One way to listen to music–and by to I mean up and over and through and around music–is to imagine it as proposing a set of ideas for our consideration. From this perspective we can think about any music as sonically embodying, modeling, and organizing itself through these ideas. As we listen the ideas become present through the evanescent flow of the music as its sounds resonate and evaporate over time.
Mark Fell’s “Multistability 6-B” (henceforth M6B) is composed of just a few synthetic sounds: warbling synth, traces of a bell-like aura, hand claps, a pitched hi hat sped up into white noise, and a stuttering kick drum that effectively doubles as a gritty bass. As I listened to the track and wondered about the sources of its enchantment I took to trying to focus on the ideas the music’s flow seemed to embody. Could I enumerate them? I can try. First, and most noticeably, M6B incorporates displacement–parts that you expect to be in one place seemingly are and aren’t at the same time. Sometimes this appears to be a function of the placement of individual sounds, other times a matter of the piece’s overall fluctuating tempo. I first noticed this with the piece’s hand claps: they seem to be squarely on 2 and 4 but then keep sliding over ever so slightly in one direction or another, a detail I confirmed only when trying to snap along with my fingers. Second, M6B uses repetition and stasis: the same parts–displaced or not through placement or tempo–keep going and going which creates a pleasing sense of stability. Except sometimes this going and going is subtly more than that, which brings us to a third idea, contraction and elongation, which I noticed somewhere around 1:42, where that stuttering kick drum first begins changing the length of its phrase, as if opening and closing. Though these contracting and elongating fluctuations are continuous in the music I noticed some major ones beginning around 5:00 until the end of the seven minute piece. It’s one of the oldest musical devices: play a phrase, then make it progressively shorter or longer. There’s a mathematical logic to this kind of transformation that is always pleasing to behold, no? This brings us to a fourth idea, density: those stuttering kick drum fills and hi hat speeding into a hi hat blur fill a lot of the music’s space; the keyboard and hand clap parts are merely tracing broad outlines on top. A fifth idea is what we might call spatiality or the stereo sense produced by the warbling synth and the bell-like aura: we hear those parts subtly bouncing from one ear to another which lends the piece space (perhaps a respite from the kick drum and hi hat density) through another kind of motion. All this leads to a final idea suggested by the music: utility. This may be the most important question to ask of any music we encounter. With regards to Mark Fell’s M6B: What is this music for? You can’t dance to it. It isn’t ideal for selling cars. It’s not a love song. Yet it is tonal, consonant, kinetic and organized–the opposite of noise. I like this music because it perceptibly and beautifully grasps at things, moving this way and that, provoking us to think about the modes of thinking contained within itself.
brettworks 