Music and Fractal Landscapes

It’s My Way of Staying Connected – She, Sir

It’s not too often that I’ll hear to something and instantly love it–usually it takes a few listens before I really get into a song–but this song by the Austin-based She, Sir is one of the rare ones that absolutely blew me away from the first second.

Shades of My Bloody Valentine, Mogwai, and pretty much any other band known for creating layers of sound, but there’s something beyond that. This is not your typical fare; this is what would’ve happened if shoegaze was around when Bach was growing up. “Intricately crafted” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Every sound has its counterpoint, every note is in place. You can almost hear the mathematical precision. But it is not cold or lifeless. It reminds me of a quote attributed to Douglas Adams: “Mozart tells us what it’s like to be human, Beethoven tells us what it’s like to be Beethoven, and Bach tells us what it’s like to be the universe.”

Seriously. That’s the kind of music we’re talking about here.

Or another Douglas Adams quote, this time from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (another part of the same chapter I quoted from a few months ago when talking about Laura Veirs):

Music of any complexity (and even “Three Blind Mice” is complex in its way by the time someone has actually performed it on an instrument with its own individual timbre and articulation) passes beyond your conscious mind into the arms of your own private mathematical genius who dwells in your unconscious responding to all the inner complexities and relationships and proportions that we think we know nothing about.
Some people object to such a view of music, saying that if you reduce music to mathematics, where does the emotion come into it? I would say that it’s never been out of it.
The things by which our emotions can be moved – the shape of a flower or a Grecian urn, the way a baby grows, the way the wind brushes across your face, the way clouds move, their shapes, the way light dances on the water, or daffodils flutter in the breeze, the way in which the person you love moves their head, the way their hair follows that movement, the curve described by the dying fall of the last chord of a piece of music – all these things can be described by the complex flow of numbers.
That’s not a reduction of it, that’s the beauty of it.

The feeling of rain on your skin, the 59th decimal point of Pi, the way it smells right before the first snow of the year, the swirling of the cosmos…it’s all here. In the last 24 hours, I have listened to this song a dozen times, and every time I notice something new. I suppose eventually it will get old but I’m guessing not for a while.

Anyways, “It’s My Way of Staying Connected” is on the EP Who Can’t Say Yes, which is scheduled for release sometime this fall. When a more exact date is released, and it goes on sale, I will let you know and (strongly) encourage you to buy yourself a copy. In the meantime, check out their myspace page to listen to some more.