What's the closest you've come to a transcendental / quasi-religious musical experience?

I'll let you interpret the question as you see fit. We hear music every day with differing degrees of connection. you could be out shopping and hear something over a tannoy but maybe not really even notice it's there. Other times you could be listening to music at home or in a club or at a gig and feel a closer, much more intense connection. Or maybe the idea of attaining a higher state through music doesn't factor to you? I'd be interested in hearing about these.

Are we talking about manufactured situations here, or happenstance sublimity?

Five records have completely floored me on first listen, and they are:

Bomb The Bass - Beat Dis
The Prodigy - Charly
Spiller - Groovejet
Daft Punk - Discovery
Nina Simone - Sinnerman

A couple of which I have catalogued on here. Of these, only Sinnerman has felt like a properly quasi-religious experience, but that's likely due to its theme; otherwise, breathless can't-believe-I'm-hearing-this is close enough for me.

I can work myself similarly through repetition, playing something I already know over-and-over, appreciating its genius 'til it overwhelms me - most recently 'Gimme Shelter' hit me just there, and more than one Kate Bush songs.

Actual religious experiences from hearing various church songs in church settings, not that I have the knowledge to distinguish among them. It can be incredibly powerful, and I don't really know how anyone can condemn religion per se when it's capable of that.

The one guaranteed secular experience that will produce the same is a crowd singing You'll Never Walk Alone. But that's so obviously a hymn too that it's not really a secular experience at all. It is completely marvellous though.

Are we talking about manufactured situations here, or happenstance sublimity?

― comedy is unnatural and abhorrent (Scik Mouthy), Friday, 16 November 2012 11:21 (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Either/or I guess (that's not an Elliot Smith reference). Ultimately I'm interested in what music fans wish to attain from their hobby. Is listening to music some sort of quest to achieve some sort of ultimate enlightenment through sound? A wish to recreate or attain that perfect moment where the elements sync up and everything just works perfectly? To get that same feeling we felt upon discovering our favourite record for the first time? To transcend the mere act of being in a room and experiencing organised soundwaves, lifting to something different; spiritual - maybe not in an evangelical sense, but something deeper than merely saying "hey, I like this"...?

I suspect Oasis - Live Forever would've been the sixth of those xp, but the first time I heard it was Noel doing an acoustic version live and no-one's going to have a quasi-religious experience off the back of Noel's singing.

Drugs could well play a part in this of course and I don't think inducement through chemical means is necessarily a cheaper way to describe this. As a first year student, just really getting into smokin weed and stuff, I remember listening to EP7 by Autechre lying down in the dark with headphones on, on a new stereo on which I'd foolishly squandered a good chunk of my loan. Without wanting to spout too much hippie student bullshit, I recall it being not just aurally but physically intense - a totally holistic and immersive experience. I was FEELING the sounds, seeing light patterns on the backs of my eyelids etc. The music became almost tangible - I wanted to touch and feel it. A few years later the video for Gantz Graf came out which is the closest thing to what I experienced then. Totally groovy man...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfwD05XA2YQ

Btw that post you did on the seven levels of listening, ending with physically becoming the music - I loved that.

Ah cheers IK - I was worried people might think I was spouting crap but it's something I've been thinking about more and more and am thinking of writing a little thinkpiece about. It all came from the preposterous Black Dice gig I attended lately where you couldn't see the band and the audience stood stock still and I just ended up wondering what I was doing there and how ridiculous the whole charade was, even though I was enjoying the music very much.

how do I link to a specific part of a thread?

Seven levels of listening? Where's that? wlt read.

make like a steak and beef (dog latin) wrote this on thread most important heavy metal characteristic on board I Love Music on Oct 18, 2012

Now I come to think about it, I remember posing this question to a true metal mate of mine a few years back, and his answer was "I listen to it for the 'vibe'".

This sort of ties into a pet theory of mine, that no music fan is ever properly satiated because there will always be a degree of disconnect between the music being played and the situation of the listener. You could describe it in concentric onion-skin terms, seven circles of music apprehension if you will:

7. - Listening to music in an inappropriate context (i.e. techno in a library or church organ in a pub).

6. - Listening to music in a less-than-ideal setting, like over a crackly radio or over shop tannoy speakers

5. - Listening in a comfortable setting such as your bedroom, your car etc...

4. - Experiencing music in a live setting or played in a club, or as the soundtrack to a film or music video or watching a generative screensaver like MilkDrop

3. - Playing the music yourself as part of a band or orchestra or as a producer

2. - Hearing the music in the exact situation specifically denoted by it. i.e. riding down the highway on a Harley in the early seventies listening to "Born To Be Wild"; standing under an overpass in a rainy Northern town litening to the Smiths; riding up a lightning-struck mountain on the back of a horse, sword in the air listening to Manowar...

1. - Total immersion in music to the point of physically becoming the music itself. Literally being, feeling and understanding those notes and sounds on an utterly tangible, yet abstract level.

