Music, they say, is painting in time, and when September comes and the air thins and children return to school, one grade older, when trees, with one ring more, drop their leaves, the time is marked differently, painted differently, because the cicadas have hushed and the birds have gone south and the clots of picnickers in the park have thinned out and the inner cochleal buzzing brought on by dehydration and pheromones has been pitched down to a hum. In this new quiet, my thoughts rescue the texture–sweet melancholy, thin and golden, or nostalgia without a referent–that they had this time last year, as if this spot of space that the earth’s orbit returns me to holds a special quality of light, or waves of electromagnetism, and when the earth passes through it, I can’t help but tune in. And the music I like now is not what I listen to in the summer, when all I want is the unbridled energy of trap and free jazz. There is time, now, for the songs that mean too much to me, and I can’t bear to listen to them year round, in case they lose their polish. They’re songs that contain the sadness of knowing that all things are transient and illuminated by their passing. Grouper, Alice Coltrane, Leonard Cohen, Phil Elverum, Umm Kulthum, Sharon Van Etten, Maurice Ravel, Frank Ocean, Fear of Men, Erik Satie, Rilo Kiley. And in my memories of childhood, I’m always staring out a window, listening to my iPod, pining for an unknown or lost world that is bright, comfortable, and familiar and it is always autumn, the light is always falling, streaking cadmium on piles of wet, rotting leaves and wormy crab apples. The world smells like pencil shavings and electric heat. Summer is stumbled through like an amphetamine haze and nothing accumulates. Sometimes I stop to look at the Hudson from my bicycle when I cross the Brooklyn Bridge, knowing the moment won’t return, and I watch the white foamy slipstreams of the ferries, the drops of the spray containing infinity, and it is all so delicate and fleeting that I feel sick. I listen to songs over and over again, unable to leave them alone until I figure out how they work, but the mystery of an artwork is that no matter how analytically dissected it is, its magic can never be found among its parts. It was three years ago, almost to the day, that my band recorded its first album, and it was written in the terror of all that was being lost–to the virus, to the burning world–during a summer when it was hard to avoid the facts of extinction. But fall comes, with its rains and cool breezes, and it is easy to forget that smoke will obscure the sky again, and some things pass violently from this world to the next. The autumnal consciousness of loss isn’t connected to the spectacles of fires or floods, just the quiet knowledge that time, like the river it's always likened to, with all its running past everything, erodes it all to dust. Scientists and tech companies want to find an evolutionary purpose for song and painting, so that they can take another share of the world away from the mystics and monks, the artists who cast their spells. They wish to place Beauty firmly in their domain, the dimensional world, so they may proclaim that one more part of the mystery’s been tamed by math. But listen closely to “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” and you’ll understand that distance will always be a quality between lovers, not a quantity, that no theory can explain the sweetness of lost love, and we sometimes sing in our broken voices, not to survive, but to reconcile ourselves with the traces these little moments leave behind when they fall away.
-Ish Ibrahim