The Scottish Enlightenment
Bus-wire-insight
04.Apr.2009
I missed my bus home from work on Tuesday - by an agonising margin - so to comfort my sorry soul I permitted a trip to the venerable WH Smith’s in Buchanan Bus Station, to the magazine shelves. Eventually, it came down to two, and I plumped for Wire magazine, thinking it was Wired magazine. I was a bit gutted, as the bus pulled away from Glasgow - a city with a big art heritage - when I realised that the reason I had never heard of any of the musical subject matter was that it was all avant guarde and that.
I do like listening to people talking about art, whether or not I appreciate the art they are talking about. I dont listen to much classical music, or circumnavigate much sculpture, or hover before many paintings. But I like listening to people talk about these art forms just as much as film, music and books. So I read pretty much all the magazine, and it made me realise some things about music and me.
Avant Guarde music strives. Probably more than any other genre. The musicians talked about in Wire are constantly looking for something more complex, more difficult, less natural. That sounds like a negative set of aims, but when complex, difficult, unnatural art is GOOD, it can be the best, most breathtaking thing. Like Catch 22.
Im a sap in one very important sense - I always want to be like other people I look up to. That’s a big flaw. And so reading Wire my little tag-along self started fretting ‘I need to be like this, i need to be more experimental and complex’. Which is pathetic, but Im used to it, and so promptly snapped the legs of that whipmering little runt. Remember Low, I said. Low, being one of my all time favourite bands, have had a big impact on me, because of the increadible depth of beauty they manage to pour in to such minimalist music.
Anyway, I’ve had to slap the aforementioned sap before with regard to Low - for a while he was constantly whinging that The Scottish Enlightenment had to sound like them and convert to mormonism etc. But now they sit as one reference point among many. The point is, in remembering Low I remembered that in simplicity there can be enormous beauty and emotional resonance. Minimalism in music has been inspiring me recently, and I’ve been thinking about what makes it good. To me, the reason to play slowly and sparsely is to allow the fullness of the note to be appreciated. You hear the tone of the instument change as it stretched out after the attack (Im thinking of guitar here), or you hear the internal bumping and rubbing between the notes in the chord. You allow space before the next note, and that changes its character when it comes. As the melody repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats…it becomes something more than it was to start with. And by repeating beyond what is normal, you’re doing something with your audience too - asking something of them. This is why I find myself wanting to slow down, play less and repeat more.
So by the time the bus got into Dunfermline - a town where art seems a microscopic stranger - I had found myself again, and the sap was gone. I feel confident in what we’re doing as a band. The songs we’re recording are part of my attempt to clear out the ideas that are messy or unpleasant or daft, to find the things that I really believe, or find the questions that are really important, so that what is left stands up against doubt. It’s a bit of a Cartesian process in that sense. And the music we’re wrapping those songs in is forming part of a similar process, taking away the notes and musical elements that tradition and standard practice push forward, to leave the bones of the music, the bits that we really like, the things that made us stop farting around at rehearsal and think ‘this is good, lets keep it’. So were making music that is distilled down to just the bits we believe in. The little runt that tells me to be like other bands gets no say. Hopefully this will result in a record that feels authentic - not authentic like its some old record by some knighted songwriter from Nashville, but authentic like its really true, like you can really believe in it.
In the end, we all really believe in something.
David, from The Scottish Enlightenment
