[The Three Degrees - The Heaven I Need]
Transcendent. Song glides with no interruptions from start to finish - no discontinuities. The tape fuzz is essential to this (this I think explains the dreamlike sense of old recording partially - this is why lo-fi is dreamy - you have this bubble of tape fuzz tying everything together - you glide in, you glide out - immerse in it. This is also why I think this era is so rich in that old psychedelic nostalgia - the tape hiss! It ties everything together in a dreamy consistency wherein things flow in and out of each other, within which they're reconciled). This plus the harmonies (ie. the harmonies harmonise with the tape-fuzz). A plateau.
You can explain the sense of Boards of Canada with this: "Warm" = "Organic" = "Soft" = "Continuous-Consistent" (as in the consistency of a pudding) - no edges. Maybe this sense of consistency speaks back to early childhood when life is an undifferentiated blur of sense & sensation.
The tape-fuzz blurs the sound - blurs destroy boundaries. For me, I always think of things which destroy boundaries as Dionysian and things which make boundaries as Apollonian. S/A/W's music is very Apollonian, intricate . A good example of what I consider Apollonian music is the riff from Video 2000's 'Phantom (It's Like This)' [Which itself is from Tatsuro Yamashita's 'Music Book']. The Apollonian moment is everything clicking - meshing, interlocking perfectly. 0:46 - 1:00 on Video 2000's 'Cruising'. Dionysian blurs, Apollonian integrates.
[Darksleep - Harvest Breed]
Organic data-storage unit British military installation on the coast attaining self-awareness Strobing grotesque scenes of body-fusion with The General's Son (A consummation) and escaping into read-of British countryside pastoral reveries (for the machine, reading is dreaming) naive reveries & visions of the British night of stars & broadcast satellites & open air & rolling hills dissolving fitfully into escape scene visions of the countryside so dreamed of close enough to smell & taste & touch the hallways dark & metal concrete buzzing lowlight KLAXON KLAXON tumble into tall grass & horizon spreading soft light barking at the heels stars sharp twinkling and clinging cleansing air the soft night under stars & freedom looming under soft night gunshot clinging gunshot in elation body numb with feeling body spilling onto British countryside the beach the sky slow shutdown.
[Drinking Their Own Nectar]
Contrast between the oceanic pads (sharp enough they feel like the rocky coast - like dolphin song), the breakbeats of machinic pulsion. Hybrid of Aphex Twin's Fenix Funk 5 & Come to Daddy.
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Same as a sauce ties flavours together, pads & drones & strings provide a beautiful consistency - but how? My working theory is the sauce provides a kind of node or locus, hub through which awareness travels smoothly from one sound, one taste to into another. Imagine a small archipelago - the pad is ocean floor which shows us they're connected. The pad is a broth in which all of the sounds are afloat intermingling and which infuses them then with this new, intermingled flavour. Lastly, the pad is a canvas, a backdrop on which sounds occur - a contextualisation. This is simple enough to explain: The pads, happening less frequently than the other noises and so the faster noises are perceived as happening within them, as within their context, hence the sense of a night looming over the scenes of the military installation. So! A theory of backdrops, sauces and pads.
