Music Is Magic In Real Life – selected by Luke Abbott from Szun Waves

I like it when people take things seriously, and I think EEIH are pretty for-real about what they do.  Arguably, three people is the ideal number for a band, and set up in a triangle facing inwards like this creates a pretty powerful vibe.  There’s something ceremonial about this performance, it has an almost monastic atmosphere.

What’s not to like about a Discordian marching band?  I love hearing a marching band, and even more so when it’s accompanied by some amount of chaotic religious parody.  Brass instruments make some of the best tones, there’s nothing like hearing them in real life, but this video captures the energy of this parade in a nice way.

Sometimes you try to channel a vibe into your own work, and I was trying to channel elements of Electric Wizard when we were recording the new Szun Waves record, although I’m not sure I told anyone that.  Slow, heavy, stoney and magical, there’s a lot to aspire to within their music.

I’ve been interested in Taoism for a long time, so it’s nice to find references to it in the music I love too.  The track title ‘Be A Pattern For The World’ on the new Szun Waves record is a quote from Tao Te Ching.  It can be difficult to talk about the spiritual side of what you do, it’s usually easier to hint at it with small references, so it’s all there if anyone wants to find it.

This video is my favourite thing on the internet and I’ve probably watched it more than 50 times.  His hands are hardly moving, but out comes the most expressive music imaginable.  The real wonder here is the mastery of dynamic control, apparently he played specially balanced lightweight keys, hence the weird flat-handed technique.  If you listen very carefully you can hear church bells ringing in the background.

I’ve only recently gotten into Erroll Garner.  Having had one of his records sitting on my shelf for a long time, when I put it on for the first time a few months ago I was instantly in love with his playing.  It’s pretty definitely Jazz with a capital J, which is sometimes a turn off for me, but there’s just so much freedom in the way he plays.  It’s hyper lucid fluidity.

I really love finding electronic music from the 70s that still feels like something from the future.  I came across this track thanks to an excellent compilation on Soul Jazz records called ‘Space, Energy & Light’.  This track is totally transcendent, it’s the kind of thing that would probably never get played at a rave, but that would be the perfect place to hear it imo.

Playing music often feels more like real magic than listening to it, especially when there’s no script and the music is being discovered in real time.  The nice thing about being in Szun Waves is that we never rehearse, we don’t have any fixed structures or setlists, we just turn up and start playing and see what happens.  That does mean that at most gigs something good will happen that would have been worth keeping if we’d done it in the studio.  Luckily this little bit got recorded and serves as a nice testament to our approach.  I wish we’d done this in the studio though.

Terry Riley’s music is often quite unassuming, dealing with long periods of time and offering micro variations through highly nuanced performance, but within his economically constructed music infinite worlds open up.  The more time I spend with his music the more I fall in love with it.

It’s healthy to be reminded that music is often playing tricks on us.  If you want to be successful (whatever that means) you learn how these tricks work and use them to your advantage.  However, if you don’t care that much about the metrics of success and instead strive to uncover whatever truths you can find within sound, then you might end up watching a video like this one and asking yourself where the line is between concept and experience.