2. Time for a deep breath

In which we consider many sides of a stone

Author

Richard Walley
May 24, 2024

Time for a deep breath

Welcome back! First up, I want to say I’m really, truly touched by how many of you signed up for this. It means a lot. Many of you are my friends (hello!), and I’m not sure whether to thank you more or less than the complete strangers who have taken the plunge. Either way, it’s wonderful :-) Thank you.

A quick note on what we’re doing here in case it’s your first time

This is the second track from the debut album from The Sixteenth. The album - entitled You Could Be Happy - will be released one track at a time over the next fifteen weeks or so. It’s being released like that because it tells a story, and I decided that it’d be fun to serialise the story, like Dickens, or a comic. The idea of these emails is to tell you a bit more of that story. If you’re coming to these thoughts for the first time and would like to start at the beginning, you can access old emails here.

Some thoughts on words

Probably about 25 years ago, Will Self wrote a tiny book called ‘Scale’. It’s literally a tiny book - about a quarter of the physical size of normal books. It was when Penguin did a series of micro-books for its 60th anniversary that cost 60p. I love this book. I love it so much I’m going quote the prologue wholesale -

The philosopher Freddie Ayer was once asked which single thing he found the most evocative of Paris. The venerable logical positivist thought for a while, and then answered, ‘A road sign with “Paris” written on it'.

The book is called Scale because it hangs a story around every different meaning of the word ‘scale’ you can possibly imagine; scales on lizards, scale on a kettle, scale as in size, scale as in climb… It’s very entertaining.

It is also a really good example of the way English people love playing with words. From cryptic crosswords to the both popular and perennially hilarious double entendre (fnar fnar), it appears to me that English people have a special love of making words do weird and wonderful things for them. In fairness, I’m not sure if this is true of every language once you get to know them, but I’m claiming it as an observation anyway. I love thinking about this stuff in a little more depth too. Are words things? Are things just words? Do words have meaning of their own, or do they just signify another, deeper meaning? Maybe in some future instalment we can talk some more about this stuff, because honestly I find it fascinating. I’ll make a note of it in the forward plan.

I mention all of this because many of the titles of the tracks on this album mean several different things. I am nowhere near the equal of either Will Self or Finbar Saunders in terms of my wordplay. But I am trying to couch myself in that tradition in order to paper over my self-consciousness at the direct and indirect meanings I’ve deliberately coded into the presentation of the music, the titles, and the images that accompany them. You heard some of this minor mucking around in last week’s track, ‘Breaking It’, which was about, well, things breaking, but which also featured a pretty ferocious breakbeat.

One of the things I’ve said about the album is that it’s a mystery to be solved. If that idea takes your fancy, understanding the multiple meanings of words, and the origins of phrases, is key to unlocking it.

Knee 1a (Cages)

Sorry to disappoint, but I plan to cover off the significance of the word ‘knee’ in a couple of weeks’ time. Apologies if that was the thing you were hanging out for, and feel free to Do Your Own Research in the mean time; it shouldn’t take you too long to figure out why this track is called ‘knee’. In the mean time, we can talk about cages. The clue to the main meaning is in the artwork for this song, which refers to the piano piece that sort of inspired it - ‘All Sides of the Small Stone, for Erik Satie and (Secretly Given to Jim Tenney as a Koan)’, by John Cage.

That whole piece is such an idea explosion of people and things. Erik Satie; the godfather of ironic musical mischief. John Cage; his rightful heir, but the person committed to the idea that simultaneously nothing should be taken seriously and everything should be taken seriously (probably a koan in itself). Jim Tenney, vaguely unacknowledged godfather of sampling and plunderphonics, and I must admit somebody who I came across first in the context of the piece Cage wrote for him (which has a very charming story behind it).

My piece is not a decent pastiche of either Cage or Satie, and if there was a Cage reference to be had, it’d be more ‘In a Landscape’ than the Tenney piece I mentioned above. But nonetheless, there is something in the oscillation between major and minor thirds that’s not quite Satie but maybe a hundred-years-out-of-time version of his wonky harmonic minor harmonies. I also like the idea that it tries to be two opposite things at once. Serious and funny, sad and happy, major and minor, all sides of the rock at once.

And in terms of the story. Well, after all the sturm und drang of the first track, we’re suddenly thrown - poof! - into something very calm indeed. As I hinted last week, this juxtaposition is the heart of this early part of the album. You can very much be melting from stress one minute and extremely calm the next. Or sometimes both at the same time. Serious and funny, major and minor… But it’s not healthy. The calm isn’t happiness, it’s something else. It’s the opposite side of the stress coin that is actually the same side. It certainly doesn’t presage anything healthy.

And so we return to cages. We are imprisoned by our emotions and ideas. They control how we see the world, and interact with it, and value it. And the biggest trick they pull is to persuade us that they’re real, and reliable arbiters of reality. They convince us that we’re completely objective and conscious at times when our relationship with reality is actually hilariously compromised. Like when we’re incredibly stressed, or have somehow persuaded ourselves that the stress is over and it wasn’t that bad in the first place really, and certainly we’re over the worst of it now. We are free but only insofar as we don’t realise how captive we are. Or to put it the other way, we are free from our feelings only when we recognise how much we are captured by them. Free - not free. Serious and funny, major and minor…

What next?

Glad you asked! Firstly, thanks for reading this far. You’ve already been part of the creative journey of this album, and I very sincerely thank you for paying attention. All I’d really like is for people to listen and be part of the journey. Job done. However, if you have friends or people you think would enjoy this, please encourage them to sign up to these updates via www.thesixteenth.net. It would mean a lot. And maybe actually listen to the songs in whatever way you enjoy!