Pan: "Post-Rock Is Not Dead"

 Local Columbia, SC post-rock tour de force Pan have clapped eager ears with their ongoing energetic touring and 2011 release of Post-Rock Is Not Dead, a strikingly balanced album replete with danceable tunes exemplified by songs like "Seeking (The Sea King)." While sections of Post-Rock Is Not Dead may inspire you to "wipe your feet really good on the rhythm rug," the album seamlessly integrates a spacious, experimentally bent momentum that listeners could enjoy in the darkness of their bedrooms. Fortunately, I have been lucky enough for Ian Flegas, guitarist of Pan, to agree to an interview which will be held in the coming week.

Here is a link to Pan's bandcamp.
Below is "Seeking (The Sea King) from Pan's 2011 release "Post-Rock Is Not Dead"

"The Triumph Of Our Tired Eyes": A Silver Mt. Zion's Political Activism

 

Musicians often engage in political discourse through both explicit and more subtle means. Lyrics, interviews, and album art directly express a band's political message. Meanwhile, song structures, sampled voice inserts, file sharing policies, ticket prices, and press choices manifest implicit clues concerning a band's intended social impact. Godspeed You! Black Emperor's political activism works on a more suggestive than outspoken level through the use of provocative voice inserts, low ticket prices, avoidance of merchandising, select press interviews, and open recording and file sharing policies for fans. As a result, Godspeed members Efrim Menuck, Sophie Trudeau, and Thierry Amar formed A Silver Mt. Zion near the beginning of America's war in Iraq in 1999 to initiate social and political discussions more casually.

Here is an interview with Efrim Menuck detailing his goals with A Silver Mt. Zion:

A Silver Mt. Zion's songs such as "God Bless Our Dead Marines" and "Mountains Made Of Steam" utilize lyrics, such as "when the world is sick can't no one be well," to candidly critique war and the socially reinforced solipsism which enables its perpetuation. Though A Silver Mt. Zion often delivers its political messages explicitly, the band simultaneously implements more subtle rhetorical strategies to communicate their intentions.

A poignant example of A Silver Mt. Zion's implied political commentary can be found in the song "The Triumph Of Our Tired Eyes." The song's structural melodic components and harmonies are inspired by a popular Spanish anarchist tune titled "A Las Barricadas" sung during the Spanish Civil War. The original song "A Las Barricadas" chants "To the barricades! For the triumph of the Confederation." A Silver Mt. Zion's "The Triumph Of Our Tired Eyes" lyrics include, "So come on friends, to the barricades again" and "musicians are cowards." By referencing a Spanish anarchist song, A Silver Mt. Zion injects another layer of meaning to their artistic work and situates their political voice within the sphere of historical protest music. A Silver Mt. Zion's allusion to Spanish anarchism extends their musical world and simultaneously insists for political action on both the listener's and musician's behalf. The lyrics saying "musicians are cowards" may be self-referential and if so, the statement suggests that both artist and audience must act upon their political leanings because creating and listening to politically provocative music simply isn't enough.

Here is a video of "A Las Barricadas"-

Here is a video of A Silver Mt. Zion's "The Triumph Of Our Tired Eyes"-

Who Gets To Call It Rock?

Attention to minute instrumentation details has interchangeably bled through post-rock, math rock, black metal, and post-dubstep. Post-rock acts like Tortoise share a clean, bright instrumental tone with their math rock siblings such as This Town Needs Guns. Meanwhile, contemporary post-rock acts that use vocals such as Mogwai further blur these genre distinctions when math-rockers Hella often stray farther beyond generic rock devices. Similarly, At The Drive-In and The Mars Volta maestro Omar Rodriguez-Lopez delivers his music in an unconventional manner whereby guitars needle through feedback, drums resonate like mosquito wings in your ear, bass lines carry Cuban undertones, and surrealist pianos lumber through organ stabs fluctuating parallel to vocal crescendos. Mars Volta vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala has described his vocal style as "painting with sound," a statement reminiscent of Sigur Ros' "Hopelandic" vocal style.

The Mars Volta is famous for its live performances, which often dismantle rock tropes to the extent that the music's waveform resembles a Rorschach test. Sound engineering slices up spoken voice inserts, implants shreds of songs previously recorded throughout the show, interlaces Latin structures, and entombs blaring saxophones in tunnels of aural pulse. One of The Mars Volta's most famous live recordings is posted below from their album "Scabdates" which ended in a continuous improvisation that straddled the 40 minute mark.

