On Music and Blurring

What do you call it when a sound unravels you?

Author, Mid-blur in 2010. Photograph by Ingrid Johansen.

Do you ever feel swept away by music? Like there’s a sort of unreality that consumes you when a certain song resonates? Or maybe you’ve been to a concert that has provoked an unexpected reaction in you– a heaviness behind your eyes, maybe a couple of tears, or even a veritable waterfall of salty tears streaming down your neck? 

I have spent my life seeking out this sort of paranormal experience. I want music to eviscerate me. That’s probably why, despite my best judgment, I have dedicated my life to making music. I want to feel the weightlessness that music gives me, again and again and again. I am constantly trying to remain vulnerable to this sensation. As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve found myself less able to access this vulnerability. Perhaps I’m jaded, or perhaps I’ve tapped out the well of disbelief. Maybe music is kind of like a drug in that sense– each time you feel the high it’s a fraction less exciting than the time before. Whatever it is, I’m trying to correct my course. 

This blog will likely become many things, but for now I want to use it as a way of exploring and preserving the sensations that music can give. Do you remember a time where you were undone by music? I remember many, and yet they all blur together. Maybe that’s what’s so addictive about it. The way I tend to describe that feeling, especially when it comes to experiencing live music, is a blurring. To borrow from Eminem, it's sort of like you ‘lose yourself in the music, the moment’. 

I can hardly recall the names of bands that I saw as a teenager going to punk shows, but I vividly remember the blurring sensation of the moshpit. My brother and I would go with our friends to 924 Gilman in Berkeley on weekends. We weren’t punks, really– we drove from Piedmont, blasting Kid Cudi in our parents’ SUVs, wearing Patagonia and pretending we understood Camus. We stuck out like sore, waspy thumbs in a sea of studded vests and patchy pants, but we craved the energy, and dutifully attended all manner of shows. There, pushing against strangers, moving in circular and vaguely ritualistic motions, something unwound in me that I’ve never been able to fully wind back up. 

How can I describe it? It was as if time stopped moving forward and instead turned in on itself, circling around the same hypnotic blast beat, falling into place in 4/4 time, 180 bpm. I can still hear the hiss of a hardcore drummer eclipsing all other sound, the blend of crash cymbal and faint melody, a singer screaming louder and louder so as to cut through the impossible sonic wall created by half-stack amplifiers and 26 inch kick drums, can still feel the punch of the subwoofer in my legs. And there we were, the audience, a patchwork of rabid teenagers, who, for a glorious moment, had managed to escape the clutches of reality by mimicking the circular nature of the rhythm, dancing in violent circles around each other. The edges of our individual selves seemed to melt away, and we became component cells of a single organism responding only to sound and light. Blurring. 

Whenever I went home afterward I would try to reconcile this incredible, rapturous feeling with the rest of my life. I couldn’t, because real life pales in comparison. It tracks, then, that I made the terrible life choice of becoming a musician (joking but a little serious– iykyk). Fifteen years have gone by since then and I still find myself trying to recreate that initial magic I felt, when, as a teenager, music blurred my whole world.