As the day comes to an end, the twilight dissolves the surfaces, absorbing their colors, leaving their reflections suspended in space. The luminous transparency in open spaces condenses into beams and phosphorescence […] along city streets the shop windows, restaurants, bars and discos enclose twilight havens where the hard edges of things are softened into glows and reflections […] The visible night gives way to a high noon of sounds, odors, and textures …
— Alphonso Lingis1
1.
I often think about what it is like, at night, in other places. Places far away, with their own scent and texture, places where the lights flicker differently in the dark. I imagine myself within these other nights, walking through streets of cities I have never visited; freed from memory and history, closer to the hissing noumena of sensation, the elusive haze of pure, unmediated flow —
2.
“I always make my music at night. This has been the case since the 80’s […] Maybe if I recorded during the day, the music wouldn’t be as nocturnal sounding. To me it sounds like 4am.”2
The music of Rod Modell has always been about the promise of the other night, the belief that the night is not one but many; a myriad of nights all existing simultaneously, only loosely held together by the movements of the leylines and the ongoings of the aether. The night is boundless, because there is always at least one more night to invent. Much like how a writer of fiction can conjure an infinite amount of fictional variants from the real events of a single night, Modell’s music spins a thick web of nocturnal fictions out of what it has captured as field recordings from specific places with peculiar flows and nocturnal energies: Barcelona, Tokyo, Berlin, Amsterdam, Lake Michigan … transformed into music, these real places meld with their fictional other, turn into ghostly apparitions that are both entirely fictional and photographically true to life. Of course Modell’s other artform would be photography, his music consists of nothing but snapshots; single, monad-like frames that hold within themselves all of the other frames that make up the fiction. Stare for a brief second and the film will begin playing …
The scene is set. Motion; repeating, carefully looped. Wind and blurred chatter in the background, the hazy glow of the city nocturnal. Curvatures of sound and light, reflected across the scene, all the way to the hazy edges where the lights begin to mingle with, and eventually cede to, the fuzzy contours of the dark —
3.
“I believe I possess some form of synesthesia that acts as a converter to process this stimulus. I’m not influenced by music, but drop me in a beautiful place, and I can pump out hours of sonic textures that were inspired by that place.”3
There is a very peculiar textural palette to Modell’s music, a kind of careful softness that is rare in electronic music; all bouba no kiki, often softened and feathered to the point of almost disappearing. What would have elsewhere been the task of percussion is instead left to the movements of the dub. Rhythm through reverb; sometimes, there’s not even a bassline, just the muffled sound of a dampened kick drum, thumping against the hazy lens of a camera positioned not towards the club, but outwards, towards the limitless expanse that lies outside, the infinite interlaced layers that make up the rich fabric of the nocturnal —
4.
'“I like music that unfolds in slow motion […] I like to show my listeners a frame-by-frame scan. Time-stretched to see the details. Pull apart the fabric of sound so you can see what’s in between the grains …”4
Rain. First a few drops, then a drizzle, until it begins pouring from above towards the dark crevices below; textures and surfaces of earth, glass and concrete, now coated in a damp reflective film amidst this warm and hissy storm … listen closely, and you can hear the phasers and flangers sweeping the spectrum, their movements picked up and carried afar by circulating lines of delay. All has become water and flange, a world traced and inhabited only by the incandescent flickers of chords briefly lit up as the filter opens. Within the trailing clouds of echo and diffusion, the soft glow of decaying harmonics lingers for just a little while longer until they, too, tend towards silence, as all things eventually tend to do —
5.
It is three in the morning, the rain has cleared. A soft bloom lingers. The air is calm and balmy, it is not cold. The sky above is rich with clouds glistening in their grey incandescence. Outside, patterns, hazy, repeating. Blurry constellations of refracted light and damp air. At this hour, there are strange phenomena in the air. No need to hurry; in the dark, there is all the time in the world —
Alphonso Lingis: The Imperative, p. 9-10.
Got to listen to Side A of Ghost Lights at our listening gallery here in Portland and I had the best nap of my life. Felt like I was inside a whale
yes yes yes. Twilight is the most inspiring time of day