The romanticism of these article
definitions on wikipedia defining post-rock and high desert is lacking, but
it's the closest thing to reconciling two things that are not reconcilable using
the same sense that I can reconcile. You hear music. You see the desert. You
listen to one, but you inhabit the other.
Most of my life consisted of growing
up in the high desert, especially the formative years. Moving from Flagstaff
(really high desert) to Prescott Valley (just plain old mile high desert) is
something I consider an important change of life. Flagstaff, life was dull,
cold, the winter was harsh, the heat didn't last long enough. I lived in a
trailer park in a three-bedroom trailer home, consisting on ramen for most of
my young life. We moved to Prescott Valley because my dad opened up an
auto-repair business there, and it made more sense to move than for him to
commute. The entire time, God was preserving the family, and His grace was
showering upon us in ways that I still don’t completely understand or remember.
Moving to Prescott Valley was a
change of scenery. Instead of there being a lot of dirt and a lot of forest and
a lot of Indian reservations, there was a lot of dirt and a lot of plains and a
lot of dirt and a lot of dead grass and a lot more dirt. I grew up thinking the
word valley meant "a plot of land consisting of mostly dead grass, some
green here and there, but really nothing to look at." Moving to California
really opened up my eyes in that regard.
When you live in Arizona your whole
life and you see everything through the lens of Arizona's desert landscape, the
ruggedness of the cactus, the old, but still living, and maybe yet a little
dying wintergreen trees, the shrub one loose cigarette away from starting a
fire, you tend to define all things by whether or not it is green. If it's
green and deciduous, it's somewhere else. You won't find it in Arizona. But
California has all this green stuff
in the middle of their valleys. And it changes colors throughout the seasons.
And some fruits and vegetables grow on it.
But I digress.
Really, the point of all this
wikipedia-article referencing is that for a long time, I didn't know how to
define the desert to people. "It's... hot. It's got a lot of dead-looking
grass here and there. It's got a lot of lizards sometimes. It's dry. There's no
water. What's a lake?" Similarly, I cannot define music in the
post-rock genre to people with words. There are things that you love and hate
about life, about the places you live, and the music you listen to, and some of
that just isn't made to be defined by vocalization or the English language.
Doing a bit of psychoanalysis, I've
come to realize that the reason I love "post-rock music" is because
it is an aural analogy to the desert. Let me try to explain.
The desert, the high desert
especially, is a wide space, with undiscovered and unseen wilderness. It
represents death, dirt roads to forests, and winding, endless paths, waiting to
be explored. Exploring the desert, even just walking around in fields or up on
mountains, reveals things that you thought didn't exist. There is discovery in
it. There's a yearning to continue walking, to continue finding.
But it's visual. It's not aural. It's a landscape. Why are Arizona sunsets my
favorite? It's unadulterated beauty despite the death that it is giving light
to. The light fades, the sky turns shades of blue and red and orange and yellow
and violet, and it disappears and gives way to the moon. And the stars. I often
brag of the visible Milky Way when the moon is not present. I can put it into
words, but it's so much better to just see it. God’s glory is
clarified in the silent sky of the desert night.
Post-rock, similarly, is sometimes
defined as having space. Not space in the sense that there are
a lot of sights here and there, and in between is uninhabitable space. Space
in the sense that your mind is opened to being in the middle of a journey.
There is room for sound to grow. The noise that would be considered just
noise in popular rock music, suddenly has life. It's not
the grass that you're staring at in the desert. It's the mountains beyond the
grass. The canyons and mesas are dipping in the sunset. It's begging to be
explored. Post rock music is spacious aurally like the high desert is spacious
visually. Amidst the noise and death of music in a post-rock song (or better
yet, albums), there is life teeming at the edge of the consciousness. Your
imagination explores and visualizes through the voice of music that doesn't
speak with words. It speaks with heart. Maybe even the soul, should the Holy Spirit use it to minister to
you.
Post-rock speaks a narrative without
using etymological language. It works through the ceaseless imagination of not
just the artists, but the listener. It's intimate. The knowledge of an album to
each separate listener draws first out of the initiation of the artist, then
the response of the hearer. In this sense, it is unique.
