Pleasure in the Process: building-blocks and naivete in Xela's 'For Frosty Mornings...'

In the last post I looked at how metaphors attached to different musical elements can shape the way we listen to a whole track. Specifically I looked at Xela's gorgeous debut album For Frosty Mornings and Summer Nights, arguing that its music conveys the notion of human vulnerability juxtaposed with mechanised artificiality. This might imply that the mechanised part of that, the clockwork-style drums, somehow 'defeats' the vulnerable or empathetic elements, reigning over them in some cruel way. But what's so striking about this album is that the drums display little malevolence whatsoever. In fact there's a pleasing naivete to the drums and the synths, something quite emblematic of this style and period of IDM. This naivete is actually part of the emotional impact of Xela's early work; the pining melancholy I described in the last post is made up of musical metaphors, and this is one of them.

The naivete of For Frosty Mornings... of course stems in part from the melodies and harmonies: tracks like 'Bobble Hats in Summer' rely on simple, three-chord progressions based around the tonic, subdominant and dominant (1^st, 4^th, 5^th notes of the scale). These chords allow for nursery rhyme or lullaby-inflected melodies, as in the piano at 4:50 in 'Bobble Hats...'. But the naivete also derives from the structure of each track. Xela's tracks reflect a method of composing I call 'betraying your compositional process'. The tracks are made up of 2, 4 and 8-bar instrumental phrases (eg. an 8-bar melody line, a 4-bar drum loop) which are more-or-less impervious; that is, these phrases nearly always sound in their entirety rather than being altered or mixed up throughout the track. Crucially, these instrumental phrases are introduced one after another as a track progresses; they never appear all together at the start or disappear all at once at the end. Metaphorically we hear the layering of different 'building-blocks' of sound. This layering betrays the process by which Xela's music was most likely composed: using a multi-track sequencer on a computer, with instrumental phrases copied and pasted across the length of the track, building up in the middle before drawing back down.

This is a common trait in electronic music; it suits the computer tools of composition to base tracks around layering blocks of sound. This can also be used to satisfying effect, in part because of these meta-genre expectations. On 'Japanese Whispers', Xela starts with a repeating slow melody before introducing glitchy vocal patterns and other synth elements, gradually quickening the pace (though doing so while bringing in long-held reverbed synth chords, contributing to the kind of juxtapositions I discussed previously). About two and a half minutes in some of these phrases begin to drop off one-by-one in 2-bar intervals. Then at three minutes, halfway through the track, a low bass melody appears, dragging the speed down with its pondering syncopated notes. When the snare that had disappeared returns at 3:20, the listening can make a fair bet that the building blocks from the first half of the track are going to be layered one on top of another all over again (what Mark Spicer calls accumulative form). In fact new instrumental phrases are also introduced, maintaining interest. As listeners we're given a sense of inevitability: these blocks of sound are bound to build up and draw down once more. Combined with the key and timbres used, 'Japanese Whispers' encourages us to 'give in' to this inevitability, as if saying we as the listener are unable to intervene in this relentless construction. We are, on the other hand, able to predict what will likely happen next in the track (that something will be added or subtracted).  I think this scenario plays a part in the resultant expression of melancholy in the music. The melodic and harmonic nature of For Frosty Mornings... also play a part, namely in heightening our focus on the building-block nature of the tracks. As noted, the melodies often have a childlike simplicity. The harmonies are consonant and easy on the ear. They do not, in other words, demand focused and attentive concentration. This allows us to get as much 'cognitive pay-off', as it were, from focusing on the build-up and draw-down of the musical phrases as we can.

