endtroducing…

A well-rounded cocktail of drugs and orange juice has me almost on top of things again. Reality no longer grates like a power sander across my brain. Figured out how to keep Premiere from crashing (it seems that the prog freezes when it tries too hard to load and unload things from RAM at the same time… so I just run a memory manager called RAMBooster, optimize out 128 MB or so when it hangs and Premiere takes over from there… beautiful, really!)

It’s snowing, and it’s snowing hard. Tuning my mind away from the spring that seemed so near so recently, I put in Endtroducing by DJ Shadow. Two years ago on a December night a load of Woochers were crammed in the Tempo, shooting down a narrow winding road north of Ely. This CD epitomized the mood. The atmosphere was frigid, and Endtroducing chilled it further with it’s drawling, creepy melodies. We would turn the headlights off and follow the brakelights of the car in front of us. They would turn off their lights and we’d navigate by the moon. Sharp turns in the icy road would sneak up. Mixed in was a serious relationship that I knew was on its way out, but couldn’t figure out how to bring to conclusion.

Some music resonates so strongly in my soul that I need to store it under oil for a few months. I flip through my CDs and pause on an album, afraid to touch it because it’s so loaded with meaning. So wired into my emotions. Endtroducing. Yonder Mountain String Band. They are cached away for a time, and while I love the albums to death I won’t listen to them. The time is not right. To listen would dishonor the music. The memory.

Sometimes it’s the other way around. I can listen to a single album for days on end and never tire of it. God Shuffled His Feet by The Crash Test Dummies. Amnesiac by Radiohead. I’ve been totally digging these two CDs the last few weeks. There’s no specific event that I connect with the albums, but it just feels so right I keep listening to them. It will be interesting to see where they stand in a year. Will they ever mean anything more? Will they be hollow utterances? Self-indulgent nostalgia? A glimpse into the psyche?

Or maybe it’ll just be music, and that’s all that matters.