As music listeners we almost never attain level 2 and never ever ever attain level 1. The only way you can trick your brain into believing it's attained level 1 is through some serious suspension of reality (perhaps aided through the use of psychotropic drugs maybe?). I think the only time I've come close to this state is when I've been just dropping off to sleep and imagined a piece of music in my head that is so beautiful that it could never be reproduced, with mental images to go with it.

The other way is through dancing/moshing which is kind of an expression of wanting to become the music - representing it with body movements etc. Disco lights, music videos live projections are all a part of aiding you towards level 1, but it's really rather crude when you think about it.

In order to connect with a bit of music you have to subconsciously acknowledge this degree of disconnect between yourself, your environment and the actual sounds being pushed out of the speakers, or else it's just noise. You can appreciate a great guitar solo, but unless that solo achieves some sort of feeling or image, it's just someone hammering out notes - you may as well be watching someone type really well on a keyboard.

Sorry, this might be a bit OT. Not sure if it merits its own discussion or thread...

There's two sides of this for me. On the one hand, there's listening and on the other there's performing.

Listening - I have never taken drugs, well recreational drugs anyway. The closest I have come is when I've had lithotripsy on kidney stones, so they pump me full of morphine, then operate on me while a cd I compiled plays. And I had a bit of an out-of-body experience then during Dylan's "I want you", I felt so close to the music and seemed to look down on myself, and laughed a lot and that sort of thing. Never had that experience since, so that's one.

Performing - well as a Christian I play guitar regularly in church and can sometimes in the right circumstances play 'in the spirit', where basically I stop thinking about my playing and just play what comes to me. It's hard to explain, and sometimes can move me to tears. Sorry for being vague.

I think I'd add a level in between bedroom/car and live.

xxposts The main points are discussed between Clarke B and I towards the last bit of this thread: most important heavy metal characteristic

Sorry, I don't know how to link to specific parts of threads.

I kind of refined the idea so that it includes an eighth level outside of music, but the idea is there are seven-or-eight levels of experiencing music, some of them only theoretical and therefore unnattainable.

8. - Hearing sound that one does not interpret as music (birdsong, machinery, radio static etc). This will vary from listener to listener, cF: "That's not music, that's noise!"

7. - Listening to music in an inappropriate context (i.e. techno in a library or church organ in a pub).

6. - Listening to music in a less-than-ideal setting, like over a crackly radio or over shop tannoy speakers

5. - Listening in a comfortable setting such as your bedroom, your car etc...

4. - Experiencing music in a live setting or played in a club, or as the soundtrack to a film or music video or watching a generative screensaver like MilkDrop

3. - Playing the music yourself as part of a band or orchestra or as a producer

2. - Hearing the music in the exact situation specifically denoted by it. i.e. riding down the highway on a Harley in the early seventies listening to "Born To Be Wild"; standing under an overpass in a rainy Northern town litening to the Smiths; riding up a lightning-struck mountain on the back of a horse, sword in the air listening to Manowar...

1. - Total immersion in music to the point of physically becoming the music itself. Literally being, feeling and understanding those notes and sounds on an utterly tangible, yet abstract level.

As music listeners we almost never attain level 2 and never ever ever attain level 1. The only way you can trick your brain into believing it's attained level 1 is through some serious suspension of reality (perhaps aided through the use of psychotropic drugs maybe?). I think the only time I've come close to this state is when I've been just dropping off to sleep and imagined a piece of music in my head that is so beautiful that it could never be reproduced, with mental images to go with it. And yet when we describe music, very often we talk about it in level-1 terms: "It sounds like a gigantic robotic goose stomping through pink-tinged gorse" etc...

The other way is through dancing/moshing which is kind of an expression of wanting to become the music - representing it with body movements etc. Disco lights, music videos live projections are all a part of aiding you towards level 1, but it's really rather crude when you think about it.

In order to connect with a piece of music you have to subconsciously acknowledge this degree of disconnect between yourself, your environment and the actual sounds being pushed out of the speakers, or else it's just noise. You can appreciate a great guitar solo, but unless that solo achieves some sort of feeling or image, it's just someone hammering out notes - you may as well be watching someone type really well on a keyboard.

Level 2 relies very much on context and background knowledge - something we learn as we grow from unprejudiced infant listeners to You don't have to be riding a Harley to enjoy "Born To Be Wild", but because of the lyrics and the Easy Rider film, it's natural to secretly wish you were. As a listener, you have to fill in the contextual gaps and make do with the surroundings you're given.

Playing the music yourself on an instrument is not the same thing as physically embodying the music. Sibelius wrote music for orchestras, but his music isn't about playing in an orchestra. The piece as a whole may be representative of a certain setting, or even an abstract emotion or concept. And then there's that intensely deep level that a lot of instrumental music, particularly dance music can evoke. It's an almost Freudian desire to physically become a light pattern or spark of consciousness that represents the music - not only to perceive or create the notes but to BE the notes and sounds.

I wrote this many, many years ago, about something that happened even longer ago - http://sickmouthy.com/2005/06/04/on-listening-to-the-stone-roses-as-a-teenager/ - it gets close to transcendent.

