Track Tale #5: SnPLO - b. 1 [03:15 ∞]

Excursions lead to estimations

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What is your role as a listener? Do you take sounds as they are given or feel obliged to interpret them?

You always have the final say, but the creator can do certain things to push you in certain directions. This track doesn’t invite analysis, at least not in the usual sense. It doesn’t start at a low point and end at a higher point, so looking at it like a narrative is pointless. There is addition and subtraction, but it isn’t discrete or sustained enough to isolate and describe. As someone under the constant obligation to interpret, I came to realize I had to take this one as it’s given.

Music that gives you little to grab onto relies on external movement. Without designed twists and turns, elements like the sounds in your environment, mental states, and sensory processes become the areas where change will play out. With that in mind, I arrived at a simple technique to illustrate this track.

You have probably tried this before: Do something while listening to music, think about the music and what you are doing, and continue going about your day. I spiced it up a bit by listening to this track on repeat and seeking out activities that were likely to be vivid for me. I also wanted to engage a variety of senses to see how they would interact with the constant sound element.

Once the entries were written they were set; I didn’t edit any of them past the listed end time. The wisdom of going fast is often more useful than the opposite, even if it turns out less lucid.

Recommended instructions: Listen through once without reading anything below (let it play for approx. 4 minutes), then continue listening to the track as you read

Purchase Link: https://tracksplease.com/

Pin-1 seven hundred and fifty loops

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All times are in eastern time (Montréal, Québec)

Monday, March 17 2:49pm-2:54pm:

I watched steam rise out of a pipe on a roof. A white pigeon stood on another roof, then flew out of view toward the horizon. The smoke almost touches the cross of the church, and the seagulls are out today. There’s a plane where the clouds turn from white to grey. A few weeks ago, two chrome tags were added to the short terrace wall across the street.

Monday, March 17 3:16pm-3:26pm:

Still on the couch at home. Wrote down all my ideas for things to do while listening, will do them over the next two weeks. Chose the b1 loop it spoke to me the most. I’ve been listening to the swirly lead for the past 15 minutes, but now the kicks are demanding my attention. I’m guessing 132bpm (close, but not quite). Need to find a phone app that lets me loop audio. I want to cover all the senses, and do things that I haven’t done before. A scavenger hunt of sorts.

Thursday, March 20 4:30am-4:37am:

The clock bites me awake, this will be a quick one. Trying to see how I listen in a half conscious state. Track sort of sounds like the static in my eyes right now. My mouth is a bit dry, besides for that everything is as I left it. DJ Stingray showed up in my dream. Things look and sound clearer now. If you listen to the lead in a certain way you hear droplets of water.

Sunday, March 23 8:15pm-9:15pm:

Wow that was fascinating. Just meditated for 20 minutes with the loop playing, learned a lot. When I was planning to do this I expected that it would modulate my thoughts and have more of a logic emphasis, but it was quite the opposite. It was very sensory, I charted the sounds in my head and saw multiple visual forms.

When I typically listen to electronic music, the kick drum is at the forefront of my perception as the base of the track, keeping the time and denoting the bar. In this case I found myself focusing on the high-pitched drone which lies toward the back of the mix volume wise, and this buzzing tone I still can’t tell if it’s actually in the track or imaginary. It sort of sounds like a phone vibrating on a hard surface.

I found it much easier to notice the movements that occur within the 4ish minute span of the recording. The doubled hand drum that comes in around 1 minute particularly caught my attention. The point where the track starts to loop also started to become very obvious, I barely noticed it over the past few days unless I was trying to hear it. (I have been listening to a youtube recording of the track that is longer than the actual song, on the vinyl the track itself lasts for about 3 minutes then enters a locked groove meaning it will play the same 4 beats of music perpetually, the youtube recording is 4 minutes long, it runs the entirety of the track and has a minute or so of the locked groove at the end)

When I meditate under normal circumstances without music, I get a bit of an aura radiating outwards from the point where my eyes are focusing, but it is relatively mild. This time I saw a number of strong patterns that took up my whole field of vision. At the start they were appearing at random and cycling through at a slower rate, but toward the end of the 20 minutes I was able to conjure specific patterns from the list of ones I had seen before by thinking about them. I drew 4 of my favorites below. (That’s funny, I just noticed that this paragraph and the second paragraph start exactly the same way. The loopiness has spread to my head.)

Sunday, March 30 8:28pm-10:23pm:

Going to a seafood restaurant now to try crab legs. I don’t imagine they’ll taste too different from lobster, but the mode of delivery is fun. It’s been raining little spitty droplets all day.

8:45- This is interesting. I thought I could get a personal size crab, but they only sell ones meant for groups. Guess I'll have a bunch of leftovers.

10:02- That ended up being a remarkably engaging experience. Walking home now, will write a full report once I return.

Monday, March 31 10:15am-11:47am:

Writing this the next morning. The crab meat, salty cajun sauce, and dousing of butter knocked me out shortly after the last entry. I ended up eating the entire crab hahah. It was intimidating when it came out, but there is more shell than there is meat.