 

As live performances continue to experiment with their conditions of possibility, genres may feed into one another, allowing for more flexibility and dialogue between musical worlds. Radiohead's "Kid A" exemplifies a band's nuanced acculturation to the digital technologies allowed them. With the development of new recording techniques and live instruments, progressive rock acts may more closely resemble their post-rock and ambient siblings.  

Ben Frost: Ambient Soundscape Explorer

Ben Frost, post-minimalist composer and ambient prodigy has spread his tendrils through numerous genres and projects, dwelling in the shadows and borders of intersecting "musical worlds." Though Frost's 2007 hard-core ambient masterpiece Theory of Machines, which can be found here: Ben Frost- "Theory of Machines" bandcamp, introduced him to the electronic spotlight, his early compositions align more with the post-rock genre. Performances of Frost's solo work were delivered by his live band "School of Emotional Engineering" from 2002-2005.
Ben Frost's "Theory of Machines"-

 School of Emotional Engineering- "She Dreams In Car Crashes"-

Frost's early connection with post-rock's wide spaces of tonal harmonies informs his ambient work where pastures of white noise collide to reveal uncharacteristic components of the ambient genre. Drums beat mercilessly through pulsing soundscapes resembling Trent Reznor pillaging through the pre-industrial wilderness. Frost's 2009 release By The Throat tears through typical ambient predispositions. This is not relaxing. You can not sleep to this music without turning over at least once. Instead, the listener has entered an aural geography that is inhospitable, cold, trembling with animal howls. By The Throat is "red in tooth and claw." It is no surprise that Ben Frost created this album while living in Iceland. The music bleeds the landscape it was formed in. The song "The Carpathians" couldn't be a better exposition of the influence Ben Frost's environment has had on his music.

Here is a link where Frost describes Iceland's effect on his musical thrust: Ben Frost and The Icelandic Allure

World-renowned pillar of ambient, post-minimalist, and electronic music, Brian Eno hand-selected Ben Frost as his protege for 2010-2011's mentor for The Rolex Mentor and Protege Initiative. The program funds the mentor and protege to collaborate and guide one another in their artistic endeavors. Frost's performance at New York's Unsound Festival in April 2011 was paired with Eno's film projections based on the 1972 movie Solaris.  With recent 2011 collaborations alongside Colin Stetson and Tim Hecker, Frost's further explorations may prove to us yet again, that the ambient earth is far from flat.

Glossolalia and the "Hopelandic" Language of Sigur Ros

 

Post-rock as a genre often wrestles with its relationship to vocals. Bands such as This Will Destroy You and Do Make Say Think exclude vocals almost entirely, while other post-rock acts such as Mogwai use lyrics and vocals as an integral component of the music. The Icelandic band Sigur Ros implements a strikingly unconventional approach to vocals: glossolalia. Defined commonly as "speaking in tongues," glossolalia is a fluid vocalization of nonsensical syllables, gibberish. Strangely enough, glossolalia is practiced by both the schizophrenic and the religiously devout. To many Christian followers, glossolalia is an expression of the Holy Spirit. Meanwhile, psychologists have recorded the phenomenon of glossolalia as a characteristic trait of schizophrenic patients. A fascinating article surrounding glossolalia can be found here: Glossolalia- Speaking In Tongues Article 

Sigur Ros' artistic choice to sing with glossolalia simultaneously amplifies their music's indeterminacy while providing a vocal cue for listener appeal.

Sigur Ros' 2002 release "( )" is exclusively characterized by vocalized glossolalia, which the band terms "hopelandic." On their website's "frequently asked questions" section (which can be found here: Sigur Ros' Frequently Asked Questions Section), "hopelandic" is described as "the 'invented language' in which Jónsi sings before lyrics are written to the vocals." That being said, the band uses glossolalia in its early writing stages before actual words enter the music. The vocals act as another instrument, bridging the depersonalized gap often characteristic of voiceless music such as Explosions In The Sky's early work.
 
