Essays In Love: Imperfection & Beauty

Yesterday I happened to be reading Alain de Botton’s ‘Essays in Love’ and a number of ideas in it reminded me of parallel thoughts I’ve had about the nature of the music we make.

A few years ago, in an interview with drumandbass.ch I was asked about what makes our sound ours, and I answered:

We’re generally fans of real life and we’ve come to realise that our music reflects that. Life is often messy, disorganised, a bit broken and imperfect but often somehow beautiful, and our music works in the same sort of way. If you try and sanitise & control everything, you eventually end up with music that doesn’t bear much relation to real life and gradually people will lose interest in it.

Much of our music uses samples or recordings of ‘real’ instruments, (as distinct from synthesizers). Aside from our personal, aesthetic preferences, we’ve always enjoyed the fact that the ‘real life-ness’ of these sounds inevitably implies a narrative of some sort, an organic sound laden down with aural baggage and emotional association; things which a listener will find very difficult not to be drawn in by and feel themselves relating to.

For me, the interesting thing about these sounds is how messily imperfect they are. The world of synthesizers and drum machines, sample-accurate audio workstations, lovingly sound-treated rooms and spectral analysers is all well and good, but ultimately so incredibly linear and inhuman that, after a while, I find it almost impossible to relate to.

Brian Eno has talked about this on several occasions:

I like [the piano] because of the complexity of its sound. If you hold the sustain pedal down, strike a note and just listen… that’s one of my favourite musical experiences. I often sit at the piano for an hour or two, and just go “bung!” and listen to the note dying. Each piano does it in a different way. You find all these exotic harmonies drifting in and drifting out again, and one that will appear and disappear many times. There’ll be fast-moving ones and slow-moving ones. That’s spell-binding, for me.
The interesting thing about the piano is that it’s a kind of compromised instrument, because of Equal Temperament. You know, no piano you’ve ever heard is in tune. Pianos are not tuned to be perfectly in tune. You can’t do it.

It occurred to me that the real problem with synthesizers is that what you are hearing in the end is the movement of a few atoms amplified, really it’s just a few atoms. When you’re hearing a grand piano you’re hearing the movement of billions of molecules, everything is active: the wood, the strings, the metal, the temperature in the room, all these elements change the way that thing sounds. For this reason those instruments remain interesting, because they are never the same twice. If you play this piano today, it isn’t the same piano that you play tomorrow.
So I think that actually the “novelty” of electronics has slightly worn off, and people are starting to look to those instruments again. The same movement happened in painting, there was a period when everybody wanted their colours to be totally flat and with very hard edges. Towards the middle of the Seventies people started to get messy again, you started to see brush strokes, evidences of the human hand and of the materials.
I think the same thing is happening in music, and once again it’s exciting to realize that this thing has a history, it’s not just something that was invented in a factory in Japan last year.
There’s a whole history and a tradition which becomes part of the performance: you can’t listen to a piano without listening to the whole history of piano music as well.

What Eno is talking about here is a loss of control; a surrender to, appreciation of, and a revelling in imperfection.

The sort of music we are involved in is so often crippled by obsessions with ideas of perfection, technique and control. Undoubtedly, there is a powerful aesthetic charm to crafting a sound which gives the impression it has never been touched by the human hand, (LFO’s 1991 album ‘Frequencies’ is a superb example of this ), however there is a limit to how far an audience will suspend their humanity and indulge your robot rock-out.

Life is full of passions, and control is the antithesis of passion.
We are at our most excited, and exciting, when matters lack clarity and are confused, fuzzy and chaotic.

In Les Liaisons Dangereuses the Marquise de Merteuil criticises the Vicomte de Valmont for writing love letters that are too perfect, too logical to be the words of a true lover, whose thoughts will be disjointed and for whom the fine phrase will always elude.

de Botton observes:

Language trips up on love, desire lacks articulacy.

A desire for too much control is a suspicious thing. True feeling, the arena in which we reveal our real selves, is out of our control.

de Botton again:

…the clumsiest seducers could generously be deemed the most genuine. Not to find the right words is paradoxically often the best proof that the right words are meant.

As I sat reading in a coffee shop on the Finchley Road I was making notes to myself, trying to think through the ebb and flow of human relationships

It occurred to me me how many of the same themes relate to the making of music.

The world of music technology I described earlier is one of machines designed to maximise control, emphasise accuracy, reduce weakness. So much effort is spent in the pursuit of the ideal sound but I’m never wholly convinced that this pursuit is driven by the desire to most perfectly articulate an expression of the self together with all its frailties, or whether it is, in fact, designed to escape it.
When people fall in love it’s common for them to idealise their lover, hoping to find in them none of the weaknesses we see in ourselves.