Around this time last year, maybe a little later, I went for a walk up to Nunhead Cemetery for the first time. I also decided to listen to DJ Harvey's Sarcastic Disco mix for the first time...walking round this gorgeous gorgeous place, just as 'Memories' by Amadeo kicked in was a moment of sheer, Walden style transcendentalism. Never had a feeling like it before or since.

The first time I heard "A Love Supreme." I'm going to be really lazy and cut-and-paste something I wrote 10 years ago on my page:

"Anyway, I have an amazingly vivid memory of listening to A Love Supreme for the first time--it's kind of corny, but absolutely true. When I put it on, I'd been up for some 30 hours finishing an essay, my last one of the year--a weird badge of honour among university students, something I used to be able to do easily, whereas now I have difficulty staying awake through a two-hour movie. A great calm always settles over you when the school year finishes--I still experience it today as a teacher--so as I listened along to 'Part 1 - Acknowledgement,' half hypnotized by its tranciness and half drifting in and out of sleep, it felt like I was in the middle of some meaningful brush with serenity. And then, towards the end, the chanting: 'a love supreme, a love supreme...' I clearly remember wondering if I was hallucinating when the chanting started up; a voice was the last thing I expected to hear, and there was a flat, druid-like quality to it that seemed to belong to the world of hallucinations. (If it had been 1991 instead of 1983, I'd have been checking under the bed for Bob from Twin Peaks.) It remains one of the great musical moments of my life, right up there with similarly life-altering encounters with 'Cowgirl in the Sand,' Taxi Driver, and The Catcher in the Rye."

^ love this

I haven't ever written this before but I related this story just last week so it's fresh.

I did some classical music festival stuff when I was a kid, on the violin. Music "festivals" are actually competitions. They line a row of kids up and sit them down in the front pew of a church and have them play their pieces back-to-back. Then, an adjudicator gets up and talks about what was good, what was bad, gives everybody a grade and a ribbon.

I'm not alone in saying that the prevailing feeling while sitting in that front pew while watching these strangers scratch through their pieces is one of intense stress. I have very few memories of the actual playing, but have acute memories of nervous knee spasms, moments where the piano accompanist got lost, and so forth. When the other competitors are playing, the kids are typically sitting there using every psychic ability they possess, going "fuck up fuck up fuck up you will fuck up now you will fuck up now".

By the time I was 17 I was playing "Symphonie Espagnole" which isn't an A-list concerto but is probably B-list. I entered in this one festival and was part of a Concerto class. There was a girl in the competition who had a cold and couldn't make it through her Khachaturian and I remember feeling a flush of relief, she was really good otherwise. I don't remember if I then played or played afterward, but I remember I played "great!" all things considered-- fundamental technical impediments, small-town education etc., they would keep me from any stream of serious training but I can hack it through a couple things.

But the important part was this other performer, named A____, who I'd known for a few years, and she got up and played, I don't even remember what concerto. She had earlier competed against me in unaccompanied Bach and had beat me handily. She started playing her piece and I was sitting there thinking "ohmygodpleasefuckuppleasefuckup", but then something changed. Not only was A playing beautifully, but the piece itself was beautiful, the instrument was beautiful. I was not only caught up in the experience of the moment but the years of history that had led to this precise performance. Somewhere in the intervening years, the spotty, scratchy kids we'd been had become serious interpreters. And A herself looked great, and I looked at her face of concentration and felt an incredible empathy for the amount of practice she'd put in, and I noticed something trivial about her dress sense, and I don't think I actually started crying but I did feel all these years of pent-up stressful energy suddenly melt away and fade away. It was that moment that I lost any desire to exist in a competitive environment. Which was good, because I came in last place.

amazing

What did you notice about her dress sense?!

Well I didn't mention it specifically because I thought it would be anachronistic, but she was wearing one of those art school thrifty barrettes in her hair.

We were pretty close for a while in college, she's pro now. She's awesome

Ive written about this before, but I think I actually met Duane Allman once while listening to "Mountain Jam". I was under the influence of something that has recently been made legal in some of these here United States.

homosexuality?

dog latin: click the "Permalink" next to the post you want to link, then copy and paste the resulting URL

thanks :-)

That's a wonderful story.

Stockhausen's 'Aus Den Sieben Tagen" to thread- it's 15 texts like this:

"play a tone for so long / until you hear its individual vibrations // hold the tone / and listen to the tones of the others / - to all of them together, not to individual ones - / and slowly move your tone / until you arrive at complete harmony / and the whole sound turns to gold / to pure, gently shimmering fire"

On weed:

Peter Hammill - Over
Scott Walker - The Drift
and a lotta jazz

Walking through a plant conservatory listening to Popol Vuh, dosed on Fricke and chlorophyll.

Had a great conversation with Terry Riley about finding these 'places' after a talk he gave last year. Pauline Oliveros has written some wonderful things on this subject too.