For a band already bilingual, sharing both Icelandic and English lyrics, Sigur Ros' "hopelandic" enables audiences of all languages to access the same degree of "meaning." For English-speaking listeners, "hopelandic" is more than gibberish; it is both a compromise and a tool. After listening to an album like "( )" that features only glossolalia, a future listening experience of a language beyond one's knowledge becomes somehow more beautiful. The foreign words take less precedence and the listener absorbs the vocals in terms of its musical qualities versus its morphemic meaning. Sigur Ros' glossolalia, though nonsensical, provides monolingual listeners with experiential practice to later formulate meaning out of a foreign language, whether that be Icelandic or English. In effect, the glossolalia in Sigur Ros' music functions as it does for its schizophrenic and religious speakers: a medium through which the individual interprets the void.

Authenticity and "The Real": Four Tet's Remixes and Mash-ups

 The post-rock genre's emphasis on instrumentation has become the subject of various remixes and mashups. The electronic artist Kieran Hebden's project Four Tet ranks among the most notable post-rock re-inventors. Hebden himself belonged to an English post-rock band called Fridge up until his full conversion to the electronic world as Four Tet in 1999. The results have been incredible. Four Tet's remixes of Explosions In The Sky and Godspeed You! Black Emperor blend electronic, post-dubstep, and post-rock genre boundaries, delving in a seamless alchemy between "the popular" and "alternative."

As a listener of post-rock music, I have found myself averting my eyes from bands that sound "too plastic," as if digital and electronically produced music was somehow less "real." This may be a suitable moment to consider Jean Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation". What makes music authentic? Is the post-rock genre grounded in the subtle disposition that it must be directly performed from finger to string in order for it to be considered categorically valuable? If we are to discount the "imitation" of the real, then we must unhinge the fundamental underpinnings of minimalist music. The repetition inherent in minimalism functions as a synthetic work built from the layered and interconnected simulacra of musical phrases. The work is woven by minute relationships, each recurrent pulse abstracted from its original source.

Four Tet's remix of Explosions In The Sky's "Catastrophe and the Cure" introduces more electronic elements into the post-rock recipe, while still placing the characteristic emphasis on voiceless instrumentation.

 On a different musical note, Four Tet's mash-up of Godspeed You! Black Emperor's "Sleep" with Nas' "It Ain't Hard To Tell" breaks the "unspoken rules" of the post-rock genre. Godspeed is given a voice it has so long been missing. Four Tet's mash-up not only unifies two definitive musical acts from their respective genres, but essentially mixes both wines of the post-rock and rap holy grails. "Lift Your Skinny Fists..." and "Illmatic" are widely considered the pinnacles of their musical spheres and Four Tet's acute artistic choices hybridize two unlike genres with mutual respect.

Visual Communication In Music's Digital Age

Most of us remember opening up a CD, vinyl record, or cassette tape, turning on the music and staring at the cover, the liner notes, and the photos inside the album's packaging. In recent years, music downloads have displaced the purchase of physical copies, thereby compromising the role of visual communication in the musical consumption of products. A contextualizing blog article concerning how digital music consumption has changed over the last thirty years can be found here: Digital Fish blog. On the other hand, music videos have become increasingly more accessible for fans to receive visual stimuli from bands. Though the music video provides a more sensory resplendent avenue for listeners, it can potentially fail to establish ambiguity or listener agency of interpretation. Album art can staple a provocative image on the liner notes while maintaining its indeterminacy. Examples of this visual ambiguity can be found in the molotov cocktail pressed on the backside of Godspeed You Black Emperor's "Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada" compact disc packaging. 
The back of Godspeed You! Black Emperor's "Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada"-

As a note, album artwork can detail the band's relationship to visual artists in a similar way that music videos detail the relationship with a film director. Who could imagine The Velvet Underground without Andy Warhol's famous banana? 
The Andy Warhol banana that became the cover art for The Velvet Underground's debut album-

Oftentimes, watching a music video is like watching a movie based on a book you've already read, the images and the characters you had in your head to start with are then replaced by the film's and you become frustrated that you can't have your own images back. The film has somehow given you a stimuli and robbed you of your own intellectual property. 

Furthermore, album covers and liner notes establish a comprehensive message that could potentially be applied to the album as a whole. The music video works almost exclusively on an individual song basis. Thus, it appears probable that the listener's shift from listening to complete albums in their entirety to single songs at a time may result as a by-product of the visual departure from album art to music videos. 