The emphasis on the building-block structure is such that the structure itself stakes its claim as the 'essence' of each track. That's where the pay-off from listening lies. Here I'm in agreement with Mark Butler and Luis-Manuel Garcia, both of whom have written on the listener pleasure gained through simultaneous repetition of different musical elements. Drawing on Butler's work, Garcia argues in his article 'On and On' for the existence of a kind of 'process pleasure', a pleasure gained from and co-extensive with the doing of an activity (eg. listening or dancing). This kind of pleasure is distinct from the usual sort of pleasure we imagine ourselves getting from music, the eventual pay-off or satisfaction of having fulfilled some desire, usually reaching a climax in a song. From Butler's work on metrical dissonance in dance music, Garcia takes the compositional idea that “precise and extended repetition idiomatic to [electronic music] benefits the listener in allowing him or her to perceptually separate separate textural layers”; this would promote “a mode of listening whereby a listener can shift focus between dissonant layers, granting perceptual primacy to one grouping at one moment, and to another at the next” (Garcia). In this way, the repetition of instrumental phrases, of different 'blocks of sound' over time, generates pleasure in the process. In the case of music such as Xela's, without dance music's musical 'cues' for changes in layering (eg. the drum rolls or drop-outs of a bass drum that tell us we're about to hit the fullest part of the track), the listener's focus is not pre-determined by the music. Rather, “a listener is able to construct his/her own process(es) of attention, creating a unique sonic pathway and manifesting a form of mastery over the ordering of these looping elements”. Our attention can shift from one bit of a sound block to another as the track progresses; in this sense we create our own structure for the track.

Xela's album certainly has the potential to give this pleasure to us: both the nature of its musical elements (with faster glitchier rhythms peppering longer warmer timbres) and their structuring (more than one build-up over each track) fit the criteria Garcia & Butler identify. What For Frosty Mornings... adds to this process pleasure is a play on the external associations or personifications popularly made with electronic music. The betrayal of compositional process I described – the layering of impervious blocks of instrumental phrases – and the simple & easy-to-digest melodic and harmonic arrangement play to the perceptions of electronic music I've described before, of this kind of music as childish (“a kid could have put this together”, with blocks of sound working almost like LEGO bricks), immature, uncreative. These knowing associations encourage us to see an expression of naivete in the music, a naivete that then sits alongside the potential to gain pleasure from the interlocking of the different musical elements. We hear a complexity and gain an active fulfilment in something ostensibly simple and unfulfilling, something that isn't supposed to be 'mature enough' to be satisfying. This is what I think makes so much IDM work for fans, this contrast between innocence and complexity, as if the music has 'wisdom beyond its years' – it just matters where you look.

What Xela's music brings in addition is, as I described in the last post, particular metaphors of human vulnerability and clockwork-like mechanical artificiality in the synths and drums of each track. While it's difficult to put into words, I think the combination of these latter metaphors with the innocence-complexity idea plays a role in creating the melancholy of the music. For one thing, the nursery rhyme-like melodies & harmonies probably add to the association of the synths with human vulnerability – the melodies are childlike and thus are personified as gentle, fragile. Now if, as I argued before, the metaphorical vulnerability of the synths creates a feeling of perpetual demise or fading away throughout the track, with the immortal but unfeeling clockwork drums left as ever-present, then I think the innocence – a human trait – associated with the track's structure, the building-block accumulative form, is portrayed as being perpetually compromised by its complexity, ie. by the act of combining the synth & drum parts. The track's naïve structure is its own undoing, since the innocent fragile melodies and chords that are built up will always decay to leave behind 'non-human' clockwork drums that have also been built up; together they create the complexity we find pleasurable, but it will eventually be at the expense of the track's human-like innocence. This inevitability allows for expression of melancholy. The emotional expression, then, lies in all aspects of the track: its melodic & harmonic nature, its timbre, and the very way it's all put together. That might seem like quite a metaphorical earful for a listener to be interpreting, but it doesn't have to be consciously-understood. It's rather just part of the way we listen the music – we make our own pleasurable path through the interlocking of musical parts, but we're also aware of the contrast between the synths & drums and the associations they encourage.

In sum, all the metaphorical and pleasure-gaining elements I've outlined make For Frosty Mornings and Summer Nights a truly satisfying listen, if the listener is attuned or willing to attempt a non-traditional form of listening, one emphasising on timbre & space rather than melody & harmony, repetition rather than progression. I think what I've written here only scratches the surface of these many disparate ideas of metaphor, repetition, and listening pleasure. There's no doubt in my mind, though, that Xela's album demonstrates the relevance of these concepts in its own beautifully melancholic way.