some thoughts about car music
Previous Industries' Service Merchandise isn't car music, I've learnt over the past few days. Well, it isn't fast motorway, windows-down or number-four air conditioning car music. Which is fine, because I don't think that was the vibe the group was going for; their songs are more comforting and comfortable than that; more three old friends in a room having a chat about stuff that makes up part of their DNA.
So while my partner was driving us into and around parts of the coast of Liguria and Tuscany, I insisted on trying to play the album, between tweaking bass and alto levels and turning the volume up and down against the surrounding acoustics, while amplifying the lyrics I knew and liked with my own voice, simultaneously trying to keep my bothersome nasalness levels down in doing so and not caring regardless.
Service Merchandise is more headphone music, as far as I can tell. It has to be, for me, because when I hear the words and the Child Actor beats (that make up the majority of the production), it's all dark. The scene is a dark room somewhere in Los Angeles. Podcast-dark, with a ON AIR radio light on a wall facing each member of the group.
But we were driving in the day and there was white noise around us that wasn't white noise anymore because it was successfully drowning out the music. I also wasn't alone in this car. The lyrics to the songs I was layering and ad-libbing weren't trying to be heard going through a mountain tunnel. They were songs that had been giving me goosebumps and resonance while by myself, through my noise-cancelling headphones, where they sounded best.