Time and Place

On half a life in electronic music

This is a revised version of a little piece I wrote in a reflective mood a few months ago. It is a bit more personal and literary than my usual writing. Perhaps it will speak to someone. I haven’t been able to get much writing done for this Substack over the last few months, but I’m hoping to get back on track soon with more posts. Thanks to everyone who has been supportive of Infinite Speeds so far!

I am now thirty years old, which means that electronic music has now taken up more than half of my life. Is that long enough to say that electronic music is my life? After fifteen years of listening and a decade of making music, I have come to realize — realize, that everything I have ever made, and listened to and written about has been about a single time and place. Not any empirical time or place, but the time and place that is the emotional instant of my life, an instant I cannot let go of because it is what the atmosphere and texture of my life revolves around.

Everybody who’s life is, in some way or the other, defined by music will remember the time and place in which they first encountered the music that is the soundtrack of their life — affirming a calling for a time and place that is for life. It couldn’t have been otherwise. It may not seem like it at the time but then, one morning you wake up and suddenly realize you've been doing this for a life-time.

Music did not make sense to me for the first thirteen years of my life. That changed when I was fourteen and encountered electronic music in the form of trance music. Suddenly, there was a form and language that made music make sense, a sense that perhaps was there all along, just waiting to be uncovered. That is what we mean when we say that someone is a lifer. To be a lifer — be it a techno lifer, a jungle lifer, or a rock & roll lifer — is to draw the sense of one's life from the singular time and place that has birthed that sense.

I have always been drawn to records that radiate with a hyper-specific sense of time and place, like Echospace's Liumin evoking Tokyo on a glowing summer night. Listening, one is enveloped by their singular musical time and place, but also simultaneously entangled with the many times and places from one’s own life of listening, layers and layers of times and places, real and fictional — all converging in the moment in which music and world melt together, a time and place that is reflected and repeated through the music that is our life.

And, even though this music is one's life, it is also always something other than one’s life, not merely personal, but interwoven with other lives and other times and places. That is the beauty of a scene, a collective of lifers that shares something that is intensely personal, but also beyond the individual — the texture and atmosphere of a music, flowing through the nexus that is our shared life. Music is uniquely suited to express that life because of its wordlessness. No one can say in words why this or that record is their life, it is beyond reproach. I can only retroactively reflect and come to realize that to be truthful to my life is to express the time and place that is my life, but also more than my life; a doubled reflection of a thousand other times and places.