I'll never forget Sabzian from Kiarostami's Close-Up saying that he feels reborn every time he discovers a great film. It's the same for me, but it applies to not just film. When I fall in love with a book, an author, a band, a song, an album—I feel reborn.
It's almost a romantic ardor. Because of the absence of romantic love in my life, I think I've channeled all my intensity into art. I've made art spiritual and mystical; it's my portal to the transcendent.
Music might be the most intimate art form for me. There's no barrier between me and a song. It reaches into me, drips right into my bloodstream, settles into my soul.
Music fills a room—fills an emptiness—in a way that literature and cinema do not. For me, sharing a song I love with someone is like sharing a piece of my heart.
Recently, I've made a major discovery. It's a band called Movietone. They came out of the fecund Bristol music scene of the 1990s. I can't stop listening to The Blossom Filled Streets and Day and Night.
There's a nice review of The Blossom Filled Streets by Pitchfork. Here are some excerpts:
The origin story of Movietone, which is also that of the small but mighty Bristol scene its members and friends created together in the early 1990s, is in one sense an archetypal tale. But the music they made together during their run was theirs alone. Their albums were weather systems, handmade assemblages of creaky folk, jazz-derived rumble, and dream-pop that’d been dried in the sun, wrapped in packages that seemed as if they’d been discovered in a cobwebbed attic.
Kate Wright and Rachel Coe became friends at Cotham Grammar School in their early teens. They were outcasts drawn to art who felt they understood something the straight world didn’t. Naturally, they bonded over Joy Division, the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Cure.
Some songs are personal, directly inspired by the deaths of people close to her. In a 2000 interview with The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, she described the album as “a kind of retrospective on their lives, all the really beautiful things,” but her language is allusive, speaking more to the subconscious and exploring the nature of memory. Sensations and fragments of thought flitter away in one song and then return, as if by concentrating hard on cycles of repetition she’ll prevent life from spinning away.
One of the beautiful things about Movietone is that they’re almost always written about as a spoke in their local scene’s wheel. The connections between the groups, offer a welcome vision of community in action. People discuss the Bristol post-rock scene as a whole because no one band eclipsed the others. They were all “small,” strictly speaking, and they all mattered. The crew that came together in a record shop turned their dreams into something real.
"The Blossom Filled Streets" by Movietone
Yours is of buildings and a history
And a memory
And yours is of celebration and sadness
And an end that confused me
And yours is of a life now that burns
With intensity that captures the radiance
Of the first star in the deep night
We're all falling, we're all falling down
We're all falling, you're ahead of us
"Night in These Rooms" by Movietone
Tonight I'll let the ocean in
And these shadows I'll let them be
And these dark corners I'll let them be
Tonight in my room
Tonight I'll let the dark sky in
The stars will shine like fragments of the sun
I'll not turn away, I'll reach out
And touch them in my room
"Star Ruby" by Movietone
Thanks for your words
Thanks for your smile
Thanks for your arms
Sleep well
Now is the time for the new flowers
It's time for the cherry blossoms to come
"Summer" by Movietone
And we sit in a glass house
With names above our heads
And this material becomes an extension of our skin
It's just words and paper smiles that mean nothing