So, while wandering on State St. a couple days ago, I decided I wanted to get one of 3 cd's: Van Halen – Diver Down, Beatles – Hey Jude, Chemical Brothers – Push the Button. Couldn't find them anywhere. Unreal. So I'm standing in B-Side and I see In Sides for 10 bucks and right next to it, The Middle of Nowhere (both Orbital). I figure it's about time I bought those, since Know Where to Run is one of my most played songs outside of any Rush. And heaven forbid I lose my collection, again, I don't want to hit up Bass for the sweetest of heavenly sounds, Halcyon + On + On (live). I'd honestly pay $10 for each of those songs to know that I could own them for life to do whatever I want with them.

Anyways…. I'm re-ripping Middle of Nowhere and decide to find the album art to put in the AAC files. Now, this is somewhat tricky as the cover is one of those high gloss and matte mixes of the same color (white) where the high gloss section is the “O” and the matte is flat white aside from a blurry guy in the corner. So, if you were to scan this, you'd have this gigantic gray or something or other O and something that looks like who knows what. And wouldn't you know it, almost every pic of the cover on the web is just that; one of those bad scans, including the first place I checked, Amazon.

Now this is what I've been getting to the whole time here… while listening to a bit of it and realizing the image from Amazon sucks (it didn't have the big O ala crappy scan, but it was only 75px or so wide) I decided to read some reviews. They all think what I think of it, which I was surprised to see, but then I saw this guy:

Then one afternoon on the way home, I was listening to Otono and realized the instruments were SPEAKING TO ME.

No, I wasn't doing crack or anything stronger than music for that matter. But music is a form of language. What I heard that afternoon was the language of this album. The “words” were foreign to me but an underlying emotion and meaning was connecting to me through a mechanism deeper than verbalization, deeper than the surface of overt meaning.

Good god…. I was reeling. I believe I sparked off a long (or at least it seemed like it) set of conversations one night with almost those exact words while a few of us, were… um…. hanging out in Goon's room.

But seriously now, I think what I had said at that time was that electronic music in it's completely vocal free state, if created properly, has the potential to be what is essentially aural poetry. Artists can use the layering of tracks to create your stanzas, verses, etc, but also provide an even more complex element to it that words cannot by layering them and merging them when appropriate to create a longer drawn out story using elements you already know or perhaps predict what might happen. For instance, you could relay a set of fear, followed by excitement, then caution and finally the excitement roars back and takes over the caution, completely overshadowing the fear which is now a minor character in the song represented by the lower layer diminished track.

And I still think that. Take a look at some of the more popular electronica that's around and the groups that have survived a decade or more now have been following this kind of approach, however, more of them now have decided to incorporate more and more vocals to help be more obvious about it. And then there's still your cheesy one off dance floor stuff that has no substance but to drive a thumping 4/4 to get you to shake your ass. I suppose that's all good as well, but just for me to watch all them bums moving, otherwise I can't stand listening to most of that. So it's basically split and gone two different ways it seems, but there's still the people striving to use the electronic medium for the deeper storytelling and those are the people I truly appreciate.