The Hidden Score

tune: The Whitest Boy Alive - Golden Cage (Fred Falke Remix)

album: Golden Cage 12" (Modular Recordings, 2008)

scene: A reliable world of gray and cool, with field of sighing brush extending to the edges of the curved earth. At the edges, a cage springs up from all sides its tattered surface suggesting long-ignored exit. It’s safe in here, quiet, for Wanda and her solitude.

I will never get enough of Erlend Oye’s lovely voice. He accompanies me to all sorts of places, through all sorts of moods, as I tramp about my world with him on my headphones.

tune: The Knife - Marble House

album: Silent Shout (Mute, 2006)

scene: A frozen landscape caught in polar night and grand constructions of metal and ice razed by wild, childish games.  The atmosphere conjured by the first minute or so of the track is what is really illustrated here: it feels like a very cold, empty space with endless, low skies. There is a clicking of activity and a sluggish build to something not entirely pleasant.

The Knife are consistently haunting for me, weaving about me a shroud with threads of the eccentric, mysterious, perverted, alien, and magical. They inspire me often with vivid imagery.

tune: Zoë Keating - Fern

album: One Cello x 16: Natoma (2005)

scene: A dark, elegant forest in the wane of a long and heavy rain. Massive roots and swelling creeks woven into black, wet soil. Fungi, moss, and spores. The air is cool and full of potential. I created this a couple years ago over the course of a couple days, listening to nothing but "Fern" on constant repeat. It makes the quaint Pub at which I work into the natural work of those ancient roots I’ve imagined and I’m surprised, when I look outside, that it isn’t raining.

All of Keating’s solo work is amazingly atmospheric. Rich, powerful stuff that seems confident in its ability to entrance the listener. I imagine astonishing worlds and epic battles.

tune: Pizzicato Five - Porno 3003: I Music for Sofa; II Galaxy One; III It’s All Too Beautiful

album: Happy End of the World (Matador, 1999)

scene: The lyrics tell of a sort of hallucinatory space station but, as a young girl listening to this (I was 15 when it came out), I always imagined a sort of smothering bamboo forest with rocks that eerily resembled people and seemed to talk at you, particularly one that looked like an old lady and delivered the monologue. In reality it is the beautiful and not old! Maki Nomiya and the song does stray from the hazy forest and into a poppier place around part III of the nearly 10 minute song. It’s like the sun peeking through.

Pizzicato Five does have that enduring quality, and as my favorite group over the course of my life with such pleasurable range, there are many more songs from their repertoire I can (and just might) post.

I have often found myself immediately spellbound by some great (and some otherwise truly mediocre) films that masterfully utilize music to set the tone and reel the viewer (and listener) into the world its creating, be it a fantastical, humid forest breathing with alien life or a humble apartment peeling at the corners and colored with the knickknacks of its lovelorn inhabitant. Creating artwork in my own apartment, I find myself in the company of dreamy, wandering pieces which audibly paint a world similar to the one I am attempting to illustrate.  Sometimes I am whisked away from my own work to imagine places and stories entirely different.  I thought there should be a music blog for these sorts of songs: lovely scores or works that might as well be, songs that make you envision a music video or that make your rain-soaked trip to the supermarket, lost in thought and damp socks, worthy of a poignant moment in your own story.

My proposed format is: 1. the tune, 2. an imagined scene, 2.5 optional link to actual movie or music video, 3. inspired sketch or accompanying art of some sort.

Here’s a stab at it.