Thursday 2 October 2008

Listening To Music On The Subte

It’s been a long time since I listened to music whilst I am moving. I don’t know why, I just never got it sorted until now. I guess I have a kind of soundtrack in my mind most of the time, like most people; not always a welcome one (‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ was one) but always a hovering, discrete one, regardless of whatever else I'm doing.

I suppose in hindsight it is a rather obvious point of reference for a young man travelling around, but I had Nick Drake’s ‘Place To Be’ on mental loop throughout my time in Spain in the late 90’s. This time it has been this Josephine Foster song ‘The Garden Of Early Delights’.

In fact this song is so timelessly, spellbindingly brilliant I can’t get enough of it and, as I got increasingly crammed into an airless pocket of the subte (tube), it still made a kind of ironic sense. This is such a common experience for most people that I feel like an idiot for mentioning it but later, as I’m being hurtled out to Avellenada by this semi-psychotic bus driver, this incongruous combination of movement and sound is an utter revelation to me. Through absence, or negligence, I’d kind of forgotten. 

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