Nova Ahead 21
Are we all living in a simulation? Is life just the universe experiencing itself from infinite perspectives? I’m more inclined to believe that we’re part of an immense pattern of chaos and order, which itself is an extremely complex but uniform arrangement. Nothingness gives way to something, which proceeds to achieve rhythm and pulse until it drips back into either total darkness or blinding light. That sequence propels and informs everything from our bloody, earnest hearts to the tides, to our political landscape; it’s all or nothing, but also all and nothing, but also some of each in varying proportions in seemingly random endless combinations. There is no design or singular will, unless you count the fact that each step we take dictates and heralds an entirely unique and unpredictable series of moments, which upon immediate reflection seems to make complete and eerie sense.
But I am also interested in the symmetry of our cellular interiors and the towering monstrous nebulae churning beyond our comprehension; why do our bronchial tubes and the ocean coral feel like distant cousins? Have you experienced the feeling of realizing something that has been in front of you all along that you just never really saw? I suppose that could describe people, but in this instance, I’m referring to music and how it can so perfectly outline things you had not known were wanting description. Hundreds of years ago, the idea of waves traveling among us, in light, sound, or hitherto unknown spectrums, was at best theoretical, and now we are aware of entire invisible networks with which we interact and respond to. It makes me think of what future specters will reveal themselves, what rainbow staircases will unfold before us, that we won’t know until they’re activated, perhaps traced in a melody unrequested but so very welcome.
This accurately retells my first interaction with the music of Wendy Eisenberg, and I’m so happy to help deliver her band Editrix to you this Friday on the ol’ livestream. Most specifically though, this morning, I just dropped the digital needle on Ruby’s new lp, Marrow, and it is so perfectly and beautifully formed; I wasn’t quite aware of how vulnerable the parts of me that this is cutting into were. It’s the right music for this time of year when the sun is as hot as ever, and your skin is like a baby’s again, but you can’t stop drinking that lovely light, no matter how much it burns you. You’re left confused in the evening, nursing tender skin and wondering when you might have singed yourself; oh right, earlier today I drank beers in the sun like a dumb teenager. I knew from the first five seconds of this album that it was going to be special, and that I’d likely be in the zone when Ruby comes to town, barring any pandemic resurgence, this summer.
You know, sometimes I sit down and write most of these in what feels like a single breath, though lucky for you, it’s not quite as annoying as if I was ranting to you breathless and wild-eyed, all without punctuation. I often wonder if everyone is as actively engaged in taming that wildness within themselves. It makes me feel better to think they are, or that you are, rather, and that’s what these special albums are; the ones that crank and make you stop. They’re someone else’s breathlessness, and maybe it’s a case of sympathetic or harmonic vibrational frequency that gives you that instant pause. Maybe it’s the suggestion of a particular person that you love or miss, captured in the abstract imagery quilted together by a stranger; it’s deja vu of deja vu, when you remember that you once remembered that thing always on the tip of your tongue. You’re then satiated not by glimpsing that knowledge, but by the comfort of knowing that you distantly had cradled this feeling before now, and before that. Maybe that is the titular marrow that Ruby alludes to: an unknowable quality, molten within us.
Whew, that one was out there! But I do like going out in that way. Join us on Friday for Editrix on the livestream, you can grab a pay what you want ticket which goes to the band and to Nova; you can also donate to the Nova Programming Fund, which ensures that we will be bringing you everything under the sun at the new space in Keene. And for goodness sake, grab that new Ruby album.
Eric Gagne is the Programming Director at Nova Arts, and has spent the last thirteen years booking The Thing in the Spring. He also played many shows over the past decades with Death to Tyrants, Sisters and Brothers, and Redwing Blackbird, and is actively recording and performing with his band Footings.