I like to imagine music, all recorded music, being as vast as the Atlantic.
When I was a kid our family spent most summers at my grandparent’s house at the Jersey shore. It was the kind of place where you could walk a few blocks and end up at the ocean or the bay. My preference was always the ocean where I learned to body surf early on and where I spent time with body surfing friends, mostly older kids that pretended not to know me after we left the beach.
On a particularly flat day the two brothers who were old enough to shave and looked nothing alike dragged a small row boat up to the beach and into the water and we rowed out well past swimming distance from shore.
“We’re going to have a contest to see who can dive to the bottom in the deepest water. You have to bring up a handful of sand to prove you made it.”
The first few dives were easy but as we moved further from the shore an element of fear entered the picture which is what made this game interesting. We’d reached a depth where the others were coming up empty handed which I saw as an opportunity to ‘win’ so I dove in with more excitement than sense. It was too deep and dark to see but you could feel the water getting colder as you neared the bottom so I pushed and pushed with one hand straight out front reaching for sand as I could feel my body becoming more interested in another breath than some silly game.
I did hit bottom, grabbed a fistful of cold sand, and swam up with increasing anxiety as my breath seemed ready to give out before I reached the surface. But I did see sunlight before swallowing salt water and got a bunch of back slaps for my risky adolescent effort as we rowed back toward shore.
But it was in that moment of uncertainty in between—before I could see sunlight not sure if my breath would hold—that I felt part of something more mysterious and meaningful than I’d ever encountered on the surface.
I only recently came across Movietone’s The Blossom Filled Streets, the Bristol-based band’s 3rd album released in July of 2000 on Domino/Drag City and I wonder how it is that can be the case seeing as this record perfectly maps to many of my want-list desires—unexpected, mysterious, beautiful, and genre-fluid albeit with folk roots.
Album opener “Hydra” begins at the beach—”We’re the first tiny creatures to breathe/First feet in the green pools left by the sea”— with a clarinet and viola drone casting a spell that lasts the album’s full 40 minutes as the band expands in shape, sounds, and sizes always remaining near the shore, creating their own wonder-filled in between.
From album closer “Night In These Rooms”:
Tonight I’ll let the ocean in
And these shadows I’ll let them be
And these dark corners I’ll let them be
Tonight in my room