What might this shift mean for post-rock which relies heavily upon creating a musical atmosphere versus delivering hit-singles? How should this characteristically wordless genre compensate to communicate an indeterminate message when music videos often require the viewer to forfeit their own preceding mental interpretations?

Godspeed You! Black Emperor's Unconventional Live Experience

Godspeed You! Black Emperor's live shows situate the band within a musical world separate from the ticket payer's expectations. Small venues such as the 40 Watt Club and the Brooklyn Masonic Temple are ideal locales for Godspeed shows and come at a surprisingly low cost. I was fortunate enough to see them play at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, GA on March 22, 2011 for an eleven dollar ticket price. The intimacy of Godspeed's small venues evokes their devout cult following to honor the band's ideologies and sincerity. Countless people that I stood in line with were adorned in Godspeed You! Black Emperor tattoos. Meanwhile, there was not a single Godspeed T-shirt to be found. This exclusivity and counter-consumerist aesthetic amplifies the fan-base's trust in Godspeed's intentions as musicians instead of as commodities.

Once inside the venue, concert-goers are soon struck with awe. In the mean time, a trained eye can spot members of the band walking through the crowd as if they have no intention to go on stage. The performance at the 40 Watt Club began with a drone, a pulsing tone that the band members individually walked on stage to make their aural contribution to. A professional film projectionist lighted the stage with striking filmstrips that saturated the band, over half of which were sitting in chairs. That being said, the show was depersonalized. There was no shining star, no front-man or lead player. The band was a collective driven not by the cult of personality, but by their loyalty to the artistic work.

Live performances garner access to new material since the band reserves certain songs only for play at live shows. "Albanian" and "Gamelan" have never been recorded on an album. One can access these songs only through live shows or recordings of live shows. Coinciding with this magnified importance of live performances, Godspeed allows fans to record the show and post their videos and sound-files on-line. By permitting fans to post exclusive songs, Godspeed fan become not only consumers, but producers and distributors of the band's music. This agency over musical material enables Godspeed You! Black Emperor to promote their do-it-yourself message, stay true to their values, build a cohesive fan-base, and deconstruct common consumerist modes of advertising.

Based on this system of distribution, I believe Godspeed You! Black Emperor and David Foster Wallace would agree about advertising's relationship to human life:

"An ad that pretends to be art is — at absolute best — like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair."
                                                                     -David Foster Wallace

Post-Minimalism Meets The Indonesian Gamelan Traditions: An Ethnomusicology Study

Minimalist and post-minimalist music is often characterized by a stasis of layered harmonies, repeated pulses, and minute phrasal modulations that gradually progress the movement. Post-minimalism departs from minimalism in its deconstruction of minimalism's structural linearity.

-Here is an example of minimalist music:

-Here is an example of post-minimalist music:

While, in the Western sense, these genres are relatively new, only blooming since around the 1960's, post-minimalism often draws from sources outside of the typical "Western" canon for inspiration and has found a wellspring of historically calcified minimalist traditions residing in the Eastern hemisphere.

On the island of Bali, off the coast of Indonesia, a musical performance known as gamelan garners a heavy cultural significance. A gamelan is a musical ensemble composed of gongs, bowls, xylophones, plucked instruments, flutes, and occasionally vocal accompaniment. Below is a video of a gamelan performance containing choreography to tell a narrative.

The musical thrust is grounded in a metronomic pulse that provides the stasis for the ensemble's other parts to layer with polyrhythms. Most gamelan performances are of a religious hue and are used simultaneously as the soundtrack and storyteller to choreographed and shadow puppet renditions of Hindu folk tales. Below is a picture of the Javanese shadow puppets called wayang kulit that are commonly found in gamelan performances.