Personal highlights for me have been the entirety of La Monte Young's Well Tuned Piano on mushrooms- that was really something else. Various nights at uni where I'd fall asleep listening to stuff like Phil Niblock and Keith Fullerton Whitman. Many times out dancing. Phil Minton in a church in Leeds.

Nothing beats playing music with people and getting there in a group. Had that for the first time in ages this week actually; the shared euphoria/smiles afterwards is a really amazing thing.

As someone who sings regularly in a professional church choir that does awesome music both in services and in concerts, I have quasi-religious musical experiences all the time, most recently singing a piece called "The Evening Choir" by a local composer named Carson Cooman. I've also, in services and concerts, been drastically moved by performances of:

Tallis - Lamentations of Jeremiah
Allegri - Miserere mei Deus
Bach - Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied
Byrd - Laudibus in sanctis dominum
Bruckner - Os justi meditabitur
Stanford - Beati quorum via
Thompson - Alleluia
Brahms - Wahrum ist das Licht gegeben?
Brahms - Requiem (movements II, III, VI & VII)
Martin - Mass for double choir
Durufle - Ubi caritas
Britten - Hymn to St Cecilia
Tavener - Little Lamb
Howells - Take Him, Earth, For Cherishing
Mozart - Requiem
Bach - Jesu, meine Freude
Ives - Psalm 67
Lauridsen - O magnum mysterium
Bach - Cantata 140 (Mein Freund ist mein duet)
Purcell - Here my prayer, O Lord
Harris - Faire is the Heaven
Faure - Requiem
Verdi - Requiem
Gowers - Viri Galilaei

actually I could go on and on and on, singing with good church choirs is a fucking privilege

Standing in Cleveland Municipal Stadium in 1989, seeing Paul McCartney -- the first time in my life I'd seen a former Beatle perform live -- when he broke into "Things We Said Today," that's about the closest I'd ever come to anything like quasi-religious or sublime feeling in relation to music. It was otherworldly.

I recently saw the Cleveland Institute of Music student orchestra perform a program that included Mendelsson's Hebrides overture, Dvorak's cello concerto in B minor, and Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," and it was amazing. The featured cellist, Andris Koh, took me to another planet during the Dvorak.

First time I heard Magma's MDK it was a lot like this, particularly the second half. I had no idea what to expect, I was just driving down the highway and everything kept getting more and more intense, spinning off new melodies every 5-6 seconds, definitely felt like a religious experience to me

Other songs that hit that place:
Cardiacs - "Dirty Boy"; every damn time in fact
Van der Graaf Generator - "La Rossa"
Vangelis - "My Face in the Rain"
YMO - "Gradated Gray"

most recently singing a piece called "The Evening Choir" by a local composer named Carson Cooman

I saw this! He was great!

DJP was, I mean.

^_^ thanking u

As far as live stuff goes, I saw Dan Deacon a few years back, that was as intense and enlightening as anything I can remember. The drop in "Dance Yrself Clean" (anyone who's seen this live knows what I'm talking about). Seeing Kraftwerk in Milwaukee of all places and getting to hear "Neon Lights", holy shit. Cornelius playing "Tone Twilight Zone". And so on.

Yeah, a good choir, fucking hell. I tend to avoid going to choral concerts because I can't deal with how overwhelmed I get; if I listen too much I feel like I'm going to melt away and get transported into space. Lol emo etc. Gonna Spotify the shit out of that list, cheers.

I had some sort of ridiculously intense experience where I started crying and just couldn't stop when I saw Spiritualized do the thing where they toured with a gospel choir. It was totally unexpected but the whole thing was so amazingly beautiful I just sort of lost it for while.

that's awesome djp/enbb

the more i thought about this, the more i realized that this sort of happens to me all the time -- it's not a once in a lifetime thing, it's more of a frequent companion.

i guess that's not really quasi spiritual but it feels transcendental to me. if this is what people get out of religion/worshipping a god (not to conflate the two necessarily), it (religion) would make a lot more sense to me.

still, there are highlights -- seeing a live choir perform the passion of joan of arc while the movie played on a giant screen in a church while i sat on a balcony. a balcony!

I frequently get this feeling from listening to music as well as performing, which is why I like so much of it so passionately (and also probably why I tend to follow and treasure bands/artists who tap into a wavelength that appeals to me long after most others have written them off)

Seeing Leonard Cohen a couple of years back on his recouping the revenue tour felt the most explicitly religious to me. Not so much physically transcendent (had that plenty in the good old days of mushroom weekends) but the feeling of being ministered wisdom and feeling a part of something special, almost holy.

Most recently, chilling in the basement with Pharoah Sanders's "The Creator Has a Master Plan." Fucking ecstatic.

