REAL LISTENER TALES VOLUME ONE

PROGRESSIVE HOUSE IN THE FOREST

Today is the debut of yet another confusing segment on John’s Music Blog: Real Listener Tales. I’m not exactly sure what I’m trying to accomplish with this one. I want to have a quick conversation with a music listener about an experience they had while listening to music. Hopefully these tales will be both somewhat mundane and somewhat interesting, like the collection of stories Kramer sold to J. Peterman on that one episode of Seinfeld. For the first installment, I speak to my friend Fred about a night he spent jogging in the forest while listening to a Sasha and Digweed mix. 

So you were going for a jog?

Yeah, every week I do a long run in the Taconic State Park. It's usually two to three hours. 

And what kind of music did you have on for your last run? 

I've been doing research on the “greatest mixes of all time.” And the Sasha and Digweed Renaissance CD from, I don't know, somewhere between ‘96 and ‘99 is on a lot of these lists. 

It's the kind of music that was made for a very specific late ‘90s superclub. 

I’ve spent a lot of time calculating how many hours these guys were DJing per week. If you think that they both were doing five, 10 hour gigs, that's 100 combined hours of DJing a week. It's beyond smooth, especially for the technology, right, it is flawless. The mixing is flawless. 

It chugs along and then there will be one major peak every 40 minutes, that's kind of the style?

These guys were doing really long sets, and this is, I think, around 70 minutes. It’s very unfunky, they almost managed to make some fairly funky stuff unfunky in the pursuit of what I presume is this very long, smooth journey. It is a fascinating construction. In some ways it's most interesting because of what it's not.

It is house music, essentially, and yet…

Yeah, every 40 minutes there's a house vocal that, if you listen to a different version of that song, that'd be a funky ass song.

It’s a version of American dance music with some stuff taken out. 

Yeah, and it sort of exists in this, in my conception of it, this sort of international space, right? Like, is it England? Is it Ibiza? It’s some club island I've never heard of, you know? 

It's that seamless turn-of-the-millennium sound. One might say it was “the sound of clubbing at the end of history.”

Yeah. It’s a very fascinating deal. It is a good mix, and it's kind of good despite itself because they strip so much. It's not these big builds that you see now, it's not these big drops. It is this engineered vibe that they've pieced together in this unbelievably seamless way. 

So you're jogging and listening to this? 

A couple pieces of context here. It's later in the day than normal and even though I've run hundreds of miles here in this three-by-three square mile park, there's places I haven't seen, and then because the seasons change, I can't always tell if I've been on a road or not. So I get there at six o'clock or something, and I head in, and immediately I start having this weird physical sensation where I feel like I've run through a cobweb. It’s this weird, zappy sensation. Am I having some neurological issue here? I can't figure it out because I can't get these cobwebs off me. Sasha and Digweed are not muzak, but in a way they are. There's something that's just so manufactured about it. 

At times, could be royalty free. 

And so it’s really tripping me out, there's a little bit of that Princess Bride, these big pools of water, and it's dark and I'm like, have I been on this trail? I'm getting very confused. I'm totally lost, which is sort of like this Sasha and Digweed mix. The room that could be anywhere, right? I have no idea where I am. How could I have discovered a new part of this forest? I'm just generally tripping out because I keep feeling these weird zapped fangs and I don't know where I am. It was a whole, whole ordeal. 

Sounds like it.

But it was the right moment to listen to the mix. Everything was very lush, very green, the trippiness of it, the loss of place, I think, was very relevant to it. I don't think I would have felt the power of this mix had I listened to it in a more normal context. 

That feels almost gamelike.

Yeah. Even though I should have been in a place that I knew very well, time and space didn't look quite right and the directionality of it didn’t make sense in the right way. There was just this way that it felt—it was different from normal, this sort of pixelization. I don't know if simulacra is the right word with this music, but it’s almost this weird simulacra of a house set. It's not something from New York, they've smoothed all of this stuff out and made it anonymous in a way.

And did you ever figure out what that sensation was? 

Only later. It turns out that it’s Gypsy Moths, and I went back two days ago and there are cobwebs all over the fucking place. It's this invasive species that's everywhere. Luckily it was not an aneurysm but a weird natural occurrence. 

So how long were you out there? Was there a point when you felt like you were peaking, and did that point include any sort of ethereal vocals? 

Yeah, the vocals anchored me in the whole thing. I remember maybe like 50 minutes in, I finally ended up by a pond that I knew, and that's when they were sort of hitting me. It wasn't the peak but it was the beginning of the peak and then I was like, oh, okay, I feel much better, I'm not losing my fucking mind. And I did go back and look at my GPS a day later, and I did discover this whole almost mile long stretch of trail I've never been on before, so it wasn't me totally losing my mind—that's the takeaway. 

I know you haven't done psychedelic drugs in quite some time. 

Yeah. 

Would you say this experience was the closest you've come to that feeling since you were maybe in high school or something?

I never really did psychedelics that much, we never had good stuff, but I will say the unmooring of things felt sort of like being in an altered state. 

And then I think you mentioned to me before that you lost your keys?

Yeah I lost my fucking car keys. Also there's no cell phone service, really, so I got back to the car—it is now dark by the way, because I didn't time things very well—and then I have to call my wife. So first I have to walk around to get service, then I can only call her, I couldn't text through my location, so it took her like 35 minutes to actually be able to show up. I ended the night just walking down this road in the dark, in the middle of nowhere. I was weirdly calm at this time and I think maybe that was the Sasha and Digweed influence.

If you have a Real Listener Tale you would like to share, feel free to email me (jchiaverina at gmail) and maybe we can chat more.