Post-minimalist composer Evan Ziporyn has immersed himself in the Balinese musical tradition since he was twenty. While Balinese gamelan typically is not written down, Ziporyn's determined years of study in Bali have resulted in written compositions for performance that are then memorized by the ensemble's members. Situating himself within Balinese culture, Ziporyn's own artistic creations intend to respect the agency of his performers and the musical background they inhabit.
Here is a video detailing Evan Ziporyn's experiences with Balinese music:

Here is a brief video for Ziporyn's "A House In Bali" which was performed at the 2010 Next Wave Festival:

As post-minimalist composers seek alternative avenues for musical expression, their listeners will continue to encounter different cultures and engage in a dialogue which not only blends musical genres, but the musical worlds which deepen their palette of understandings. The conditions of possibility with technological advancement may open even further frontiers for cross-cultural exchange as seen in Aphex Twin's "Didgeridoo" which can be found here: Aphex Twin- "Didgeridoo". Traveling composers like Ziporyn offer audiences on both ends of the globe the opportunity to hybridize their cultural wells and invest in a brave, new, musical world.

"Shall I Project A World?"

Since, I am a human being writing this blog, I would like to begin with a reader-response post. In order to communicate my musical background and exposure to a musical "world," I will supply a list of five albums from the post-rock, ambient, minimalist, and post-minimalist genres that have personally "affected" my life and well of experiences. With this post, I don't intend to inculcate an objective standard on what is "good music" nor do I think that these are my all-time favorite albums, but instead I aim to provide insight into the musical worlds I have come to inhabit, the stories attached to them, and some suggestions for further listening. Hopefully these albums can give a springboard to introduce post-rock, ambient, post-minimalist, and minimalist works and anchor the genres of music I hope to discuss in subsequent postings.

In no particular order:

1.) 

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven"

A liberating, gravitational sonic journey broken into four, approximately twenty-minute long tracks. Godspeed's "Lift Yr. Skinny Fists" travels from sweeping horn crescendos thundering onward to lone, lamenting violins beside sampled voice inserts of a department store, a religious speaker, an old man remembering Coney Island, and children at play. Soundscapes pulse as if embodying the listener's psychology, surfing on the edges of epitome and confusion. Cellos warm the tone. The percussion marches, drops out, and emerges in a hip-hop-esque beat. Guitars cry with a resemblance to human screams. Songs collapse into gears of machinery chopping up and relocating their myriad parts, and out of the darkness, a pattern emerges, a voice, a quiet plea, the recognition that we are here for a limited time and that we should pay attention to our lives and contribute to making us all "a little more free."                       
2.)         

   Ben Frost "By The Throat" bandcamp

Ben Frost - "By The Throat"

A haunting, cinematic work of aural shadows. "By The Throat's" icy caverns are inhabited by wolves, one-by-one hunting the viscera of musical predispositions. The listener embarks on a thematic narrative that interrogates the relationship between civilization and wilderness. Ben Frost's cold ambient textures envelope straining strings, throbbing guitars, dissolving digital pulsations, strident horns, and drums that pass through channels of static before reaching your ear. To categorize this album is a difficult task. "By The Throat" seamlessly balances its classical minimalist, punk rock, ambient, and metal flavors to establish an environment that situates the listener within its own diegetic world. "The Carpathians" leads the listener into a frigid tundra filled with wolves and deconstructs the growl of a wolf within the song's "musical space." "Hibakusja" exemplifies Frost's eloquent synthesis of a song from its various genre ingredients. Furthermore, the album's motif of arctic wolves continues through the last three songs titles that work with a narrative function. "Through The Glass Of The Roof,""Through The Roof Of Your Mouth," and "Through The Mouth Of Your Eye" establish a process of events correlated with the music's progress through time.
 3.)

The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-la-la Band - "He Has Left Us Alone, But Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace The Corners of Our Rooms"

Written in the wake of Godspeed-guitarist Efrim Menuck's dog Wanda's death, "He Has Left Us Alone" soundtracks the mourning and grieving process. I turned to this album more than any other musical work in my life to help me "understand" death, suicide, and illness. A Silver Mt. Zion cohesively extends the instrumental thrust of Godspeed You! Black Emperor while maintaining a straightforward, direct structural approach that includes a few songs with lead vocals such as "Movie (Never Made)." The album's waveform pattern is the topography of sorrow. A "bleak, uncertain, beautiful" piano draws the listener into a mirage of sampled voices, tacit percussion, and rich, dark violins that transform tragedy into irrevocably moving art. "13 Angels Standing Guard 'Round the Side of Your Bed" is a heavenly portrayal of the human capacity to communicate pain, suffering, and a desire to relieve the world of it. This is the kernel of hope left in Pandora's box.
4.)