Oh MAN I listen to Karma every Thanksgiving and
it
is
wonderful

For example, the cacophonous intro to Depeche Mode's "In Chains" bleeding into that held organ note with Dave's bluesy vocal sliding in on top and the guitar lick popping in as he goes up to the top of his range and then the bass line coming in before the drums and Martin's high part come in and then the whole thing slams into that bridge-as-refrain and holy shit I'm melting just typing about it

The only regular spiritual experiences I have had when listening to music (aside from ones w/drink or drugs which I don't keep track of) have been 'outside-looking-in' moments. When I'm confronted with music that lots of people like and I do not, and then suddenly I have a moment of clarity when it totally works and I feel for an instant what a great mass of people must feel.

Usually it's like military grade pathos though, like, Coldplay dumping several tonnes of butterflies on thousands of fans who all gasp at the same moment. That's pretty transcendental.

The closest I can think of for myself is when I'm playing my acoustic guitar, alone with a couple beers, and I cease 'trying' to play, and I begin to *hear* myself, and the notes come out in some unexpected way, a patten, configuration, or tone I never would have been able to make if I'd been 'trying'. It's hard to describe. It's usually very fleeting, and it's sometimes an out-of-body sensation.

As soon as I notice it, it's gone. I imagine being able to hold on to and exist within that moment requires massive willpower and concentration, and would be the mark of a truly great musician.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQBpire6jhw

xpost yeah, i've had that - suddenly everything turns to liquid and you're just "feeling-out" sounds. as soon as you become aware of it, it stops happening though.

get bent, have you heard janacek's glagolitic mass?

I've had a couple of these. One was a long afternoon drive down to San Francisco listening to live King Crimson, culminating in approaching/crossing the Bay Bridge into the city at sunset to "Starless." Another one was a playthrough of V, the Merzbow/Pan Sonic album, in total darkness here in the office -- volume up as high as I could get it of course, though nowhere near loud enough. Normally listening to an hour-long piece of music in total darkness would put me straight to sleep, but I was really engaged with it this time, listening hard and getting hit hard by it.

Just thought of another -- driving through Wisconsin countryside during one of the weirdest thunderstorms I've ever encountered -- the cloud cover all the way to the horizon seemed to be about 50 feet above the ground and the landscape was very flat, so it felt like I was being squeezed along a wet paper-thin space between two slick membranes...very freaky. My wife and daughter were sound asleep in the car and I felt briefly like the world was uninhabited. Just as the rain hit its heaviest, Autechre's "Flutter" came up on the mixtape I was listening to: about nine perfect minutes.

Hearing "Son Of A Preacher Man" in Pulp Fiction when I was thirteen or fourteen.

get bent, have you heard janacek's glagolitic mass?

i have! it's not really my style.

the ones that immediately pop to mind are 1) seeing yo la tengo at the 9:30 club in dc in '97. i was standing in the back leaning against the sound guy's enclosure and when they started playing 'deeper into movies' the bass line just filled me to the point where i'm not even sure if i could see. 2) driving through durham, nc alone at 3am some time in 1993 and the fast part of superchunk's 'swallow that' made me seriously consider crashing my car into a wall or something because i felt like nothing would ever be better.

as I'm late home and wasted I'll share one of my embarrassing indie ones (which iirc I shared in some manner here before, and Steven Tyler had a laugh at me for it) - seeing Joanna Newsom play Ys with the Northern Sinfonia orchestra, when the string swell hit during 'Emily' I had probably the most intense physical reaction I've had to music, a curious vague vibrating ~activity~ which started in the back of my head, went through my mouth, and went all the way down to my belly, and oscillated away across the upper half of my body until the end of the song. I'm pleased that I'm less fond of 'Monkey and Bear', cuz I needed a good five minutes to recover from whatever that was.

I'm given to saying that music is my religion. Didn't even know that Hendrix had said it when I started saying it.

I also like to quote Dylan:

" I don't adhere to rabbis,
preachers, evengelists, all of
that. I've learned more from
the songs than I've learned
from any of this kind of
entity. The songs are my lexicon
I believe the songs."

That's how I feel, 100%.

I also agree with the comment upthread about the holy vibe at at least some of the 2010 Leonard Cohen tour shows. I attended the final one and I was in tears for at least half of the show.

And I fairly often achieve a feeling of deep joy while listening to music at home. Mostly Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins these days. Sometimes I feel something that seems to border on transcendance.

And I'm having a damn nice time with a 1995 Bob Dylan bootleg right now.

I've felt this way twice, both times live.

First time, Colleen opened for Beirut. Just a spare stage, single spotlight, several acoustic instruments, and a bunch of effects pedals surrounding her while she played this contemplative, aching chamber music. I'd been following her since a little after her first album and at this point she was promoting Les Ondes Silencieuses, so I knew what to expect, but the entire hushed stillness in the midst of a whole audience that seemed as rapturously stunned as I was, holding our breaths seemingly for the duration of her whole set until she finally took her modest bow -- the sense of experiencing a deeply private moment in the midst of a whole auditorium who presumably experiencing the same thing -- a sort of communal erasing of ego. It didn't matter that, reading some user reviews afterwards, the quietude wasn't down to everyoen being enthralled (some were bored), or that during one her songs, a click got caught in one of her loops, or that I'm somewhere in between an atheist and an agnost -- in less than an hour in that cavernous auditorium, I felt profound, holy piety.

