#7 - sounds
You can skip to this week’s playlist on Spotify or scroll to the end.
Two weeks ago I saw Sam Green’s 32 Sounds at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and I haven’t really stopped thinking about it since. It was co-commissioned by the NYUAD Arts Center and performed there a few weeks earlier, and having seen other work by Sam Green at the Arts Center before, I knew I was missing out. 32 Sounds is a documentary about, well, about sound, screened as Sam Green narrates it and JD Samson and Michael O’Neill play the music live. It’s like a film, a concert, a spoken word event, at some point even a DJ set, all at the same time and seamlessly weaved through.
The film explores how fascinating and impactful sound is, in all its forms and from many different perspectives. The 32 sounds that structure it include the mating call of the last ever male Moho braccatus bird, the last female birds having already gone extinct, or Black Liberation Army activist Nahanda Abdioun listening to the songs that remind her of the joy and solidarity of protest from her exile in Cuba before she passed away. The film’s interviewees ranged from Lebanese Princeton physicist Edgar Choueiri, who presented cutting edge ASMR technology and listened to a long-forgotton Arabic message to his future self he’d recorded as a child, to 82-year-old experimental composer Annea Lockwood, who spent 50 years listening to rivers and continues to do so.
If that sounds very broad, it’s because it was, but it somehow all fit (or didn’t fit) perfectly. The broad range and expansiveness of the sounds, the topics, the emotions, the memories, and the disciplines represented seemed to be the point. To value, appreciate, or simply notice sound in all the ways it manifests, in all the ways we experience it, and in all the ways we share that collective experience. In the days since, I found myself taking off my headphones (which if you know me, are always on) more often, to pay more attention to my daily soundscape, to appreciate the rhythm and chaos and simplicity of the seemingly mundane. I’m grateful for art like Sam Green’s, art that complicates and simplifies the world around us all at once, that helps us find meaning, reflection, and beauty in our lives, from the faintest sounds to the most overwhelming emotions. 32 Sounds was a very multi-layered experience, and it felt like all of us leaving BAM’s sold out theatre did so with a greater appreciation for the layers that compose our own experiences outside of it.
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This week’s playlist has very little constraint beyond that there are no words. While I’ll have lyrics-less songs throughout the playlists, I don’t often, so I thought a newsletter about sounds would be a good chance to do. It is also my attempt at a Ramadan friendly playlist; fasting too provides me with opportunities to take a step back and be more present and mindful. The tracks include Beethoven’s Appassionata, which I heard in high school from one of my all time favorite films The Lives of Others / Das Leben der Anderen, Matthieu Faubourg’s Please, Stay, which I heard on Pierre Depaz’s show in undergrad and has since gotten me through countless study sessions, and Merrimac’s The Gardens - shoutout to my fellow Politics PhD student Jasante Howard who’s still making music while grad school-ing at Princeton.
Ramdan kareem!
10 songs
(Spotify)
Flying Home - Lionel Hampton, Joshua Redman, Patrice Rushen, Ndugu Chancler
Please, Stay - Matthieu Faubourg
Flow - Kelly Lee Owens
Heart of Cosmos - PRIMITIVE ART ORCHESTRA
Movement 5 - Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, London Symphony Orchestra
Sonata N°23, Appassionata I - Ludwig van Beethoven (Fazıl Say)
Bint Al Chalabiyah - Marcel Khalifa, Vladimir Sirinko & Kyiv National Symphony Orchestra
Grace - The Soft Pink Truth
We Could Forver - Bonobo
The Gardens - Merrimac
All my gratitude to art I also attribute to the people who facilitate, curate, and enable our experience of it. Shoutout to Bill Bragin and the NYUAD Arts Center for making my life so much richer & more enjoyable.