FEAROFDARK || MOTORWAY

Stephen Hemstritch-Johnston's greatest success on his album, Motorway (released under his alias, Fearofdark), is a breathtaking ability to make happy music that is profound. Very often, I think our go-to emotional or descriptive pairings for aesthetic depth lean toward the problematic, the furrowed brow, the shattered pane of glass; and while these reflexes and expressions are fine and admirable, it seems that types of luminous joy are underrepresented. In the most powerful of Motorway's pieces and moments, joy is made more joyful by a melancholic silver lining -- there is a narrative of transience (and what better medium for that than the most transient one of all?), and an understanding of the strange, unexpected joy that can develop out of one's understanding of what is temporary. Melodies at once sing out enthusiasm for their ability to simply be alive and also contemplate, welcome, as if with hot tears, their own tender, fading substances. And even with all that the music invents, it yearns for an expression, a state of unnamed happiness that's extra-unknown. Motorway is an album of sensucht. 

Motorway has become one of my favorite albums -- all categories be damned -- since its November, 2012 release, and has allowed me to develop a brand of relationship with it that I'm realizing is all too rare -- yet, all the more wonderful for it. If you haven't, check it out.

A quick look back at Vurgon

Vurgon’s tracks were mostly not written under the idea that such-and-such a piece would be alongside another. The idea did come up, but only near the end as I refined pieces that were basically complete, or close to being such. Selecting the tracks was a matter of finding the material I felt happiest with and which, when brought together, could create some sort of emotional arc. My method of composing tracks followed a fairly standard personal method. I usually start by figuring out a chordal pattern that interests me as an isolated form and as a thing ripe with developmental suggestions. I also tend to treat chords percussively, prioritizing rhythm and voicing over vertical movement (e.g., the nineteen-second mark in “Glaustarr”). I think that this a result both of my own physical limitations and a fondness for Steve Reich’s music. I treat these chords as a bed of implications that can be danced upon by a melody and additionally motored by a bassline. This produces a somewhat fractured effect, since I’m often conceiving of and applying elements in layers.

The mixture of my habit of keeping my hands close together when playing and my love of frictional, dense utterances leads to tone clusters and, sometimes, block chords. It’s almost as if I perceive the chord as a sort of fruit, and the relative closeness of notes is a way of squeezing out the ripest juice and fragrance. Tetrads, historically, have been the minimum for me. More recently, around the time I submitted Vurgon, I realized that frequent clustering may stifle ideas’ expressions, as a huddled voicing can degrade the touchier parts whose context needs finer definition; and also that it’s not right for every situation.

I never wrote any of Vurgon’s pieces with a general structure in mind, although I’m aware of patterns that developed. Composing was pretty much a matter of following each idea into the next and finally reaching that indefensible and temporary (as in, when I listen to the tracks now, I hear all sorts of new possibilities (a common thing among composers?)) point of exhaustion that constitutes the end. The bulk of the pieces have a modest motivic thrust. In “Vurgon”, for example, the melodic “head” that appears at the 1:28 mark continues to return in fragmented ways until its final, most crazed formation – which also includes the hilly motif from 30 seconds – at the 3:00 mark (and is thereafter, at 3:26, usurped by a strange newcomer that adopts and warps a couple of the preceding motivic traits).

Motivic compositions particularly interest me because they seem to bring me closer to perceiving the music as an aural character. By this I don’t mean that I hear such-and-such and have a mental image of a person or creature; rather, that I hear such-and-such and its characteristics contribute to a sense of a being’s, an entity’s presence and unfolding existence. I might also hear a piece of music and interpret it as a gathering of characters in conversation or in the flow of narrative. It’s hard to tell just what exactly produces these phenomena, though my guess is that it involves linguistic corollaries. Let me take this opportunity to say that Final Fantasy Tactics is one of my favorite videogame soundtracks.

As far as writing the melodies went, it was usually a case of improvising, making a false final decision, and then treating that decision as a base that I built off of through mental additions or humming. As a terrible musician, I’ve found humming/wordlessly singing very useful in writing music, especially when it comes to discrete accompaniment, as it’s a way of idealizing content and bypassing the technical constraints of performing on an instrument. Luckily, I’m a decent singer. The challenge upon getting an idea via humming is to hold onto it long enough to insert it into the actual piece (very tough when you’re out and an hour away from home!). Now and then, around, say, thirty-seconds’ worth of material – maybe broadly or exactly – would lay itself out in my head, and all I had to do was transcribe it and fill in the gaps that my head glossed over. This was, for example, how I developed the introductory melody in “Tuulu.”

I meant the idea for the cover art (thanks again to Jason) to be representative of Vurgon’s attributes and general ideas I have about instrumental music. Vurgon’s tracks strike me as having a rigidity to their architecture, and an often mysterious attitude; ergo, the odd façade. More generally, the cover appeals to my belief that instrumental music tells no tales – that it’s a language, a system of ideas, unto itself. In a sense, as Edward Said wrote, all music is really only about music. This is probably why it’s the hardest art form to write about. The cover’s façade is clearly the result of some sort of effort at aesthetic organization, but its window-mouths only offer blackness, the hint of a dark, spacious life within that awaits, yet resists, exploration.

Below are the pronunciations of the track titles, in case anyone was interested and/or having trouble saying them. The phonetics arose in accordance to what their own sound and surrounding sounds implied to me, so you could say that my method was a dribble-free adult version of “baby talk.” “Clankendrung” is a pretty explicable example, I think. That track felt the most metallic and hardy of the pieces, so I led with “clank” (an English onomatopoeia or noun designating a hard, metallic sound), and ended with “drung”, which to me feels like a submerged stressing of the words “drag” or “drug” (not proper past tense, but whatever), implying blunt power or labor. The “en” is a sort of medial connective tissue for rhythm, and also a fun little link to the German term, “Sturm un Drang.” “Mahanambulov” is harder to unpack and perhaps impossible to justify. The reduplication present in “mahanam” connotes to me extensiveness, tying into the spacier arena of the track, and the wide softness of the syllables therein bring out a touch of empathy and embryonic comfort. “Bulov”, for whatever reason, sounds like a circle to me, and – also for whatever reason – ”Mahanambulov” appears (if that is the right word) to me as a circular piece of music. Perhaps it’s the preponderance of that five-note pattern that embeds a cyclical, and then circular, notion.

Vurgon: Vur (R having a retroflex flap) gawn 

Glaustarr: Glau (AU sounding like the exclamation of pain “ow) star (R having an alveolar trill)

Fallaloopavan: Fah lah loo pah vahn 

Terevigliar: Tair (like the ripping action “tear”; R having a retroflex flap) uh vig lee ahr (R having a retroflex flap)

Tuulu: Too (T having a voiced dental fricative) loo 

Clankendrung: Clahn (like the first syllable in “Klondike”) ken droong (R having a retroflex flap)

Mahanambulov: Mah hah nahm byoo (like the first syllable of “beautiful”) lohv (like “loaves”, as in bread)

Listen to Vurgon here.