day 17 - 18/11/20 : Music, Fermanagh, & Carmex

Hello folks ! We're now sitting on $1,653 for the funds raised towards The Water Project and our wee group Privileged To Help. 49 people will receive clean, safe drinking water thanks to your donations and I couldn't be more chuffed with the support throughout the past few weeks. Thank you.

I've been inspired to talk about music today by a few of Tom's blogs, specifically his most recent one. He touched on something that I wanted to delve a bit further into so let's get started.

One of the concepts we've been applying during our module on Film & Sound is what is called Acoustic Ecology. When I first started learning about it, I felt it was from the same wacko pot as aromatherapy or astral projection n that but I've paid a fair bit of credence to it since studying and writing more about it. Acoustic Ecology refers to how our soundscapes have an unconscious effect on our mood as well as our wellbeing. Sound design in Film is historically overlooked but can have a profound effect on how you perceive what is onscreen and you'd be shocked by the amount of minute details layered into the films you watch (Baby Driver, Gravity, Godfather 1 and Apocalypse Now to name a few).

Moving on from film, I wanted to talk about acoustic ecology and my own music taste or the things I associate with different songs. In his blog, Tom beautifully phrased the deeper emotional comfort that music can offer; "There are periods in life where everything’s gone wrong and you’re feeling awful and, for a while at least, you just don’t have the time or patience for someone telling you to get your mind out of the gutter or trying to do something to cheer you up — a bad thing has happened, and you want to hear something which seems to resonate and empathise with that negative experience." He talked about an artist helping him grieve after his Granda passed away and I had an almost identical experience with my Granny. When she died last summer I had a few days that just felt non-stop. The day I got the call that she had died, I was in Berlin interrailing with my mates and got a flight home the same day. The next day I was feeling exhausted and sick from the flight but because my Granny had lived with us for the past 9 years, we had a wake in Belfast and the following day had another wake in our home in Fermanagh. The following day was the funeral. The morning of the funeral I was in the shower and 'Say Something' by Bright New World came on. Now, for the past two weeks or so from when I realised my Granny really was at death's door, it was as if I was waiting for the grief to hit me and it just didn't come. When that song started playing, I was surprisingly relieved to have a wee cry in the shower. I liked the song enough but was never too fussed about it, and yet everytime I hear it come on now it reminds me of that sort of purge of held in emotions for my granny that I felt so that when it came round to the actual funeral, I was a bit more ready for it.

There's a few other songs and albums that remind me of other points in my life. Randomly, I've started listening to Billy Talent again and it was like greeting depressed 14 year old Hugh again. Lots of these songs have become anthems or indicative of a certain feeling I had at that point in my life. Another album is Ladder by Andrew Belle which just reminds me of my first breakup, crying in my kitchen and wallowing in my own pity. A combination of the Hamilton soundtrack and the cinematic soundtrack for Swiss Army man reminds me of the rejection of not getting into Uni and feeling a little bit lonely while I was in tec repeating A-Levels. She's Not There by The Zombies reminds me of sunny early mornings in empty streets as I went to work at the start of lockdown. Blind Man in Amsterdam by George Ezra reminds me of my niece Molly being born. Michal Jackson songs actually remind me of being 4 year old playing Simpsons Hit & Run. I could keep rattling off the random connections I make between myself and music but we'd be here all day and I'd run out of words.

One thing I am stumped by with music is which comes first - the emotion or the music? The next most important question after the chicken and the egg. Typically, I'm already in the mood to listen to a certain band or playlist or song and the music serves to emphasise the feeling, if that makes sense. If I'm listening to a song that's the opposite of what I'm feeling, it just feels grating. My working theory is that music, just like storytelling (because often that's what music is), takes you on a journey. You'll come across some albums that are catered to be listened to in their full. They're all strong songs by themselves but they're not isolated and feed into the next seamlessly so you're fully absorbed by this harmonious journey you're taking. I love that shit. The reason these songs probably stick in my mind so much and bring back all this nostalgia is to with acoustic ecology and how the songs themselves are reflexive of a very fixed point in time, as if the entire story and moral of that song is to summarise that singular feeling. I quite like that. I'm rarely not listening to music and while I only have some limited musical ability, music does act as a sort of crutch to me, if you get me. It eases that burden in your chest and the lyrics