This is something I always wanted to do. Sharing a song and a few words at the same time. Please let yourself be taken by the music before you read further.
I love that song. It’s one of these great piece where words and melody intertwine to form something special that goes beyond rationalization. One of these inexplicable moment that suddenly happen. Serenity becomes suddenly reachable. Peacefulness as well. Ok. Stop the song. Or let it finish, before we switch to a new kind of mood.
This one produces a complete different atmosphere. Are we lingering into what Stewart calls atmospheric attunements? Maybe. But that’s not the space where I would like to access, the theoretical area that what I would like to reach. Are you still hearing the noisy sound of the guitars. Does it not sound like whales? I have always been impressed with the musicality of the noises. Not the notes per se, but the cacophony and the commotion that are at times produced (performed) by a variety of instruments (including the voices). The stressful tone induces a different mood than the previous piece. Both of them are however really powerful.
These are my ghosts, my phantoms, my deads. One day, as Ochoa did with the dead, I will use music as a methodology, or at least as a vector that will allow me to sediment and augment what I am writing; the description of the people and their culture I am attempting to portray ethnographically. Ochoa’s work is so insightful and deeply compelling in the ways in which he attempted to portray the sea of the deads (was it his words??). I mean, within his narrative, you could almost feel the texture of the dead. I however believe that arts provide instinctively a mood, a density, that catalyzes the our senses to touch the texture. Any kind of arts should augment ethnography, even the most rigid and severe ones.
It’s when I write stuff like that that I realize I need to deepen my understanding of sound theories in anthropology.
