It happened last issue too. The week the magazine comes out, I suddenly hate music, or at least I can’t be bothered with it. It only lasts a few days, this state, but it’s unsettling, regarding my shelves of CDs like they’re stacks of old newspapers or something. Like they’re just plastic boxes filled with people’s dreams that they can’t quite communicate to me right now.

Mark Hollis’ record from 1998, then, breaks this spell and tugs at my heart and whispers to me that I’ll like musc again in, oh, about two days probably. Maybe by the weekend, or by tomorrow when you’re gonna do some recording. And it makes me sad too, this record, in an entirely righteous and pleasurable way.

It came out in 1998 and I don’t remember it coming out. What was I listening to back then? I can’t remember, NeuCanKraftwerkFaust, Godspeed, Steve Reich, Trans Am maybe, Acid Mothers, Flying Lizards, Buffalo Daughter, Accelerator by the Royal Trux, Ruins, Stereolab, I Hear a New World by Joe Meek. Stuff like that. I didn’t know who this man was, or who Talk Talk were, and probably didn’t care, and if I’d heard this record then I know I wouldn’t have appreciated it. It wouldn’t have touched the right reference points for me, and that was what I cared about when I was younger - recognition, references; also, music that shocked me, music that I could lose it to, logic and noise. But that doesn’t matter, because you hear a record when you’re meant to, sometimes.

And this one, I did. The first time I heard it, it was the last record we listened to together before a friend of mine left London. It was the last thing we talked about, quietly and sparingly, feeling the spaces between the chords and the sudden surges in the vocals and the lovely slowness of everything. It was the right record to say goodbye to, because it went over and under and around sentimentality. It held a kind of sorrow that was something much purer and more universal than just two friends saying goodbye to each other. And it means that when I listen to it, I think of nothing. I think of no-one. I just think of music, which is how I want it to be sometimes.

It’s an album of songs arranged for piano, guitars, some drums, some hand percussion steadily jingling, and almost a whole wind section, who never allow themselves to indulge the flashy potential of their instruments but instead provide grave interludes and delicate punctuation. Sometimes it sounds as if each instrument is gently chasing each other around some still, silent central point, dancing around it and never touching. Even when they all mesh together there’s something so graceful and instinctive about it, like flowers springing in all directions from the same plants, their stems intertwining, but all facing the sun.

Despite reading the lyrics and knowing that this is a single-minded project and vision like few others, I never feel the ’solo’-ness of this record. I never feel that annoying, needling feeling that a musician’s trying to tell you something, push some point home. This music is weightless. It doesn’t demand you to be sideways and angry, or to be happy or maudlin, or to dance or move or sleep or anything. It doesn’t demand anything, yet it’s demanding. That little emotional steering is demanding. But while your intellect follows the notes and your body breathes with the pauses, your sadness, ignored, untangles itself and quietly dissolves, walks away while you weren’t looking.

It could be the saddest music in the world, but that’s only because it, kind of, for me, spoils sad music a little. It’s what’s left after sad. When you’ve done all your crying along to something else and you’re ready to be clear-eyed again.

Posted on Tuesday, September 14th, 2004by Frances May Morgan