The second time was Einstein on the Beach. When the performers eased into "Knee 1," I was taken aback at how much I wanted to cry. I managed to hold it off until "Knee 4":

I remember “Knee 4,” and how the two women writhed on transparent gurneys, lit so expertly in so many ways that one set of shadows cast upon the curtain behind them looked like figures trying to climb out of a box, and another set of shadows, dozens of feet high, doubled and trebled against each other from all the reflective surfaces, and I swore those shadows looked like angels, like they were goddesses.

Like we all have within ourselves 20-foot-tall essences with six arms and three heads, struggling to emerge if only under the right circumstances. You know, Gnosticism.

By the time Knee 5 rolled in, I was sobbing.

Yay Colleen, she rules.

I came here to post "Einstein" too. "Koyaanisqatsi" got me into Philip Glass in 1983, and then the first revival of "Einstein" came around in 1984, which not only led me to buy pretty much every Glass album for the next 20 years, but also to see anything Robert Wilson directs (7 show so far!), up to and including his taking a dump on stage verrrry sloooowly against a brilliant blue backdrop.

Which led to another transcendent moment--"The Black Rider," probably the best piece of theater I've ever seen.

Driving home one night and someone was playing Mahmoud Ahmed, I think "Sedètègnash Nègn", on WPRB. I started laughing out of sheer joy - his voice was simultaneously so alien but human and beautiful - and had to pull over and wait for the song to finish, then called and found out what it was. It was definitely the most extraordinary thing I had ever heard at the time. Might still be.

The time I had morphine in the hospital and had music on. When the drugs wore off, I never wanted another "transcendental" experience. Sounds terrifying.

reading back thru the thread has been v.rewarding & inspired me to remember some of mine:

- listening to Van Morrison - Astral Weeks for the first time, v.lonely recent high school grad whose friends had all moved away and was now spending 8 hours a day inside a huge corporate building (with my headphones on, of course)—ended up having to run outside because I couldn't handle it, the music was just. so. beautiful. phoned up my best friend (who, of course, I was also heavy-crushin' on at the time) and a few other ppl, immediately took up the lance in defense of Van Morrison's entire career, etc etc

- The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, while robo-tripping. And I just started dancing, and haven't really ever stopped.

- same Van Morrison album, couple years later, stoned, on better headphones, in my dorm at night: I can hear everything maaaaan! I can... fuckin... hear him moving towards and away from the mic! It's like Van Morrison is whispering right into my ear! ... Holy shit, I'm still just on the first song! That's like... seven more songs? or something? I dunno if I can...............*falls asleep*

(that last one was one of the first times I listened to music* stoned, if that wasn't clear from context)

*music of my own choosing, not sublime or snoop dogg or whatever bullshit those kids wanted to hear

I think I went through a "transcendental" phase when I listened to stuff like LOOP. Must be youth.

I listened to Popul Vuh and stuff to hear what it sounded like, but after my surgery I can't imagine having any experience without drugs.

DJP have you ever sung in any of the Delius pieces that mix chorus and orchestra?

I have not!

also get bent OTM re: Rachmaninoff Bogoroditse, Pärt Magnificat and Tallis Spem in alium; I might know that Rheinberger piece too

Tallis Spem in alium

Gods yes, putting on the Kronos Quartet version right now.

as a teen listening to electric wizard - come my fanatics for the first time whilst on acid was one of my most profound and formative musical moments ...ivixor b/phase inducer?! shit. someone put kyuss - blues for the red sun on after that and it was such a perfect resolution. half way through 50 million year trip when it slows right down into half time and the guitars do that harmony thing. it all made so much sense maaan. vividly remember those feelings even though it was over 10 years ago.

more recently, pandit pran nath - raga malkauns (nyc recording from '76)

i don't have the words for this one. people just have to try it for themselves. preferably with the lights off.

there was a time in my life when I could not listen to "walk on by" by Isaac Hayes without losing it. at least once I fell to my knees and sobbed and convulsed (tears were common, the falling to knees was new)

I have many, but the first one I can remember is Spacemen 3's "Mary Anne" when I was in college, and yes I had taken drugs, and no I can't remember what they were. Didn't know the band, and a friend of a friend put on the lp without explanation. In any event, what I do remember is perceiving the song as a solid 3-dimensional structure that was as inevitable as the laws of nature, and suddenly feeling like there were certain songs that had a reality that would outlast the law of gravity. Um, yeah.

i saw the blind boys of alabama at a festival last year and they brought aaron neville (whom i had always admired but not ever loved) on to sing 'a change is gonna come' and it was the most heartbreaking melancholic beautiful thing i have ever heard, i can still cry thinking about it.

wow

Just for future reference, and if it's not being too cheeky to ask, who is DJP IRL?

