Mum

Is it a form of synesthesia to prefer reading about music than actually listening to it? To pore over music magazines and articles and reviews and essays and photographs (and spending more money on those in the process) rather than actually spending my 'leisure time' buying or downloading and listening to the music? I think it is. It must be; that's the only (ir)rational explanation I can think of, and it also points me toward a pretty big clue as to why these days I prefer, when I do listen to music, to select artists who have a somewhat more… (thinks of a word) existential approach to noise and sound and harmony.

I know that sounds bloody pretentious. Well consider for a moment that I almost wrote 'ambient'!

"Existential pop" are the words, is the description, that flows through my mind whenever I think about the Icelandic group Mum. After picking up their exquisitely beautiful album Finally We Are No One (on Fat Cat records, pop pickers) those were, and are, the only two words I can think to me sum up everything about them. That term communicates exactly how I feel about Mum’s aural world of pops and drips and echoes and winds and child-like instruments and rhythms (other writers are more articulate and have composed some excellent words about the group's music; Momus sums them up nicely in his online essay 'Favourite Records of 2001'). Bizarrely, after listening to the album in full a couple of times, I was gripped with the urge to write an article about it. "Alister and the chaps'll dig this!" I thought. Weird, first of all, that my immediate reaction would be to want to write about it! And weirder still that I could literally not think of any other words to describe the record apart from "existential pop". Which is still a neat phrase methinks and I wish I had the balls to patent it (ignoring the fact that some underground German music site probably already has).

Mum are one of a good few groups I have been following now, either on cd or through caught snatches on the web, who do not use conventional instruments. Or if they do, they disguise it by using them in an unconventional manner and in conjunction with 'created' sounds from iMacs, samplers, and the like. (Now, I realise that a good deal of what I'm saying here makes me come across like I've been living in a cave for the past, ooh, twenty years, and in a way I have. But let me just explain that I have always been somewhat slow on the uptake, and when I finally understand something, I have the tendency to excitedly exclaim this understanding, like an infant who has finally grasped the concept of the clock and insists on boring his family with the time every five minutes). The groups and artists I followed throughout, largely, my teens were very conventional. Guitar groups--you know the drill. I was aware of and enjoyed rap and 'dance' artists, but these were very much on the periphery of my consciousness.

The thing is, hand in hand with the conventions of the rock music industry are the conventions of the marketing industry, and journalism and advertising and hype. Time and time again I was exposed to bands that, it was promised, would blow my mind, would change the way I think about music - forever! You know the Douglas Adams and John Lloyd book The Meaning Of Liff? Well, what I for one would really appreciate would be a word that describes the feeling you get when you know in your gut you've been suckered into buying something that turns out to be shit, but you insist to others, and in fact try to convince yourself, that this is not shit. As a follower of bass/guitar/drums/lyric artists, I felt this a lot, and continuously.

Reading about the bands, therefore, almost always turned out to be a much safer bet than actually listening to them. On paper, writers could really raise the most average of groups to lofty heights through the power of their pen. JG Ballard once said that he read the NME every week throughout the punk era because even though he had no knowledge of the bands that it was writing about, he was carried away by the energy of the writing itself (and this was the era of Parsons, Burchill, Morley et al in embryo so you can't blame the man). I really wish I took this on board as advice, but sadly I was never able to. Consistently I was still suckered in. The writers, excellent poets and descriptive journalists that they were, never failed to heighten my expectations to ridiculous proportions. When writing about groups, they created a mini-world which only ever really existed in print, but which created the illusion (the part-of-the-gang factor) that this could be widened up to incorporate the physical reality of the pop experience. No wonder The Smiths were the ultimate music-press band; when Morrissey sang "There's a club if you'd like to go..." etc, he was tapping directly into a kind of sociology which confounded a great many music fan. The reviews and the articles and the interviews would paint going to see a certain band as a cosmic experience, a vital playground of the imagination. And you'd go, and… well, it would be a couple of guys on a stage. Playing, you know, chords and bridges and stuff. And so you'd leave on your own, and go home and cry and want to die.... (sorry 'bout that one).

Something had to give. Then, sometime later, a friend made me a tape of Godspeed You Black Emperor. That something promptly gave.

Here was a band that escaped the crushing inevitability of the routine I'd been so used to because, in quite a few ways, it wasn't music. Or rather, it wasn't the music I was used to hearing. I had heard violins and wind and stringed instruments in pop before, but always wedged into the conventional pop formula, used as a gimmick or as some background seasoning. There were no lyrics. Instead of sung words there were long recorded speeches from people caught at open mic nights, idiot-savant ragings against the American government, old men reminiscing about their childhoods. It sounds like a dreadful cliche, but the guitars and drums soared, precisely because they weren't chained to a conventional verse/chorus/verse musical pattern. As a result, the music really did open up to encompass wider emotional and imaginative spaces. This was a band that, I thought, could surely never let me down. They did change the way I felt about music, and every listen to every release they put out entranced and enchanted me. Every listen is different. Here, at last, was an approach to music that could excite me, consistently and for real.

This knowledge did not necessarily alter my spending habits. I didn't start buying whole racks of records which came from a Constellation-approved or Wire-featured artist. This is because the knowledge was a relaxing one. The relentlessness of reading, and wanting to believe in, the music press was literally exhausting. Having a new crop of artists to turn to meant that, duh, I didn't have to fall for that anymore. Like JG Ballard flicking through his inky punk-era tabloids, I could now appreciate the words that were spilling over these bits of paper, or across a PC monitor. Music writing is really to do with alternative styles of political writing, social writing, experimental writing, art writing, history writing. It is wildly easy to take articles and swap around the title of the record they are talking about and still be left with a coherent article, because the tangents (pun not intended) taken are the reason the article is being written. In the internet era, if somebody wants to simply describe a record, they could put out an mp3 of the thing and be done with it. But how exciting would that be? Not bloody very. Read Jon Savage’s England's Dreaming and it's a survey of whole dark chunks of British social history. Read Ocean of Sound and it's a cross-cultural travelogue of global sound development. Read the Digital Hardcore website and it's an explosion of post-feminist, anti-capitalist thought. And so on.

And then, if I want, I can listen to some music. My relationship with reading about music inordinately more than I listen to it is still there, but now it's a far more healthy one. I'm spending the same amount of time away from the wife, as it were, but no longer shagging the secretary… 'Conventional' stuff will always be there, on the radio, in the background, whatever. But the music that I know can change my life will be out there too, and now I know where to look and who to trust and who not to. "Existential pop" probably, by definition, should be impossible to write about anyway. The words woven around and about it, however, can be taken separately. In doses…