Tactility is associated with the sense of touch or that which is physically and intimately tangible. This would naturally seem at cross-purposes with music which, other than the medium producing it, exists on an altogether different plane than the material. However, there has been since ancient times a school of sonic architecture that tries to link sound with space in a mutually reinforcing relationship. Closer to our age, and probably more pertinent to the message of this post, are the acid-doused hippies of the 60s with their cliches of hearing colors and seeing sounds, but could there be something more than just chemical-induced euphoria to their ravings?
It is a somewhat tenuous concept to get one’s head around. For instance, Bruckner’s symphonies are often likened to the spires and vaults of Gothic cathedrals. But what is once seen cannot be unseen, and however apt that analogy may appear to us now, it is necessarily a posteriori; the description made by whoever was eloquent and perceptive enough to devise it in the first place will from here onwards guide the listener’s imagination and his experience of the music in an extremely narrow, pre-determined channel. Perhaps it can even be said that the amount of agency i.e. the ability to stay open to interpretation, lost by a piece of music is directly proportional to how concrete and fleshed out its most popular description is. Lyrics are an even more flagrant “violation” of this postulate because they leave the mind in no doubt whatsoever as to what it’s supposed to make of the accompanying aural stimuli, hence also the criticism leveled at the very nature of lyrics themselves in metal by other writers and the ensuing case for absolute metal.
Abstractedness, then, is what we’re after, but an abstractedness like some shade come visiting, just about verging on this dimension of mud, blood, and shit, that by degrees achieves near-substantiality, so much so that it comes to resemble at the fringes of vision a heaving, writhing thing, ugly and covered in nascent afterbirth yet somehow refulgent with life-affirming potential underneath, pulsing with power and pure psychic energy. This phenomenon by necessity is providential; no musician, I imagine, is capable of transmitting such an image, but intent, conviction, skill, and complete momentary immersion in the unconscious can conceivably align to make for just such a favorable event. A listener receptive to such frequencies and aided by a suitably fevered mind then completes the circle.
I point the reader to Manilla Road‘s final appearance at the Keep It True festival in 2017 and naturally, as one would expect, to Mark Shelton’s playing throughout the concert. From small beginnings come great things; no other guitarist in heavy metal qualified more to this little platitude, and I refer exclusively to Shelton’s playing style, assembled from basic pentatonic blocks in an ever-evolving cascade. It’s not that Shelton was a particularly technical player or even one of especial finesse; calling him sloppy might be uncharitable but he possessed a certain looseness, the instinctiveness of the self-taught, which made his playing relatable and that much co-extant with the listener’s world. Certain guitarists leave one confounded as to their method, but there was no such quandary with Shelton; his guitar runs throughout this show and indeed his career were constructed from fairly elemental licks and phrases in key with the core theme of his songs that left little room for ambiguity and yet when piled atop one another in outwardly concentric eddies of motion came to achieve a progressively grander existence like the undulations of…but wait, overt description kills the mystique, remember?
I think sheer volume has something to do with it. Noise has a tendency to overwhelm the waking consciousness to the exclusion of all other stimuli, to the extent that it being the sole foci of the subject’s perception begins achieving a quasi-physical status by virtue of the “stirrings” it induces in the immediate vicinity. But, also, musical technique, as described above; exaggerated embellishments and discrete jumps aren’t an accurate simulacra – if anything ever can be – of the state of human being, behind the layers of obfuscation that help us function in a dysfunctional world. A homogeneity through continuity, however, may model those occasions when we are least distracted by that world, and in tune with our selves. And such times of dissolution and meant surrender might just be the crucible in which the distinctions between the physical and the ethereal blur, and something new and strange and beautiful rises among us.
Old Disgruntled Bastard 