I am a word person. I'm sure that comes
as no great surprise to you, the reader. I mean, I'm an English major, I write for a newspaper, and much of what I have to say about music deals with lyrics. I admit it freely. I am a stickler for grammar, I catch spelling errors everywhere and I've even stopped at a store to tell them that their advertisement was punctuated incorrectly. My obsession with words - their combination, their meaning and their usage - pervades my appreciation of almost everything. When I listen to music, I focus on picking out the lyrics and organizing them into poetic lines in my head. I even insist on watching DVDs with subtitles turned on so that I can be sure to correctly catch every line of dialogue. There are only two exceptions to my word fetish: the Octopus Project and Sigur Rós.
I discovered the Octopus Project when they were touring with Aesop Rock. The Octopus Project makes predominantly instrumental music, consisting of an eclectic mix of guitars and drums combined with digital instrumentation and a theremin. On Hello, Avalanche, only one song, the last song, includes vocals at all. Interestingly, the song flows so well with the rest of the album that you hardly notice the vocals at all. This song is one of the only songs I can listen to without trying to pick out the lyrics.
Sigur Rós, however, present a different situation. The Icelandic wonders use vocals extensively, but since I am fluent in neither Icelandic, nor in Hopelandic, a language made up of syllables that fit the musical mood of the song, I can't make sense of the lyrics.
When I was analyzing how I listen to music, I was a little surprised to recognize that I still absolutely loved Sigur Rós and the Octopus Project. But I realized that I appreciate them in a different way than other music. When I listen to other music, focusing on the lyrics is my method of actively participating in listening. When I listen to Aesop Rock or Death Cab for Cutie, my primary activity is listening to the lyrics and comparing the instrumentals to the vocals.
But when I hear the Octopus Project and Sigur Rós, I don't participate nearly as actively. This is reflected by the way I describe their music. I often describe Sigur Rós as songs that wash over you."" The first time I listened to Hello, Avalanche, I felt like the band were not playing instruments, but rather playing me. With every rise and fall of the melody line, with every crescendo, I felt like a puppet being danced across a stage.
These two bands manage to make music that pushes past verbal language, and instead communicates to the subconscious. Music like this doesn't have to use words to talk about love, sadness, hope, or excitement. This is music that speaks for itself.
To learn how to speak Hopelandic, email Dale at dpmundt@wisc.edu