 

 Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto - "Insen"

Japanese classical pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto teams with German minimal artist Alva Noto to produce a stunning exposition of frontier music structures. Sakamoto plays ethereal piano and Alva Noto dresses the song's skeleton with micro electronic pulses, digital glitches, and melodic blankets. The album is light in color and often resembles the heartbeat of raindrops. With this collaboration, Sakamoto and Alva Noto have intertwined formal classical and electronic boundaries, creating a synesthesia of genres that explores uncharted ambient spaces and cloud-like, nebulous post-minimalism realms where individual musical notes softly burst into percussive patterns. With headphones, "Insen's" layers peel open through minute bass thumps, almost imperceptible bird chirps, and panned speaker output rattling one's bodily reactions to the left and right. Each song re-engineers what is typically understood as "musical space," embellishing a single note's infinite potential to create meaning. It is all at once phrasally repetitive and uncompromisingly fascinating. 

 

On this collaboration's later 2011 release "Summvs," there contains an extraordinary cover of Brian Eno's "By This River" posted above. 

5.)

  

Explosions In The Sky - "The Earth Is Not A Cold, Dead Place"

Guitar-oriented, accessible post-rock that quivers with emotional evocation through minimalist compositions teetering toward the ten-minute mark. "The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place" crescendos with needling guitars bent beside syncopated drum rolls that sink to "Six Days At The Bottom Of The Ocean" and elevate to the harmonic peaks of "Your Hand In Mine." Replete with melodic guitar arpeggios and shimmering cymbal splashes, this album is devoid of the vast "canyons of static" one may find in a Godspeed release. Instead, Explosions In The Sky's four-piece instrumentation delivers clean-toned musical consonance within song structures that could more readily be consumed as singles than the songs of their post-rock contemporaries. Meanwhile, "The Earth Is Not A Cold, Dead Place" could be played on repeat without a hint of boredom. The absence of vocals enhances the music's scalar sequences and enables fluidity. Simultaneously, the track and album titling couldn't be more suitable to the resolute and triumphant diegetic atmosphere manifested within the songs. Explosions In The Sky challenge the listener's palette to rethink the capabilities of a four-piece.

With Sound Intentions

  "As if from a distance" is intended to provide exposure and commentary concerning the post-rock, ambient, minimalist, and post-minimalist music genres specifically, but more widely, the blog attempts to focus on bands with a do-it-yourself aesthetic. These genres often converge, intersect, and blur into other genres such as lo-fi, punk, classical, and post-dubstep. Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the focal inspiration for this blog's creation, exemplifies the blending of these musical genres while "synthesizing" a unique body of work. The post-rock, ambient, and post-minimalism genres extend beyond our casual predispositions of musical structure, consumption, promotion, and "world." Though often wordless, the music, in Nico Muhly’s terms, “Speaks Volumes” about the human experience and its myriad faces. While Godspeed You! Black Emperor questions the commodification of music reviews and journalism, the band appears to encourage a more D.I.Y., user-generated approach through their openness to fan videotaping at shows, performances at small venues, and general sincerity.

            I aim to examine the post-rock, ambient, and post-minimalist genres in order to give words to the wordless, to provide a window for the music’s accessibility to beginning listeners or the inquiring. Due to the highly personal nature of instrumentation-centered music, the blog will try to share this internal experience and contribute to an ongoing dialogue about music, its boundaries, and its explorations. I hope to uncover intersubjective relationships between artists, genres, and their audiences. The blog will include album reviews, discussions about live shows, interviews, music news, collaborations, academic perspectives, and theoretical applications.

            I have been an avid listener of the post-rock genre for several years and have spent countless nights pressing my ear to the speakers while plastered to my bed or outside beneath yellow streetlights in Columbia, SC. I’ve seen several live shows at venues around the South Eastern US and in the Northeast as well. Godspeed You! Black Emperor and A Silver Mt. Zion have been the soundtrack to my life for the past year, helping me cope with my friends’ deaths and my mother’s illness. I owe post-rock, ambient, and post-minimalism for the emotional support and the inspiration to become a vegan, which is a major part of my lifestyle. My goal is that other people use this blog for music suggestions and insight to carry with them in this great wide suffering world imbued with hope and beauty. These are things I love and I want to share them with you.