The Living Music List #12: On Recognition and Losing Touch

Considering the long impacts of short friendships. Plus, a new Melted Form demo, and new music releases from Lia Kohl, ASC, Michael Pike, Markus Guentner, habn, and more

Aug 30, 2024

Read the previous issue of The Living Music List:

The Living Music List #11: On the Dedication of Waterfalls

Melted Form

August 23, 2024

Read full story

The Saco River at dusk, Maine, USA. Photo by Melted Form.

Currently listening to: Décollage (Demo) by Melted Form

Today’s track is an ambient demo by me, built from some synths, processed piano, and several field recordings I captured on my iPhone while vacaitioning in western Maine last week. Headphones are highly recommended. Hope you enjoy.

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Reflection

Hello, friend.

When was the last time you remembered someone existed?

It’s not our fault that our brains need to constantly dump or cover old information to make room for the new. After old acquaintences have gone their own way, eventually, we forget them—without realizing it, of course.

Sometimes, those people we’ve forgotten pop up in our lives years later and our recognition of them happens like an old lightbulb flickering back to life in a dank basement. That happened to me this week—but in this case, the lightbulb illuminated and instantly burst, shattering and scattering its glass, extinguishing its light forever.

We encounter many other souls throughout our lives, some of whom hover inside our realms of consciousness longer than most. Some are there forever, but the majority just pass through, leaving our awareness with little more than a face, a name, a rumor.

Some of the most interesting people, to me, are the interim friends. The people whose lives happen to align with ours during a temporary period like a vacation, a university career, or an internship. We spend a relatively short time in one place—a week, a few months, a few years—and we know from the onset that we won’t be there forever. By chance or fate, some other person happened to make it to the same provisional position and encounter us.

This was the case of my colleague and later friend Isham. During the summer of 2018, Isham and I were both employed at an internship in New York City. We came from different backgrounds and different New Jersey universities, and we worked in different departments on different floors of the building. Thankfully, the nature of our intership gave us plenty of time to get to know our fellow interns. I gravitated toward Isham, along with a couple of other colleagues.

At the time, my mom actually worked at this company and she was Isham’s supervisor, which further aided our relationship. My mom and I both appreciated Isham’s consistently friendly and relaxed demeanor, his intelligence, and his kindness. But neither of us had kept in touch with him long after the internship ended, save a couple of drinks here and there in the year after the internship and a long-dormant groupchat. He eventually became another face and name removed but not entirely forgotten.

This made the unexpected news of his death this week shockingly emotional for both me and my mom. Adding insult to injury, we discovered that Isham had actually died a year ago.

In a rare visit to the Facebook app, I noticed a notification I would usually ignore: “Isham was tagged in a post.” Perhaps guided by some unknown force, I tapped on it and saw it was Isham’s sister memorializing the 1-year anniversary of his death.

I simply could not believe it. Isham was in his mid 20s, like me. He was healthy. He was a few years into a solid career. How could this have happened? My mom then found his obituary and discovered that he had passed in a kayaking accident.

Just like that.

The timing and significance of his passing was, in many ways, similar to our short friendship. Just like that. A brief moment in time. A blip. The coalescence of a trillion factors bringing two people—and one person and their fate—together. The meeting of these people and events happened and then, without much thought at the time, they ended.

I’m sure you have some folks in your life who you haven’t spoken to in months, years, or decades, but you would remember them fondly upon recollection (if absentmindedly). There are so many people who have entered our lives and connected with us in ways just significant enough to warrant emotion and memory. Some have done enough to earn the title of friend long after they permanently leave us.

I’m making assumptions here, but it must be a universal human experience for a mutual acquaintance to randomly mention someone from your past and you think or even cry out loud, “Oh, yes! [Insert name]! Of course! How could I have forgotten them?! They were the best!”

It’s enough to make me cast my eyes scowling upwards as if to roll them back into my head to glare furiously at my brain like, “Stop forgetting the best people!”

