Time travel.

I’m obsessed with time. I’m very nostalgic, constantly afraid/excited about the future, and I get lost in reading about history, particularly personal histories. I like how time seems to stop, how it seems to pass so quickly. I like/hate how each new year feels shorter, how weird it is to compare how much time has really passed with how much time has really passed for people who are younger than me or older than me. I check my phone constantly and set alarms for all sorts of little things then I ignore them all day. For someone without a career or many obligations, I have a pretty elaborate calendar that has things scheduled for up to a year from now. Even my 2011 project is intimately tied up in how time is experienced: it both aims to condense a year into an hour or two and at the same time trap me in that year for probably the next decade. I like time.

I thought it would be interesting to play around with how music fits into this for me. I was going through my collection and came across Ben Folds’ Evaporated and just had to listen to it and immediately it was 2001 and I was walking down the street to the Wawa in Cape May, New Jersey on a sunny fall day on my break from Acrat, the head shop I was working at which was perpetually empty during the off season. I was listening to that album a lot at the time and that song would play in my head constantly on those walks. This sort of thing happens really often for me and I imagine it does for many others as well so I thought it would be interesting to put my whole collection on shuffle and post a few tracks that come up with a description of when and where they take me. I’m no narcissist, though, I’d really like others to do the same. So here, I’ll start off with the Ben Folds song:

The next is Che Gilda Manina from Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme. This is one of the first operas I ever watched. It brings me back to around 2006 or so, sitting in my bedroom at my mom’s house where I was unfortunately living at the time. There’s sort of a double time travel thing going on with this one for me because I’m both at my mom’s house and also in a run down apartment in Paris in the middle of the winter of 1890. For those who don’t speak Italian, Rodolfo just met this girl, his neighbor, and has fallen in love with her and is explaining his bohemian lifestyle. He’s saying how he doesn’t have a thing but he has everything he needs:

David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion brings me to 2011 in San Francisco. My ride to work included a bus trip (on the 28 for those who know, it’s a really nice route) that went up to the Golden Gate Bridge then along the bay to The Marina district where I’d walk another mile over hills which gave me great views of the Coit Tower and all the staggered and colorful houses of North Beach. I listened to this piece for the first time on one of those trips on a sunny day and I remember being transfixed. I hated going to work to begin with but this made me want to stop on one of those hills and just stare out and listen. To hell with work. (Incidentally, this performance is at the San Francisco Conservatory’s Hot Air Music Festival which I’ve been to before and even wrote a little review on. You should listen to other versions if you’re interested, though, as this one is pretty stripped down.)

Ironically, the next thing to come up was Philip Glass’s 5th String Quartet, which I first heard at that very festival in 2006. It was really a nice piece but it actually brings me back to a Missy Mazzoli piece that was also played there called Lies You Can Believe In. It’s a trio piece which was played by a high school group with such vigor and enthusiasm I could hardly believe they were just teenagers. Or maybe that’s why they could play it so well. I think I brought my friend Beryl to this event. These pieces remind me of nights at The Revolution Cafe in San Francisco, too, where you could drink sangria and listen to spontaneous open-mic style classical music: casual as all fuck. (The Mazzoli piece is near the bottom of the link underneath the Glass piece.)

Missy Mazzoli: Lies You Can Believe In

Ah, the Foo Fighters. I really love their first two albums but they sorta crashed into generic pop nonsense after Pat Smear left them. Good Grief isn’t my favorite song on the album but it came up. In this case, it’s really the whole album that transports me, not one particular song. I end up back in junior high in 1996 or so, listening to my friend Mike tell me about how the Foo Fighters are gonna be the new Nirvana. He was wrong, but that’s okay. I also associate it with fall. I associate a lot of music with fall.

This source is even broader than the Foo Fighters album. I started listening to the Mountain Goats after they had already released numerous albums so I just got all of them and listened straight through. I would always listen in the middle of the day, between classes at City College of San Francisco. I had to take a bus from the the Ocean campus to the Mission campus. I’d try to do homework on the way but the ride was so bumpy that I’d mostly just listen to music. It was fall, again, so of course it was always ridiculously hot (fall is summer in SF). I’d have to kill some time after the ride so I’d just wander around The Mission, taking in the people and sights. There was always something new to discover whether it be a cool looking house or some interesting plants or a mural that I never noticed. I really enjoyed those directionless hours.

This one is a little more embarrassing, but what the hell. Elemeno P’s Urban Getaway brings me to 2004, when I was in the midst of an addiction to the MMO Dark Age of Camelot. I say addiction in all seriousness. I loved that game but it stole two years of my young life and I’m not happy about it. I would literally play whenever I wasn’t at work or school. I once spent the entire week between Christmas and New Years without leaving my studio because of that game. (Point is, don’t be like that. It’s bad.) Anyway, I would watch a lot of videos of other people playing the game at the time, for pointers I guess but they were also just entertaining. The one below I watched quite a bit and it’s where I first heard Urban Getaway (it’s the first song he uses). The song actually places me not in any particular physical space but in a digital space. It’s strange feeling such an attachment to a world that doesn’t really exist. (Incidentally, I just now realized that the second line in the song is “Feeling Shostakovich.” I like that.)

It’s kind of interesting to me that my associations don’t necessarily have anything to do with what the music is about. I could go on and on, and I will, but I’m not gonna share the rest. Seriously, though, share some of your own. I’d love to hear what other peoples’ associations are.