were a bit soggier than anticipated, so I went back home from Cantwell that same day. On the next decent day, however, I drove up to Hatcher Pass, and scrambling to get some purchase on the crumbling scree, I witnessed the rapid passage of light and dark over the summit of the pass, as the clouds breathed their way around the peaks. Descending, I found that in Palmer there are pastures greener than I expected to find above 60 degrees of latitude.

Then, mid-way into September, my oil leak became much more pronounced. Because the places I wanted to take it were full up, and because I am sluggish about such things, for about a month I did not drive anywhere to speak of, but simply walked back and forth to work – which in my case is a pleasantly short and flat commute. I took the time to walk around my neighborhood in North Spenard, to see that my neighbor’s poppies were still in bloom even as the trees at Chester Creek were already browning.

Thankfully the only thing wrong with my car was a loose gasket, and once it had been resettled in place I headed back to Hatcher Pass to see what a month of Autumn had done to the place. The change, even in early October, was quite profound; the hills were already indistinguishable from the white fleece of clouds which hung above (and in cases, below) them. South from the pass, the sea was undergoing the same change, as the watery grey of the Knik Arm bled into the watery grey of the sky.

Over the next few weeks I stopped in Bicentennial Park several times, often after church, to observe the progress of the fall. Each day the sun rapidly declined, which only augmented the beauty of its angle while it remained up, and the birch trees and dead grasses glowed with the last of its yellow light.

Then came the frost. First, one morning my windshield was stenciled with crystals. That same day I drove to Girdwood, and saw that the snowline above Turnagain Arm was a sharp divide of ice. The valley above the town felt like something from a different continent, one higher and less green, now that the leaves were bare.

Exploring from Girdwood to Portage, I was astonished at the intensity of the frost. The veins of a leaf were replicated and exaggerated in ice; and the grass, even in the sun, extruded a forest of flat crystals, some an inch long, yet thinner than a sheet of paper. The ponds were not simply frozen: they were locked up in a way that preserved their layers of ripples as well as the brush strokes of their icy coat. Portage Lake was still unfrozen, but the waterfalls had changed from noisy white cascades to silent pillars.

On another day, leaving behind the forlorn, south-staring satellite dishes near my home, I probed round the corner of the Knik Arm, into a neighborhood fully shadowed by a steep mountain to its south. Here the frost had already accumulated so much that everything was desaturated, as if bleached. The air hung bitter, and the world seemed as dead as the abandoned cars which littered the woods. Only the patchy ice on the river moved, though it too would soon cease.

Finally, I returned to Bicentennial Park, and found that I could now walk on what had been marsh. Out on the surface of the pond, a child was skating with their parents. The sky above, even in mid-afternoon, already had the quality of watercolor that is too much water and too little color, so diminished was the sun. I did not know it yet, but this, at the end of October, was the terminus of Autumn. The next time I came to this park, it would be unrecognizable.