Through this experience—of remembering Isham exists, to realizing he had tragically passed, to noticing that his death happened a year ago and I never noticed—I’ve questioned many things about myself and the way we keep in touch with others.

Am I prioritizing my relationships enough?
How many people can I reasonably keep up with on a regular basis—and is it worth attempting to do it all from my end?
Do I know (or care) what’s happening in the lives of my closest friends and family members? How can I possibly remember them all?
Do I at least know that if one of them died, I would hear about it right away from a mutual acquaintance? Because social media can be an unreliable, blink-and-you-miss-it notifier, especially for the social-media-agnostics-in-training like myself.

The answers to the questions in those bullets are, respectively: no, not many and probably not, not usually and I have no idea, and I fucking hope so.

I want to stick with the thought in that second bullet, though. There are many friends to whom I rarely speak, due primarily to a combination of busyness, forgetfulness, and whatever other excuses the two of us make up to make ourselves feel better about not having to keep up with each other’s lives. It’s not that we don’t like each other, but that socializing can be exhausting and, let’s be honest, we’ve narrowed down our need-to-know bubbles signficantly after COVID. We’ve realized that, for those people we don’t ever see or very rarely see in real life, maintaining a line of communication can be frustrating, unfulfilling, and take away time we could be spending on the thousands of other things we hope to achieve in our lives.

It’s a matter of priority, and that’s no slight against those people. We still care about them. But Jesus, if you want to know how I’m doing or a little about what’s happening in my life, maybe read the blog posts I share online every week?

And why do I always fight this voice in my brain that blames me for not giving someone a call? They don’t call or text me.

I realize I’m sounding rather whiny at the moment, but the truth is that I just feel guilty about Isham. I know how it feels to receive a call from someone you deeply care about but haven’t spoken to in a while. It reignites a relationship. We recognize the person’s voice, remember memories and emotions, recall places and experiences.

I wish I felt more compelled to be that person picking up the phone more often. This experience with Isham is only reaffirming that desire.

I wish I had spent more afternoons getting happy hour drinks with him, chatting about football and laughing about our days at the internship. But we were only interim friends. We went our separate ways to prioritize different people and different experiences, as much as I know we enjoyed each other’s company for a little while.

***

Recognition. It’s a word we take at face value, but its meaning has great implications when we put our artist caps on:

The action of recognizing, or the state of being recognized, such as: knowledge or feeling that someone or something present has been encountered before1

This moment of recognition is what I’ve become fascinated by since hearing about Isham’s passing. I recognized his name and image as soon as I saw it, and I remembered. I remembered how he made me feel. I remembered how he inspired me. I remembered how lucky I felt to have encountered him before in my life.

Good art triggers recognition. We feel seen and validated, or we feel challenged and questioned, because the piece of art puts something familiar in front of us mixed with something new.

Music consists of the same handful of notes, so when we feel the melody of a new song, we may be feeling the melody of an old, familiar one. One that makes us feel some way. Hearing that little piece of familiarity recontextualized is why finding new music matters.

We are in a different place in every way than when we first heard a song. Hearing that same song now is an experience of recognition, both of the song and of the fact that we’ve changed.

Music and art is our way of keeping up with ourselves and everyone else we care about. We recognize people in music, in paintings, in writing, the same way we recognize people when see their faces. And we remember why the music is tied to them—it reminds us how and when they touched us. It reminds us about who they were and might be now, even if we aren’t aware of where they are now. It reminds us that we don’t always have to know someone for very long to recognize that they changed our lives.

I’m grateful to recognize Isham and know that he was someone worth remembering.

This post is dedicated to Isham Huq. May Allah grant him Jannah. Please consider donating to his legacy campaign to help provide clean drinking water and food to orphans in Bangladesh.

Music Recommendations + Announcement

Hello again, friend.

Thank you for reading today’s post. I hope you enjoyed the reflection and the demo track, and I sincerely hope you’ll consider supporting Isham’s legacy campaign linked above.

Now, on to today’s lists of music recommendations. Happy listening.

