Is this melancholic? Hard call. My thoughts on melancholia are more aligned with the dictionary definition which describes a much deeper condition of depression or sadness. This, to my my mind, is more wistful than melancholic, and that may be halfway up the garden path to melancholy but it’s not quite there. I’ll take it anyway. Wistful is a place I find myself more often than melancholic.

The music itself is right in line with my other (limited) experience with Basinski, which is really only repeated listenings of the entire approximately six hour cycle of Disintegration Loops. It’s open and atmospheric, but still misty, the limits and depth of the sky obscured by mist or smoke. Again, none of the claustrophobia of a lot of ambient music, where the notes tend to corral space and bring it down into a focal point. The notes decay outwards into open space, which is how sound works in an open, natural setting. I can hang my thoughts and questions on the notes and let the music carry them outwards. The answers to the questions and the notes aren’t necessary. Just putting them out there and listening to the echoes fade. There are probably no answers, but just feelings. Feelings aren’t facts. Give them to The Universe.

Maybe for this to portray melancholia, one would have to be in that space already, and just maybe that’s where Basinski was when he composed it. “These are my feelings. This is what they sound like.” In other words, it’s only calling it Melancholia that makes it melancholic, like when an abstract visual artist accompanies a painting with a lengthy description of what it portrays and then the viewer reads it, identifies and nods in agreement. That sounds cynical when I write it. Maybe it’s cynical, or maybe art should speak for itself. (reminder here to rewatch Von Trier’s Melancholia and see if this phenomena plays out that way)

Everything written here could be written off as a bit of verbal wanking, really. I’m more thinking about how people describe or explain their feelings and experiences with feelings. Facility with words and their real meaning varies from person to person but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t prone to hyperbole. There are sprawling lists of overused/misused/abused words: Depression, melancholy, genius, love, migraine, literally, hate. Hate and love are probably at the top of the list, and depression follows closely behind. Hyperbole doesn’t lend any weight to experience or feelings. It makes them, if anything, inert or even impotent or banal.

Pedestrian.

The music here is not pedestrian. It doesn’t fall under the aural wallpaper category that plagues ambient music. The muted keyboard repetitions give it movement. It’s conducive to thought and reflection, both of which are difficult when in the throes of melancholia. Yes, I would retitle this Wistful. There are verbs in the definition of wistful as opposed to nouns that just sit there in a sort of low-key onomatopoeia. It’s kinesthesia, I think, that sets Basinski’s compositions apart from the genre.

Movement. Yes, movement. One more work day and I have a short break from it, a longer than average long weekend. Five or six days of respite. There will be movement though I’ve given no thought to direction. It will start somewhere tomorrow morning in a train station or perhaps an airport. A credit card, a toothbrush, a backpack and two very itchy feet. There’s never been any doubt in my mind that Planet Earth is a friendlier place when its moving beneath my feet. I can’t really put my finger on the whys and why-nots but I’ve always felt more centered and whole when I’m outside my familiar and scenery is rushing by just outside the window of a moving vehicle. It’s never about plans or destinations because there is always the coming home at the other end. It’s about the movement itself.

Simply the movement.

Selah.