Had another moment like this on Saturday night. Met a good friend I'd not seen for a while at the ICA for the weird Factory Floor gig/performance piece that was on that night, enjoyed it, went back to New Cross for a few pints with a few more friends, the drink flowed, the memories washed over us, great times were had...went back to mine with my housemate, drank a few more beers, smoked a joint and put on the 2nd half of Erol Alkan's Bugged In mix (from the DJ Koze track onwards)...started to feel weirdly intense when the Clinic track ('Come into Our Room') came on...like I felt weighed down by the music...then that ten minute remix of Big City by Spacemen 3 started. I'd never heard it before, but I knew instantly that I'd never heard anything quite like it...that anchoring bass throb, those weird, shuffling arpreggios darting about, the GORGEOUS snatch of phased vocals waving in and out of the mix...it was too much. I sort of floated outside myself whilst being soundly beaten on Halo 4. Top top stuff.

lol at two spacemen 3 mentions in a day

Might throw this in here as a few people have mentioned the music-as-shapes thing...does anyone get this when they hear repeated piano chord sequences? I 'see' the piano's sound as a series of vertically layered oblongs, with their position moving left or right depending on the chord played etc.

it's a bummer, but there doesn't seem to be a universal code unlocked by synesthesia. it's completely arbitrary from person to person. or maybe there is a secret code underneath the code... can you draw what these oblongs look like?

Will try tomorrow and post them up

This is my attempt at transferring that mental process into something viewable. I listened to 'Ghost Ship in a Storm' by Jim O Rourke, which is one of the songs that I have the strongest reaction to...having thought about it more, the 'vision' I get only really arrives on songs with similarly sad/dusty sounding piano sections. Weird.

So, this is my MS Paint representation of the chord sequence you can hear at 40 seconds into this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iILhsfkens)

http://i45.tinypic.com/25jfv28.jpg

(sequence begins at the bottom and rises up btw)

djp otm itt. standing in the presence of great singers, let alone actually getting to join your voice to theirs, is deep mystical territory. the first rehearsal with anonymous 4 I did, as soon as they started singing I practically left my body, I'll never forget it. and then much later, at rehearsal last month, on one of the worst days of my life ever, I could not believe the depths their voices reached in me. it wasn't healing because I don't work like that, I have to tunnel through stuff, so it made me very very sad, but it also put me in touch with - like - the taproot - something central to me, like how I imagine it'd feel if I had an open wound on my arm and somebody reached in and touched bone.

there was a time in my life when I could not listen to "walk on by" by Isaac Hayes without losing it. at least once I fell to my knees and sobbed and convulsed (tears were common, the falling to knees was new)

― Lamborghini mercy, yo sledge she's so percy (m bison), Monday, 19 November 2012 05:17

This, only I'd roll around on the floor, literally. Amazing, amazing.

A few come to mind:

-- When I was 13, my dad agreed to take me and a friend to my first proper rock show. It was U2, on the War tour. But this is not about U2, even though I totally loved the show. Since it was a school night, and I was going to be out late by my normal 13-yr-old standards, my parents suggested that I go take a nap after dinner, before we headed out for the show. Of course, being all wired about my big night out, there was no way I was going to sleep. But I agreed to lie down, and turned on a local freeform nonprofit radio station. For whatever reason, they had decided to play the entirety of Roxy Music's High Road EP. What I remember is lying there in my bed, eyes closed, in a weird state of excited near-sleep, with Roxy's version of "Like a Hurricane" washing over me. It felt like the greatest piece of music I had ever heard. I don't know what it signified, exactly -- I'm sure it was bound up with my sense that I was about to cross one of those thresholds to proper adolescence, I was going to start going to shows, I was going to start become someone different, I don't know. But that's still my favorite version of that song (and I love Neil's original to pieces).

-- In terms of live shows, the most amazing thing I've felt was at a Patti Smith concert about 11 or 12 years ago. The first half of the show was pretty good but felt a little off, it took a while for Patti to feel her way into the crowd. But halfway through, she played "Redondo Beach," and from there on things just picked up steam and by the end everyone was thronged as close as we could get to the stage, jumped up and down, yelling and singing along to "Gloria" and "Be My Baby" and whatever else was in the set-closing part of the night. She was playing barefoot in jeans and a T-shirt and ripping strings off her guitar. It was incantatory and delirious.

Last night I saw Arneis Quartet, a local string quartet who are really quite badass, and David Kravitz, a local baritone who is also quite badass, doing a piece called "Being Music" by Charles Fussell that was just INCREDIBLE. I literally had an out of body experience while listening to it.

appropriate title too, "Being Music"

re: jim orourke chord graph -- are the darker blue sections guitar parts?

Tipsy, your Patti Smith experience reminds of a similar Sleater-Kinney gig, which Carrie actually agreed with, I will try to find it.

