So It’s Different

Volcano Choir “Seeplymouth”

We can easily identify the big emotions, the primary colors of feeling. But just as we mostly see the world in impure shades and hues, we mostly experience emotion as odd hybrid syndromes of thoughts, feelings, and motivations. We’re often overcome by mixtures of sensations that are incredibly difficult to catalog and process, and I think to a large extent, this is why we make and appreciate art, particularly music — it’s perhaps our best way of articulating and understanding so many of the emotional experiences that go beyond our regular vocabulary. In the case of this Volcano Choir song, I would be very hard pressed to tell you exactly what this mood is, or what it means, but I hear it and recognize it, and can go to that place by hearing it. Not even a specific feeling, but the movement from one state to another, and knowing that sequence but not exactly the context for it. This is wonderfully articulate music, but at the same time, totally inscrutable and undefined. If a lot of music can be taken as stylized representation, this seems more like an abstracted realism where we are so close up that we can hardly suss out the subject of representation.

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