This morning I put on my headphones and went for a brisk walk to the local “Schrebergarten”, a community garden here in Wuppertal where they’ve planted rose bushes and sunflowers along the walkways and where plots of land are as hard to come by as «insert something very rare».
During my walk I decided to listen to an old album from The Books, a now-disbanded indie music duo from New York City which I had been very fond of when I was a student living there, but haven’t listened to since I moved to Germany a little over 4 years ago:
If, somewhere in your distant past, you have listened to an album like The Lemon of Pink as many times as I have and then decide to listen to it again on a spontaneous whim, then you might find yourself walking down the sidewalk of a very cold, empty city block one morning while watching curls of vapor escape every exhale and then suddenly, as the first track starts to play, you will feel yourself transported through time and space to a very familiar but distant sensation of suffocating warmth and sweat forming along your underarms and behind your knees, a feeling from your early 20s when you walked home every day past the Plaza de España and exulted in thumping the soles of your shoes against the blazing, gum-stained streets of Madrid. That was where you studied Spanish Lit for ten months and listened to The Books whenever you got homesick and yearned for a taste of New York, and as the track switches to “Tokyo” you will immediately whiz back to that magnificent, grinding city, the third place in your life which you’d thought of as home - your old dorm building on Union Square West in Manhattan - and even though it’s on the wrong side of the wrong ocean, and even though you’d never been to Tokyo, or Japan, or for that matter any other Asian countries besides Taiwan, you still think that song epitomizes the vision of Tokyo you’ve always had in your head.
Listening to The Books is like being dropped in the middle of a collage of sounds which drowns you in waves of disorienting- and familiar-ness, tugging and pushing at the edges of your being by tickling all of your senses at once. One of my close friends, who doesn’t like them, used to say back in college that what they produced was not music but rather “the art of noise” (conceptually; not to be confused with the music group of the same name). I think that description is probably accurate.
I think my own equivalent of these would be "Cave Rave" by Crystal Fighters.
Might just take a walk one of these days and blast that just to get this feeling.