Column: A Postcard Life #1
"The people in my films are exactly like myself - creatures of instinct, of rather poor intellectual capacity, who at best only think while they're talking. Mostly they're a body, with a little hollow for the soul," the recently deceased Ingmar Bergman once said. For whatever reason this particular fragment struck a chord in me, a few loose strands of the fraying tapestry of my mind were forced taut, and I realized the Swedish director's words succinctly explained my experience as a music junky; a detailed snapshot of that windswept section of our hearts that bleeds and sings and dances when a particular song floors and overwhelms us, adds meaning to a moment of our lives - a timestamp with a soul and a pulse that will forever remain entwined with one powerful memory, or a series of events, and will always be able to throw us back into our pasts even as its melodies encircle and color our present. With music, the only 'thinking' is done through the vocal delivery, the rest is pure emotion, 'instinct' if you'll allow me to thoroughly dissect the quotation. We don't always require the lyrics to be on par with Shakespeare's sonnets or to keep pace with Fitzgerald's poetic prose, they just have to ring true, to remind us of ourselves, of our own memories, hopes, dreams, and failures. The thematic exploration of an artist's music is very much composed of their own experiences, but it would not affect us as powerfully as these creations often do were we not able to see a dim reflection of ourselves looking up out of the compositions.
For the past half decade or so I've slowly found the ranks of my favorite musicians being peopled more and more frequently by Scandinavian artists. I understood the subtle phasing out of my youthful love of punk and hardcore music by other bands of the 70s and 80s, the bands they influenced, and even my attraction to the cinematic efforts of post-rock bands, but it's puzzled me how Scandinavian bands have been able to cut noticeably deeper in the years since my musical tastes have, for the most part, solidified. As I poured over the Washington Post the day after Bergman died, Adam Bernstein's piece, a summation of Bergman's illustrious career and a mournful farewell to the dynamic and brilliant director, seemed to clarify certain facets of Scandinavian music that hold this dark attraction for me (though all clarity is accomplished through a blurring of further details).
"Critics saw in Bergman's films a tendency for characters to use sex as a way of overcoming their sense of isolation and finding tenuous connections with one another. Yet fear of intimacy frequently caused the characters to cloak their true emotions. Bergman underscored this theme by focusing on people who were involved in theater and used disguises as role-playing," Bernstein wrote. While explorations of physical intimacy, ulterior and hidden agendas, alienation, and strained bonds are not exactly rare topics for music of any origin or genre, my life has led me down certain roads which make me more susceptible to Scandinavian analyses. While brash British deliveries will add a little swagger to my walk and my Polyvinyl Records collection will find me longing for a striped wool sweatshirt and a girl once loved, now lost, a quick examination of my favorite records and most played tracks on iTunes and last.fm quickly reveal a shadowy fascination with Scandinavian music, from playful pop melodies to the fading notes of a lost orchestral expedition. There is something distinct about the Scandinavian music scene as a whole (for if there was not, sites like It's A Trap! would not have sprung up nor command a loyal fanbase), and even more so when split into it compositional genres. This inarticulately labeled 'something' is a collage of places I've been and settings I've not yet experienced; a strange nowhere from which my past is cut more vibrantly into who I am, the present is constantly reinventing itself, and from where the future stretches on as a series of new dawns and novel chances to recapture all that is beautifully recorded in nostalgic compositions - an optimistic sight enhanced through a sense that we can survive all the obstacles that will invariably cause us to stumble, or that we will at least have good company (provided through records we own and ones not yet purchased or released) throughout these ordeals. This broken logic, possibly influenced by the changing landscapes seen out of bus windows and the realities of my rootless youth, set me along towards the 'tenuous connection' between Markus Krunegård and a girl half the world away in Laakso's wonderful "Aussie girl", from which I borrowed the title of this column.
As an introduction, this fractured installment works. Further additions will be more focused, threaded around an album, band, or genre, amongst other musical backdrops, and shall not sprawl quite so carelessly through elongated sentence structures, adjectives, and metaphor... well, one can always hope. It's difficult to sum up a love for music as a whole, and this effort proves even more complicated once lines are drawn in the sand. Without delving into Håkan Hellström's lyrical explorations on "Känn ingen sorg för mig Göteborg" or the evolution of bands like Shout Out Louds or the Legends, I hope that I have at least shown a near rabid fascination with the craftsmanship of musicians from northern Europe, and have provided an appropriate prologue for 'A Postcard Life' and an introduction of myself as a columnist. Criticisms, no matter how brutally honest or savagely delivered, suggestions, comments, and general thoughts and ideas are always welcomed, be they added as a comment or emailed to me directly, and I hope none of you shy away from saying what you feel about the words put down here.
Until next time...
- Lars Garvey Laing-Peterson