My first post-rock album purchase
was All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone by Austin, Texas-native
Explosions In The Sky. It was an impulse-buy at Wal-Mart after hearing from a
friend that I just had to hear it to understand. I wasn't that
old then. About age 16. It was summer vacation before starting 12th grade.
Age 16 wasn't a great year for me. I
was coming to the painful conclusion that my parents were considering
divorcing. There was no hope for the marriage. It was crashing and burning and
I was being swept along in the wreckage. If there was ever a time when I can
place the moment that I realized that God speaks through music, even without
the words, even through the ambiguity of secular music, it was through this
album. More than Brother, Sister by mewithoutYou, another
impulse-buy from a liquidating Family Christian Bookstore, EITS drew the plot
of their album, suffering through noise and confusion, suddenly bringing things
to such clarity and emotion, and then ending with a dissonant crash of drums
and piano.
It wasn't love at first listen, in the same sense that one
person seeing Arizona's landscape from a plane or from the safety of Google
Earth wouldn't really sense the romance or the depth of the desert. It took
effort to listen to. But it was rewarding. I learned that music is not just a
friend that speaks the same pains, joys, confusions, doubts and anxieties,
loves, hatreds, and fears that you do. Music is not an idle speaker through
which it preaches viewpoints and culture to you. Music is a tool. It came from
God. The first record of human music comes from Adam, upon God's revealing Eve
to him:
Genesis 2:23
English
Standard Version (ESV)
23 Then the man said,
“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.
Adam sings a song out of the creativity given to him by his creative
Creator God.
What this says to me is that music is primarily
creative and is a reflection of the image God created us with; that is, to say
that music is first-and-foremost from the hand of God as part of our essence.
The form matters not. What does is that it comes from God.
So in this line of thinking, Explosions in the Sky
speaks of creation in a way that glorifies God. Sure, my bent is that most
post-rock music will probably remind me of the desert, but it does that because
it is creative and it primarily reminds me of the Creator. It doesn’t matter if they do
it unwittingly, unwillingly, or unexpectedly. What matters is that it still
brings worship to God. Words don’t always express worship. The fact that music
can worship or lead to worship of God points to common grace, but also to the
efficacious grace of God, and it also brings to mind that there is redemption
in the Christian listening to music without words, maybe without worshipful
intent. It’s a sanctifying listen. The Holy Spirit just does something from
without the vibrations and resonance and dissonance of music, and uses it for
the good of the listening believer. He ministers to the soul in a way that
sometimes words don’t express.
Another thing about post-rock that reminds me of the
high-desert is the fact that night falls, the moon rises, lonely and lost coyotes
howl, and if you’re in the right place, you witness the sounds of things unseen
echoing in the landscape that is before your eyes. The wind is blowing, and
kicking up some dirt, and some pollen, and is moving things and setting the
stage for new life to flourish. Jesus Christ speaks of the Holy Spirit in a
similar way in John 3.
3 Now there was a man of the
Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. 2 This
man came to Jesus[a] by
night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can
do these signs that you do unless God is with him.” 3 Jesus
answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again[b] he
cannot see the kingdom of God.” 4 Nicodemus
said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time
into his mother's womb and be born?” 5 Jesus
answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of
water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That
which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.[c] 7 Do not
marvel that I said to you, ‘You[d] must be
born again.’ 8 The wind[e] blows where
it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or
where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
So do post-rock and the high desert point me to
Jesus and the Spirit. It’s not a replacement to the continued direct worship of
Christ that I’m called to as a Christian, but it is an effective supplement. A gracious dispensation of cognizance to
the creativity of God. That He can choose to minister to me in ways that are so
unexpected and so unorthodox and
graciously lead me to His throne in worship and adoration, and to even do such
a thing without the expression of verbal
communication is overwhelming in itself. Words don’t do it justice.
Listening to post-rock reminds me of the old “home”
I used to refer to as Arizona. I don’t think I want to move back. But the
nostalgia is there, and it is good to be reminded that God is present elsewhere
doing things in the space between structure and wilderness, even in the spaces
that others perceive as dead or noisy. God is constantly creating resonance
despite the dissonance, and post-rock music and the high desert are gracious
reflections of that good, regenerative work in the hearts and souls of His
believers.
And that's what I love most about post-rock music.
Cheers,
Nick
