Music can heal. Music can touch lives. Music can ignite the crowd. Music can make one sober. Music can bring peace and calm. Classic music does this for me.
But then music can have some sinister agenda that makes you want to find it out. At first, it hits your ears and you feel something - something you cannot describe. Then you listen again and then start to follow the story, held by the hand of the sound, it takes you on a journey to a place unknown. You stop listening and then your brain keeps replaying the sound, you imagine yourself sitting in a place you have never been to. A cliff, a hammock, on a rock outside the woods, in the room full of nobody, at the edge of space or in a space rocket, outside an untarred road, beside the bedside of someone you don’t know, at the restaurant full of you, in the past, in the future, in between the past and the future but not in the present. You know know you are somewhere unknown but familiar. And this is what Carbon Based Lifeforms does to me.
I just want to listen on and on and on and on and on. Their sound is an art, a tech, a canvas, a structure, a geometry that holds me down. I like the wrestle, the wrestle to get on it. To overcome it and move past it but those sounds keep holding me down. Rather, I keep holding on to them, Its just not explainable. The music glides through my ears, then flows through whatever it is that connects them to my brain and then starts to do the work - the work of thinking, analyzing, humming, imagining, remembrance of the past, thinking about the future, doing nothing, taking it all in, traveling to the spot you have never dreamed of. The work of being human, of vulnerability, of being available. Am I high? No. Am I low? No. But I’m here while my mind is “getting a kick out of it”, as one comment on their youtube page reads.
Between the world and Me. Between art and sound. Between here and there. Up and down, high and low, inside and outside, is where I always am when I listen to Carbon Based Lifeforms. I honestly don’t know how to explain it. How to translate the intangible feeling to tangible words but CBL does this for me EVERY SINGLE TIME. It’s a privilege to enjoy this work of art, to be alive to have listened to this sounds, to be alive to experience this sounds from a living band, to know that they are not dead, to be rest assured that they will do more of this as with time. I’m grateful to God.
What do I do when I’m listening? Usually, I do nothing. I just listen with my eyes closed. But today, I listened while writing this. Yes I was was listening to CBL while writing about CBL, what else would have listened to.
I work with data, thats my day job and some parts of it can be monotonous. What do I do? I listen to CBL to transport me away from the task. I’m grounded enough to complete the task but I’m not on ground. It has transported me to that place I cannot describe. Since its mostly without lyrics, I also listen while I’m coding at home. I run long distances but I’ve not tried running with it. I’ll give it a shot someday.