The Districts on disorienting yourself musically

Putting yourself in new situations and disorienting yourself can be stimulating and exciting, and I’ve found unfamiliar music to be no exception. There are tried and true favorites that I will never stop listening to, but records wear out and you can only get so much out of what you’ve always known. Like a teenager stranded in a hometown, sometimes Western classics aren’t enough after hours in a van or hunched over an instrument writing.

I love how music serves a similar purpose to so many cultures and truly is a universal language in so many ways. Scales and rhythms and sounds vary throughout the world. But there are also constants in music that bridge time and place. At any period of history, people put their minds to the task of creation and expression to bring people together, make something original, or simply satisfy something within themselves. Music can be intellectual, spiritual, mindless, or antagonistic. There are seemingly endless possibilities.

There was a time that I was closed-minded about what I thought was “good”, and I’m grateful that my appreciation of music and art broadened over time. Having been raised with classic rock and roll and songwriters and interested in punk rock from a pretty young age, most of my music taste was pentatonic and 4/4. There’s plenty of amazing music of that sort that I will love forever, but to hear something that sounds completely new is refreshing and inspiring. The internet and YouTube are infinitely valuable resources that have brought so much music to the surface. Spending hours digging through the internet is what record stores offered previous generations. While there are many discussions to be had about streaming’s detrimental effects on music, the accessibility of such a wide array of sounds for free offers constant gratification for people interested in new listens.

I’m in no way an expert on music from around the world, a novice at best, but the sounds from other cultures began to appeal to me a while back and it’s a really fun world to explore. I’m not sure what first caught me, but William Onyeabor struck me with the rhythms, synthesizers, and lyrics that are both charming and serious. Another favorite from Africa is Francis Bebey. With recordings both of a dancey, electronic nature, as well as sanza-based songs, there’s a lot of really interesting material. The sanza is a thumb piano, which Bebey puts to use in wonderful ways. My bandmate Connor introduced me to Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares. It’s an enchanting record of The Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir, with melodies and dissonance unlike anything I’d ever heard. Yasuaki Shimizu’s record Kakashe is reminiscent at times of the Talking Heads, but ultimately a strange, unique world. From Brazil, there’s Forca Bruta by Jorge Ben. The horn and string arrangements are incredible, and it’s great to wonder at rhythms that are outside of most American and British popular music I was raised on.

There’s a captivation when you first get into music as you seek to understand how it’s made. It can be easy to become over confident once you learn to write songs and challenging yourself is important. I’ve hit many walls when writing, as have most people. I’ve felt at times on tour like I’ve exhausted every possible thing to listen to. But it seems to me like there are always more depths to plunge and sounds to love. Sometimes all you need to escape a creative rut is to explore and find yourself disoriented in the sense of wonder that captivated you at the start.