Vol. 3: September 11 - QuietTunes III: Information Density
Quietness isn’t just about volume. For some musics, it’s about the density of information (or lack thereof). The pieces today use to information density to make you listen closer or not at all.
(They’re also the shortest and the longest pieces in our series, by FAR)
Ninjoi. - Spirited
Lo-Fi hip-hop is muzak made art. Combining elements of hip-hop, technological decay, and nostalgia, LFHH seeks to foster an air of chill sentimentality (usually). It has a long, fascinating history, coming from the vaporwave aesthetics of the 80s, with its hazy neons, synthy reverbs, and plastic consumerism, through 90’s hip-hop, Toonami, and Cowboy Bebop. Updating vaporwave for a digital age, LFHH uses detuned, jazzy synths and granulated atmospherics to recreate that warped tape track vibe, then finishes it off with a sparse, mid-tempo beat.
Ninjoi. is a popular artist, an oasis amidst a desert of mediocre, neon mirages. His style often incorporates old anime tunes (this is One Summer Day from Miyazaki’s Spirited Away) as an explicit callback to a relic of childhood nostalgia about childhood nostalgie (that ol’ one-two). This is not really music to be listened to, though you can. It’s music to create a mood, or, as the million and a half playlists put it: music to study to.
It’s not necessarily just marketing that makes this music to study to. There may be some science to back it up, as Brian Woods, the lead science officer at Brain.FM noted:
good focus music has no vocals, no strong melodies, 'dark' spectrum, dense texture, minimal salient events (more on that later), heavy spatialization, a steady pulse, sub-30-200Hz modulation and above 10-20Hz modulation
LFHH has all of these elements. Listen to the Ninjoi. again, but imagine it with lyrics, a breakbeat, bright, metallic percussion, or the guitar solo from Back to the Future (for nostalgia’s sake). You wouldn’t really feel relaxed (but you would feel cooler with that guitar solo). These elements also describe a lot of heavy metal music, maybe explaining why metal can be cathartic and relaxing as well.
Speaking of back to the future, nostalgia may key us in on another soothing element of this as well:
“The strongest way that we respond to music is the associations we’ve had with it,” [director and associate professor of music therapy at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, Teresa] Lesiuk said. The videos’ album-art tropes — serene anime loops of children, or cartoon animals, studying — may hint at “people wanting to feel relaxed, going back to their childhood, going back to before things were stressful”…
The inclusion of nostalgia reminds us, during stressful times, of more carefree times, of the simple joys of Saturday morning cartoons (covered in QuaranTunes here (my first self-link yay!)).
Listening is, like everything else, a complex reality. Do we listen to music because we like it structurally, because a melody or an atmosphere is inherently soothing? Or are we taught that certain music is soothing and then seek that out when we’re soothing ourselves, fulfilling the prophecy? Are we listening to the music or the idea of the music? Is it a mixture of all of these? This music is quiet by design, by context, and by marketing. These all play together when we’re listening, actively or not, to anything.
The indisctinctness that draws so much criticism to LFHH is also its charm and its mechanic. It’s a low-information sound-world, one designed to be understood, along with its context, connotations, and references, before the first downbeat even sounds.
Terry Riley - In C
Terry Riley is one of the four horsemen of the minimalist apocalypse. Along with Glass, Reich, and Young, Riley saw the end times of serialism with a brand new genre called Minimalism, which sought clarity and audibility through pantonal, pattern-based music. That is no more clear than Riley’s foundational In C. The score is one page, just a series of fragments which fit together like a cacophonic puzzle. The players move through at their own pace, always keeping the pulse, which drives the piece forward like a first-time ice skater careening into the boards.
To be blunt: this is not quiet music. This. Is. Loud. And active. It is a din of noise for 41 minutes. What makes it Quiet, though, are its harmonic stasis and its rhetoric. There are no key changes or phrases (in the classic sense), there is no goal or climax. There is just, like the Abrahamsen and Sdraulig, a process that unfolds. That process reveals to us a slowly morphing object, one made of little threads of contrapuntal loops. As the players move between these loops, the quilt (to extend this metaphor for too long) shifts slightly. You sit for so long in one spot that, even at its most hectic, you feel that you know every moment of music inside and out. There is a calm in this, a sacrifice of your expectational self-determination to the omnipotent god of Minimalist fate. You simply exist in it.
When I listen to music like this, my mind wanders (my mind wanders during most things, but that’s for another blog). It’s supposed to. It’s supposed to leave and re-enter because one of a dozen screaming banshees screamed in a slightly different way and that subtle change in texture reveals to you a new vista of sound. There is no big timpani banging the finale, but instead, such a denial of anchorage and a paucity of change that you need just a little nudge to be moved.
Like the Ninjoi., the pulse plays a crucial part in this. It’s not midtempo, it’s just fast. This piece SLAPS. But that slapping keeps you attended to the music, it keeps your heart up (especially live). Even if you wander, it’s not a bored wandering, it’s a natural meandering of your mind, fueled by the frenzied masses pounding in front of you and made possible by the space given between musical changes.
As a thought experiment, imagine this piece as different movements, each lasting 4 minutes (around the length of a pop song). Listening to ten of those would be agony, just episodes of noodly patterns. But since the music unfolds so slowly, you have the space to appreciate a moment, to understand and process the mania, and move on. It’s a low-information rhetoric that enables this reflection and wandering. Again, like heavy metal, because there’s so much going on and not a clear sonic hierarchy, your mind has little to fix upon, so it's left suspended in attention, constantly attuned to the music, but never pushed towards something, allowed to roam.