To be honest, I had doubts about this segment of the article when I was walking to the restaurant. I thought, “This will be entertaining, but it kind of feels like nonsense for the sake of nonsense, it won’t add to our understanding or interact with the music.” I am happy to report that the opposite is true. I had zero notion that eating crab legs would be such a flow-inducing activity, so this was a very pleasant surprise.

I got the crab at 9 and the restaurant closed at 10, so I had exactly an hour to eat it. Racing against the clock was fun, it got me even more immersed. I had never eaten crab meat straight from the legs, and I can count the times I’ve eaten overall crab meat on one hand. I enjoyed the taste, it felt like a mix between the flavor of shrimp and the meatiness of lobster.

When the legs, corn and potatoes were dumped out of a bucket onto my table, I needed a minute or two to process what was in front of me. I took stock of the crab and thought about how to approach it. There were four halves in total each with four limbs, three legs and one claw. The leg farthest from the claw was the skinniest and smallest, and they gradually got bigger as I got closer to the claw. I opted to go without the gloves that were provided because I wanted the full tactile experience.

I broke off the smallest leg and got handed the metal tool for getting through the shells. It was basically a nutcracker, it had two different crushing sizes and a pointed part for more precise crushing. I broke the leg at the joint and got the evening’s first taste of crab meat. I shortly reached a roadblock in the form of shell, and started to get familiar with the tool. Both of the crushing surfaces were too wide to work on the leg, so I used the pointed part to get to the meat. That was tricky too as the leg didn’t want to stay stable between the points, slipping back and forth beneath its layer of spicy oil. I was a bit frustrated, and I moved on to the second leg.

I started to figure things out once I got to the second one. I came to realize I had the right idea using the pointed part of the tool, and I used the same strategy for the next 15 legs: crush a vertical seam running the entirety of one leg segment, then split it with your hands, using your fingers to scoop the meat out of its refuge.

By the time I got to legs 4-8, I was working very well. I was into the music, bobbing my head and keeping time in my feet. I probably finished these four legs in the same time it took me to get through the very first one. I started scrapping the skinniest ones as they barely held any meat, my efforts were better spent elsewhere.

Even though things were becoming more intuitive, the crab still demanded respect. It had a lot of spiny points and the cracked shell was pretty sharp, so it had to be handled with care. There were multiple times where I almost cut myself, but I managed to get through it without any slices on my hands. The crab also took a physical toll in other ways: I was so focused that I forgot to look up for the first 30 minutes, which has given me a bit of neck soreness.

There was no clock in view and my hands were covered in oil, so I had no idea what time it was when I cracked the final leg. I ended up finishing right on time, it was 9:57.

The aftermath

How did the loop fit into this crab-legged journey? I wasn’t explicitly thinking about the music when I was eating, but upon further reflection, I think the main thing it did was shift the context of the space. By taking the loud french rap and group chatter out of the equation, the crab legs in front of me turned into a video game that demanded speed, precision, and a massive appetite. The sounds gave additional structure to the activity, which gave me better awareness of the nuance of each leg.

There are few things more rewarding than feeling yourself learn in real time. I have gained a full belly and a newfound appreciation for seafood, solo dining, and minimal.

Monday, March 31 7:05pm-8:15pm:

I <3 arcades. For the final act of this story, Raef and I went to a new one called Planète Claw, which is conveniently located 2 minutes away from our house. I wanted to play a rhythm game while listening to the track to see what challenges it would create. They had a newer dancing game that didn’t just track where you stepped, it had a motion sensor to catch your whole body. I put in 4 tokens and the first round started before I could set the track up. In hindsight this is a very good thing, as it gave us something to compare to.

The second time around we both got the track loaded and began to dance. Surprisingly enough, I found it easier to follow the dance moves to something more cyclic than the ups and downs of a vocal pop song. I’m not sure if this was on purpose, but the designed dance moves were pretty independent of the original song’s rhythm, making what you listen to while doing it kind of interchangeable.

After that, we found an interesting game right next to the dance machine. If you took 200 steps in 1 minute on the sensor, you were guaranteed a prize. I played this with the track going and was narrowly defeated, my time running out with 5 steps left to go. It was Raef’s turn to avenge me and he made it happen, winning a stuffed potato with legs. Later on I won a sleepy capybara holding a pineapple.

Tuesday, April 1 10:44am-11:00am:

I originally wanted to write a longer “insightful” outro for this piece, but I think that would go against the spirit of it. There are a couple of things I can say after weeks of intense research. Music is fun, putting yourself in odd situations is fun, and if you pay close attention, everything becomes a surprise.

Not a single one of these activities turned out the way I expected, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’d like to thank the track for giving me a fresh brain and encouraging me to process things outside normal perception.

All of this has gotten me thinking about the first question in this article. In my opinion, your only role as a listener is to make music your own. Through the simple act of living with it, you are taking it to places that nobody else could have imagined.

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