Talking about the feeling of inferiority which comes from comparing the perfection perceived in the idealised lover with oneself, de Botton observes:

Out of this perceived inferiority, there often emerges the need to lie or be absurdly reserved: to take on a personality that is not directly our own, a seducing self that can locate and respond to the demands of the superior being we’re having dinner with. Does love condemn us not to be ourselves? Perhaps not for ever, but at least initially, for it leads us to ask What would appeal to her? rather than what appeals to me?

The projection of perfection onto a lover negates the pleasure of difference by refusing to recognise imperfection, classifying it as undesirable. Rather than be spellbound by the exotic harmonies, drifting frequencies and overall out-of-tune-ness of the true character of the lover across the table, the idealised version of her induces a crippling sense of conformity.

de Botton illustrates this as he describes dinner with a clever and opinionated woman he has only just met, but rapidly fallen in love with:

The complexity of her views led to a certain schizophrenia in mine. What sides of myself should I release? How could I avoid alienating her without appearing impossibly bland?…
Because it involves the risk of alienating those who do not agree with what one is saying, originality proved wholly beyond me. I merely adjusted myself to whatever I judged Chloe might feel…My idea of what she wanted from a lover could be compared to a tight-fitting suit and my true self to a fat man, so that the evening was a process resembling a fat man trying to fit into a suit that is too small for him. There was a desperate attempt to repress the bulges that did not fit the cut of the fabric, to shrink my waist and hold my breath so that the material did not tear. It was not surprising if my posture was not as spontaneous as I would have liked. How can a fat man in suit too small for him feel spontaneous? He is so frightened the suit will split, he is forced to sit in complete stillness, holding his breath and praying he can get through the evening without disaster. Love had crippled me.

The lover crippled by the pursuit of the ideal doesn’t feel that they can, (like Eno at his piano), simply strike a note on their object of desire and enjoy the fast and slow moving interplay of the molecules of her reaction.

Eno, talking about instruments, could so easily be talking about people. Read the following passage with a lover in mind:

The nature of acoustic instruments is that they have these complex harmonics. Not only do these notes generate their whole harmonic series, but the harmonics interact. You get both the product and the difference of them.

So the ear already hears very complex sound from a simple instrument, But, further than this, because of the problem of Equal Temperament and Just Intonation, because you can’t tune a piano perfectly, you never have such a simple interval. There are much more complex numbers than these involved with a piano, and that means you get some much more exotic harmonies, which really are very transitory. It’s the most extraordinary instrument for that.

Finding out about harmonics is actually a good way of understanding a lot about music, I think. And finding out about the piano, and about the history of the piano, is like studying a history of music.

I would suggest that in both the fields of sound and human love, a more enriching experience can be gained by recognising, appreciating and encouraging the beauty of difference and imperfection rather than the pursuit of a ideal that is almost entirely self-invented and projected. I’m sure everyone reading this knows either a musician or a lover who is holding their breath, crippled by love and in the pursuit of unattainable utopia, (itself from the Greek ‘ou-topos’ meaning ‘no place’).

de Botton again:

More often than not, we achieve our goals by coincidence rather than design, dispiriting news for the seducer, who is imbued with the spirit of positivism and rationalism , believing that with enough careful and almost scientific research, laws for the fall into love may be discovered. Seducers proceed in the hope of finding love hooks to ensnare the beloved – a certain smile, or opinion or way of holding a fork…But it is an unfortunate fact that though love hooks exist for everyone; if we hit upon them in the course of seduction, it is more by chance than by calculation. After all, what had Chloe done to make me fall in love with her? My love for her had as much to do with the adorable way she had asked the waiter for some butter as it had with her sharing my views on the merits of Heidegger’s Being and Time

Eno, (talking about starting a piece of music):

I really begin by allowing myself to make a mess, and then seeing if I can get out of it. There’s nothing worse than a ‘blank canvas’. Picasso said there’s nothing worse than a brilliant beginning, and that’s true. If your first move is brilliant, you’re in trouble. You don’t really know how to follow it; you’re frightened of ruining it. So to make a mess is a good beginning.

de Botton:

Seduction is a form of acting, but just as an actor needs to have a concept of the audience’s expectations, so too the seducer must have an idea of what the beloved will want to hear – so that if there is a conclusive argument against lying in order to be loved, it is that the actor can have no idea of what his or her audience will actually be touched by. Most of the time, we charm people for reasons we don’t entirely understand and cannot fully control. There’s no better reason to try to be that most tricky of things on our dates: ourselves.

This is a complex subject and something I’ve thought about for years. The detail of my opinions on it are constantly in flux but I believe that an appreciation and enjoyment of fault and difference is a hallmark of the capacity to love with clear vision.
I’ll take my music and my lovers as they are; flawed, imperfect and beautifully human; for as Eno says, “no piano you’ve ever heard is in tune”.