I’m listening to an album due out next week from a New York-based trio of veteran musicians who’ve dubbed themselves numün. The embrace of lowercase in the band’s name annoys me, if I’m being honest, but their all-instrumental music does not. It reminds me of Pink Floyd circa Dark Side of the Moon, as it’s spacey, tuneful and compelling—and even features Clare Torry-like wordless vocals a la “The Great Gig in the Sky” from time to time. While calling it transcendental meditation set to song is technically wrong, my hunch is that’s about what I’ll say when I put my thoughts into print this weekend.
Some folks enjoy movies, others hiking. I enjoy music and writing, of using my platform to spotlight artists and bands that capture my imagination. The best songs and albums are not static affairs; they’re oceans of sound with waves that lap and crash to shore before retreating to whence they came. Some are stormy, others picturesque, but either/or they beckon us into their depths. If the lyrics to their siren song could be understood (and I might, like Wallace Stevens in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” be projecting here), they would be similar to the conclusion of Frank O’Hara’s “Poem V (F) W”:
among the relics of postwar hysterical pleasures
I see my vices
lying like abandoned works of art
which I created so eagerly
to be worldly and modern
and with it
what I can’t remember
I see them with your eyes
Music works on multiple levels. On the one hand, as I sometimes say, it takes us there, wherever there is. On another, it serves as a floor-length mirror, enabling us to see ourselves in full, both the good and bad. Most importantly, I think, whether a silly love song or mad retort or something in between, music crystalizes what it means to be human in an increasingly inhumane world. (Empathy has fast become a lost art.) To borrow from the final lines of Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric,” “O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,/O I say now these are the soul!”
To return to the question at hand, I most enjoy grooving to songs and albums that speak to this thing called life and then serving as a signpost so that others may find them. If, along the way, I can point people to my other passions—poetry, movies, what have you—all the better.
The Old Grey Cat 