Happiness

Some music fans- if not most music fans- have no real, personal reference to the artist who’s music they admire. Yes, some fans of rock music might care very much about John Lennon’s thoughts on fashion in 1968, or Henry Rollins’s method of buying bus tickets in 1985, but that is relatively rare, even among huge fans. They’d much rather emotionally grapple with I’m so Tired or In My Head.

Most people react to a song itself, to its real or imagined meaning to them as individuals with their own very real lives. The music on the charts, i.e. the music that people are actually purchasing every single week, is never a reflection of this visceral reaction to song. If so, they reflect only in part. Much of chart-bound music is music to dance to, or weep to, or make love to. But only some of these songs actually outlive their shelf life and become something meaningful.

I hardly know Esbjorn Svensson, and not just because he was never on any chart. Yet, while on the train to Calcutta last year, after watching an Esbjorn Svensson Trio concert, I felt really sad that he was no longer alive. This wasn’t an entirely sentimental feeling; it was in large part because I like the music that he made, and as he was only in his early forties and at his creative peak at the time of his freakish passing, I felt great regret.

In a sense, I was mourning the drying up of a kind of song emanating from a particular musical source using a distinct musical language that I deeply love. That music imparted to its source- a man called Esbjorn Svensson- a particular glamour; an allure that in turn attracted me to him as a person. And there’s also the fact that the musical persona of Svensson also included the music that he in turn had soaked up. Some of these influences I connect with personally and some I’ve never heard. But its still the music that his band made, that I was missing.

There’s this song on the Dark Was the Night indie charity compilation called Happiness, an eight and a half ambient piece by an Iceland-based duo called Jonsi & Alex. More about them later. I don’t usually go for ambient music, like say Brian Eno’s, and when the song started playing, I instinctively skipped it. But I cannot let any song go without hearing at least a little part of it, so I started playing the song somewhere randomly in the middle. What I heard drew me in and captivated me- introspective, meditative strings playing a long held line that glided between two emotionally high notes, via deep troughs in between. The melody that was thus created was a widescreen, soft-focus window into a world of terrible beauty.

Seeing Valley- While I was listening to the song, in front of me on my computer screen was a picture I had recently taken during a stay in Tunganath high up in the Kedarnath hills. The picture was of a deeply forested valley, many thousands of feet below me, between the spurs of two gigantic ranges. A pretty captivating image it was, and rendered all the more eerie by the light. The sun streaming through billowing clouds above me created a lightly hazy, shimmering, and constantly changing screen of fractured light. On film, I had captured a brief moment, and the rest of the forbidding loveliness of the scene lay in what it didn’t make apparent. .

Hearing Happiness was like tuning into a bed of shifting, beeping reverb drones from which arose yet another stretched out electronic drone that kind of switches on like a tube light, in starts. Under this new drone, the earlier one continued, and then other electronic elements joined in, winking in and out. It was like trying to listen in on a gigantic radio antenna somewhere, while an electric music of the spheres suffusing every sense. I felt like I was swimming in a sea of electricity, only the particles were made up of notes. From within this swirl of sound came the stately strings, gradually swelling in volume and detail like the realization of a beautiful and vital memory lost. For a while- which seemed like an eternity of bliss tinged with longing that I was floating in- the strings played that one figure, over and over again, like the regular breathing of a gigantic organism. Through this I could hear the underlying drone, almost entirely overpowered by this grand emotion. Then the strings started falling, gently, like a floating feather coming to rest. It dissolved into a bittersweet coda of a three-note piano figure infused with a shifting sheet of white noise. Then this too dissolved, slowly, a true dying fall.

Hearing this music, and transfixed by the scene in front of me, I felt a welling up of intense longing. I wanted to cry. I felt like Adam must’ve felt after the Fall. It is cruel to have seen Paradise. You know happiness, and when you’ve lost it, you know that you will never know that feeling ever again. Yet I try. I listen to Happiness almost everyday.

Its part of an album of ambient work called Riceboy Sleeps by the duo Jonsi and Alex, which came out this year. Jonsi, is of the Icelandic band band Sigur Ros. Alex Sommers, his boyfriend, is an American musician and artist. Following their limited edition picture book in 2006, this is their first foray into music.

This got me randomly wondering.

I thought of the many gay people I know, and then of something that I’ve seen in their eyes. To me it always seemed that they’ve known great love, a swooning, swept-off-the-feet love. But I also saw the eventual tempering of that grand feeling, in the face of intolerance and bigotry. I don’t know if that spurred the duo to compose this music, but then again, does it really matter? Mine is a subjective point of view, just like any fans. You’ll hear other things, and see differently. But maybe, like me, you’ll love the song.