Sometimes it’s fun or satisfying to put music on that matches the the activity you’re doing or the place where you are. There is a risk that it feels too contrived, the experience of adding the selected soundtrack to the situation detracting from it, or suddenly giving it a time limit (track length etc), but when done ‘right’ (whatever that means), I have found that it can be really enjoyable.
For example, when visiting Japan recently, I found myself on the balcony of my accommodation, with an unfamiliar Japanese beer, looking down at glimpses of the quiet streets through the gaps in buildings in that part of the city, the glow of distant lights of busier parts. While ostensibly pretty ‘on the nose’ as a choice, I put on ‘Alone in Kyoto’ by Air (as featured on my Thin Places playlist discussed in a previous blog entry). Not only was it appropriate in name, but the melancholic and at times sort of gently epic nature of that track genuinely fitted the mood of the situation perfectly, adding to what I was experiencing without making it feel like an artificial moment. To save myself from downing the can too quickly, I even put the song on twice.
Another example of this during my trip was on the way home. Faced with a 21 hour layover in Shanghai while travelling home from Tokyo to London, and unable to leave the airport, a night on the cold hard floor was looming. After having dinner and playing chess with my travel companion to kill time, we decided to attempt get some sleep. We engaged in what I am terming ‘airport nesting’, the principle of which involves finding a quiet corner away from people and using whatever bags and clothes you have to try to make a comfortable place to sleep in what J G Ballard called ...”the suburbs of an invisible world capital” which are “designed for the next 5 minutes”. When faced with 21 hours, your perception of the place changes. We associate airports with crowds and queues, but in the early hours of the morning in a country still suffering touristically from continuing strict regulations related to the pandemic, you’re instead in an even more eerie version of the inbetween worlds that airports are. A massive space with only a handful of other people visible, some hundreds of meters way despite being in the same room as you; an unfamiliar language emanating from a tannoy, echoing around the space like some dystopian public alert system; shops and restaurants off the main concourse, closed and dark, their normal or former identities as places of life and movement no longer visible, even to the imagination a feeling that John Koenig's term 'kenopsia' from the brilliant Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows perfectly describes. Our ‘bed’ was the floor behind a large plant pot containing a plastic shrub,
our 'pillows' bags of laundry. After a night full of half hour bursts of sleep, I finally decided to sit up and read a borrowed book and put on what else but Brian Eno’s ‘Music for Airports’. Again, pretty on the nose you might say, but in the same way as I like to use all of the features of a space (e.g. the hooks in a shop’s changing room or every cubby hole in a car for storing something), there’s something in me that takes satisfaction from ‘using’ something (in this case music) for the job it was, ostensibly at least, designed for- and it worked perfectly. The gentle melodies and slow pace of the harmonic rhythm fitted the situation well, soothed my tired mind, perfectly filled the hole between my restless night and the throng as the airport started to wake up and get busier.
Sometimes it is situations such as those described above (or the feelings that they can be catalysts for in us) that can be the inspiration for us composers, the starting point of pieces- how appropriate then that they can also be the ‘end’ point, contexts in which we choose to consume the music, that we consider to be able to be enhanced by choosing this music to be the soundtrack.