Remain & Mlle Caro - Heat
Watching a special today on physics and our general understanding of what happens in and around black holes, I realized: science is a much a distraction for us as music, literature, drama, and visual arts. Scientific pursuits might as well be classified as one of the great human diversions, because just like the others--but for entirely different reasons--science will never be finished. It's tempting to think of science as following a kind of linear progression (with occasional jumps), where we refine our knowledge of old discoveries and continually make new ones and get closer and closer to understanding the material and otherwise natures of reality. Tempting, but ultimately probably wrong. Sometimes it feels more like a sisyphean task we've set for ourselves in order to kill time until there is no time.This has nothing to do at all with Remain & Mlle Caro's excellent "Heat," outside of the fact that it's interesting to think about how certain sounds will evoke certain emotional states almost immediately, and part of that, I think, must have to do with the physical circumstances of the sound's effect on our body (Alex Ross's "The Rest Is Noise" has a nice section where he talks about pleasing vibrations vs. painful or irritating vibrations) and the other part is probably accounted for by something like musical nurture; memories of other sounds, sensations or movements associated with those sounds, etc. Even if I knew how to precisely articulate all those things, I still wouldn't be able to explain exactly why this song appeals to me so much.[Buy the Heat/Rogue single]