Announcement: Existing readers may remember that, up until this point, I have been linking out to a Google Sheet of my music recommendations which is complementary to these newsletters. Well, I’ve let myself get severely behind on updating it and am considering abandoning it all together, at least for now. I haven’t made enough time to keep up with it, and I’m not sure how many people actually use it. If you have any strong feelings about it, feel free to let me know in the comments, but for now, I won’t be linking to it in these posts anymore. You can revisit posts #1-11 to find the link. Thanks for understanding.

The Living Music List—Ambient

Note: All of the below ambient projects are available on Bandcamp.

Normal Sounds by Lia Kohl (album / field recordings, experimental) [Bandcamp]
Kontrapunkt by Markus Guentner (album / drone, experimental) [Bandcamp]
Pluie d Etoiles Filantes by Michael Pike (album / electronica, drone) [Bandcamp]
Through The Haze by Human Is Alive & Warmth (album / drone, field recordings) [Bandcamp]
Home by habn (album / drone) [Bandcamp]
Magnetar by Dirk Serries & Trosta (album / drone, jazz) [Bandcamp]
In Iron Houses by bvdub | Brock Van Wey (album / experimental, down-tempo) [Bandcamp]
Transient Luminous Events by Isostatic (album / drone, space) [Bandcamp]
Live on Star’s End Radio by Gray Acres (album / drone, meditative) [Bandcamp]
Omval by Machinefabriek (album / experimental, electronic) [Bandcamp]
Ongaku by Beaunoise (album / field recordings, experimental) [Bandcamp]
Humble Submission To Wisdom by Violent Shogun (album / noise, experimental) [Bandcamp]
Outflow by Séraphitüs-Séraphîta (album / noise) [Bandcamp]
Grief Eater by Cicatrice // Pain Chain (album / noise, experimental) [Bandcamp]
Aspect Of What by Päfgens (album / experimental, noise) [Bandcamp]

The Living Music List—All Genres

Note: All of the below projects are available on major streaming services.

Infinite Health by Tycho (album / electronic)
Telos by Zedd (album / dance)
RITUAL by Jon Hopkins (album / electronic)
Desire by Dosem (album / dance)
Direct Cuts II by Mute & Gerd Janson (EP / house)
Moto Zone by Cong Josie (album / alt electronic)
E2-E4 (A reference to E2-E4 by Manuel Gottsching) by Alex Kassian & Manuel Göttsching (EP / house)
Everything Squared by Seefeel (album / electronic)
Thug’s Prayer by Gene Richards Jr (EP / dance)
Urmah by Reeko (album / jungle/drum’n’bass)
Foreverer by Lake People (album / electronic)
I Want To Be by Tomu DJ (album / electronic)
Mindgame 6 by ASC (EP / jungle/drum’n’bass)
Sun Inside by Ali Berger (EP / electronic)
Code Derivation by Robert Glasper (album / jazz)
Amelia by Laurie Anderson (album / avant garde, spoken word)
A Ballet Through Mud by RZA, Colorado Symphony & Christopher Dragon (album / classical)
Better Me Than You by Big Sean (album / hip-hop/rap)
WE ARE BIOPHONICA (feat. The Listening Planet) by Biophonica & Peter Raeburn (album / field recordings, orchestral)
Talkie Talkie by Los Bitchos (album / alternative)
Wild God by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (album / alternative)
Ashes of the Wake (20th Anniversary Edition) by Lamb of God (album / metal)
The Phantom Five by AWOLNATION (album / rock)
Home in Another Life by Enumclaw (album / indie rock)
Midas by Wunderhorse (album / indie rock)

In the News

Here are some stories in the ambient space:

Hear an instrument that produces erratic electronic sounds using magnets
Fake artists on Spotify have used AI to farm streams for cash, and the ambient and electronic genres are areas where they flourish
André 3000 released a film for his album New Blue Sun called LISTENING TO THE SUN

That’s all for this week’s issue. Thank you for reading. Until next time.

Your friend,