I don’t know how these Friday newsletters come together. Or maybe I do. They usually start with an image I want to put at the top, or a subject line. Today’s began with the subject line: “Listening is the whole deal.”
I came across that line when I was reading The Work of Art, and I knew I had 3 things I wanted to put in there — the Eno doc, Perfect Days, and the Four Tet interview — which were all somewhat related to listening. So once I had almost half the letter, I figured might as well make it a theme.
My favorite bit in the letter is item #9:
“The act of writing is to me to listen,” said Jon Fosse in his Nobel lecture. “When I write I never prepare, I don’t plan anything, I proceed by listening… At a certain point I always get a feeling that the text has already been written, is out there somewhere, not inside me, and that I just need to write it down before the text disappears.”
I don’t consider my newsletters fine literature or anything like that, but there’s something that happens when I’m out here in the studio at my desk, and I’m writing and just pushing things around, seeing how they bump up to each other — the arrangement presents itself, and the thing just comes into being.
THERE IS A PHRASE, variations of which many of the subjects of this book ended up uttering at some point. As they were describing why they did this or that, they would say they “listened” to the work, or the work would “tell” them what to do; the work would “speak” to them, as if a character in a book or a color on a canvas could issue orders. Tony Kushner asked his Angels alter ego, Louis, to explain the play to him; Cheryl Pope waited for the mother in her picture with no face to tell her whether she wanted a face. For a long while, I dismissed this phrasing as cliché — more of the empty language people often employ to describe how they work because creation is so hard to describe. Eventually, however, I began to think that no, maybe listening was the whole deal.
Listening to what the poem or song was telling them was another way of describing how they listened to themselves, taking whatever their imagination spewed forth, recognizing it and translating it back—simplifying it, usually—so their conscious self could go about manipulating it. And this attending (“I was just taking dictation,” said Kushner, a common sentiment) was really, I realized, at the heart of the project of this book. That’s what the exhibits they shared are about. The studies, notes, doodles —they are all ways the artists have of talking to themselves.
Yesterday’s newsletter, “Drawing Eno,” was inspired by seeing Gary Hustwit’s new film Eno and how I’ve been drawing Brian Eno lectures and interviews for over 15 years. Here’s a drawing I made from the generated version of the movie I saw:
I am a big believer that travel doesn’t relieve your problems, it throws them into relief. You see your life in a new light and new shadows. The desert light can be good for this. At its peak, it is harsh and unforgiving, but at dusk and dawn it softens, becomes more mysterious. Every trip has its challenges, but I returned home, as I often do, with a sense of perspective and a clarity about what I want to do next. What more could one ask for? (“Go away so you can come back.”)
What I liked most about New Mexico was being in the forests and the deserts outside of town.
In Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac, a fictional Richard Feynman says:
Los Alamos was high up on a mesa with tall cliffs carved in dark red earth, lots of trees and shrubs all around. The landscape was breathtaking, the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. Coming from New York, I’d never traveled out to the West before, so I really felt like I was in another world. In Mars or something. It had the strange energy of a sacred space, a haven far away from the civilized world, away from prying eyes, farther than God could see. The perfect spot to do the unimaginable.
Four Tet’s Three is one of my favorite albums of the year, so I was delighted to come across an interview with Kieran Hebden on the Tape Notes podcast discussing its making. He rarely gives interviews, so before listening, I really knew nothing about him or how he works. It was a delight to hear about the making of a record I’ve spent so much time with.
Four Tet’s music is extra special to me because my 11-year-old composer and I both love it — I put “Loved” on my February mixtape and Owen put “Lush” on the mixtape we collaborated on this month. It was wild to me to hear Hebden describe how he works in Ableton, drawing the notes on the piano roll instead of playing them on the keyboard. (Something I see Owen do a ton when he’s composing.)
I really loved Hebden’s attitude towards making music after many decades. He says that if he can stay excited about listening to music and enjoy the making of it while also avoiding the trappings of success and the bog of the industry, that it actually makes the work more successful. Just a wonderful listen.
When he was asked about his most important piece of equipment, he said his hi-fi system because it’s what helps him listen to music in a level of detail that helps him really explore and hear sounds. (Check out the gigantic ongoing Spotify playlist of what he’s listening to.)
This emphasis on listening came up over and over again in the interview, and I wanted to copy down his advice to other musicians: Listen to more music.
“Listening to a lot of music and really exploring it and doing that level of investigation of really understanding where things have come from.”
If you listen to a current record now that samples an old nineties record, and then you check out the old nineties record, find out that sample’s like an old soul record for the drum break or whatever.
And then you go listen to the old soul record and then you find out who the drummer was who played that drum break. And it’s like, oh, it’s Bernard Purdy or whatever.
And then you look on Wikipedia and check out all the other records he made. And then you’re like, oh, he worked with this producer a lot and you check out what that producer did.
To listen to music in that way and explore it and study it, I think is hugely valuable in terms of learning how to be a good arranger, a good producer, a good musician. The more you take in of understanding the sort of like great music that’s out there and the things that came before, it’s so powerful.
Everything’s there, all the information’s there. And then if you take everything you learn from that and then combine it with your own ideas and your own emotions and stuff, then you sort of set up to sort of push things forward. I think that’s much more useful than spending all your time being like, I’m just gonna be learning what every single thing in Ableton does now for the next few months…
You’ve got to love records so much, he says, that you want to make something that can sit on a shelf alongside the records you love.
If you want to be a great musician, you need to listen to more great music. If you want to write great books, you need to read more great books. If you want to make great films…