Still the piano part...It's not the best diagram but until I tried to do it I hadn't realised how unspecific but still 'there' the thing I see is.

what does dark blue mean vs light blue?

dark blue = lower pitched chords (??? i have a shaky grasp of musical terminology at the best of times so forgive me).

several years ago i saw Tim Hecker and Growing at an once-factory-now-loft-like space/recording studio in an industrial part of town with a scarce population (now in the process of major condo-related gentrification...). i think it was at the end of summer, like the temperature was just right outside and maybe a little warm in the space. one of the few times i've sat on the floor for a show, but hey everyone was doing it! and i was with three of my close friends, and we knew many people there, and so it had a home-like feeling (and was in fact a place where people lived), and it wasn't crowded anyway. the lighting was just regular lamp light with a string or two of christmas lights around all these great plants and a huge window, the kind divided up into smaller rectangular panes. the musicians were set up in front of the window, but closer to a corner of the room. all the lights were off for Tim Hecker, of course, and the sound just completely filled the room and then my body - I remember this moment of not being able to feel the wood floor i was sitting on, or that it suddenly became really comfortable, all kinds of blue-grey fuzzed-out geometric-shape visions when i closed my eyes. And then there was a break in which people stood up and said hi to friends and but were mostly like whoa and drank their beer and smiled. Then Growing played and all the visions suddenly became brightly coloured and sunlit and i definitely could not feel the floor beneath me and time just disappeared, like I could've listened to them play forever because I had no concept of forever or now or then anyway. But they did stop playing after however long, who knows, and everyone milled around for a bit and we went somewhere or home.

i did ecstasy so much in my late teens and early 20s that i feel like drug experiences, transcendental experiences, and drug experiences which were transcendental are all sort of mixed together. these days i find i get really strong quite spiritual feelings when i go on long runs and listen to music, eg about two saturdays ago i was towards the end of a really good run and a particular track came on in a mix i was listening to (hadn't ever heard the track before) and i was filled with this sense of my youth and energy, a sort of opposite feeling to how i've often felt in recent years about me and music and my life, mainly cos of having had so many health problems. usually my euphoric moments when exercising are fleeting or feel shallow (not in the pejorative way) but this was really deep and rich and lasted for about 10 minutes. just this all-pervasive sense of power and the prescient nature of the moment itself.

then i got home and showered and went out and got wasted, buying a scotch egg on the way :)

i feel like i must have some good stories about club experiences but i think i felt just generally consumed by the music i loved in those years, like every record i heard that i liked, every great night, every time a dj played something i liked, it wasn't always the same but it was a life lived for this (narcotics-assisted) feelings.

what i love about exercise and what makes it stand out here is that it's given me a sense of recapturing something that was lost, of clawing back the kind of feelings i thought had gone forever, i guess primal rushes inspired by your own physicality, your own physical relationship to music, the same feelings i got from raving, except i wear shorts and expel more mucus in an hour than most people do in a year.

No one's mentioned "New Grass" yet. First time I heard it, it definitely stirred something in me. I didn't lose it or anyhting like that, just felt this immense warmth and comfort, maybe even a sense of wonder, listening to Hollis channeling that grace.

Faure's Requiem have a similar effect on me.

xpost I had that moment with 'Taphead'. I had not heard or thought about Talk Talk since 1985. It was the middle of the night in mid december 1991 and I was packing to move back to Seattle from a brief adventure in Madison WI. The community radio played 'Taphead' and I felt like I'd just been handed the key to some garden I forgot I owned.

yes, "new grass" is something very special, warm is a fitting adjective but there is more to it. here is what i wrote about it in my blog a couple of years ago:

This is the song I'd play to someone just about to kill himself. No. Maybe that should say that's the song I would play to myself if I was about to leave this world on my own. The beauty of this song transcends the appeal death could have for someone who has lost all hope. It is the warmest, most caressing, most soothing song on Laughing Stock. It's a holy song, the lyrics use Christian terminology: sacrament, Christ, heaven, vow. Mark Hollis is English, if he had been from India he would sing about Vishnu or Krishna, the words and names don't matter. It's all about the music. What reaches our brain via the ears directly without the interference of the ratio. Call it truth, love or anything. I think I would call it trust.

Wow. Nailing it. Great post.

Talk Talk would make me pull a pin but the sentiment is nice

I might have written about this in another thread, but I went to see Arvo Pärts Passio recently. I'd invited a girl along, and when the piece started I began to be concerned, as it was really samey and perhaps a bit boring, and it's an hourlong piece, and she doesn't normally listen to choral music, so I was worried she wouldn't like it. Also, we had been given translations of the latin text, which we sat there reading, and I had just recently written this blogpost on the choirs performance of Pärts Summa, so I was sort of trying to think of smart stuff to say afterwards. All in all, I was hardly able to concentrate about the music at all, and I was a bit stressed and dissapointed. Until the very end. Jesus' final words, 'consumatum est', are just this descending scale, and then the four evangelists sing 'and then he died' on the very same note. Small pause. And then the choir sings these absolutely amazing ascending chords, which is probably the first really harmonic part of the piece. And it was just like everything inside of me became untangled, every barrier broke completely. Tears welled up in my eyes, and yeah, it was pretty transcendental. It only lasted a few seconds though, then I had to stop myself from crying in front of my date...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YhFmIZi978

It's about five minutes into this video.