talking heads' early vs. later stuff is what got us going, as we differ...

i love how talking with someone you can be open with makes you articulate things aloud you didn't even know yet internally. all else equal i like thin, sparse music over thick, full/lush stuff (not just in terms of orchestral sheer numbers but production value, glossy sheen or lack therefore) and similarly, i prefer slow to fast tempo (these have both been explicit and obvious preferences for a long time now; it was putting two and two together and how they can counter each other that was a revelation to me tonight). an otherwise busy confetti-like song can be redeemed in my eyes if i's going slooooow enough, and likewise the fast upbeat songs i do like tend to be rather thin or make a lot of use of empty air/space, what's NOT there. in other words, somewhere, through at least one of those channels, there has to be textural relief, some "quiet" to lay the rest against for comparison and meaning. the worst music is stuff that's crazy busy AND frantically sped up. like a richard scarry cartoon! ...these axes have made me wonder if it's to do with the theory introverts/the depressed suffer from taking in too much input, being too unprotected/unfiltered in their absorption of stimulus. just requiring less stimulus before i need to stop, before an unbearable threshold/gate is reached. i also felt terribly validated by that one radiolab where they explained how music really is one of the most visceral arts, no really--it is literal touch from a distance, vibrating your body. (i also felt validated when they talked about how despite how direct a blow it is physically, you can and do acclimate and train yourself socioculturally for it--i remember realizing this with full conviction when i underwent the standard indie hipster training through junior and senior high school, where i was drawn to what was initially destructive and then soothing comfort and then barely numbing in his name is alive through massive routine exposure, the whole indie-fication training, the way radio hits can never touch you quite the same way and things that might as well have been muddled-mess-noise sonic gylphs with no textural relief with which to begin forming references become quick emotional native reading with enough short crazed exposure. R and i have bonded over this epiphany teenagers go-through-or-don't, it's uncanny. and explains why "your favorite band sucks" stuff, no matter what context, always seems so futile, silly, pointless to me. trying to reach each other's viewpoints in a dimension we can explicitly never balance or know in the first place. how that difference in itself is worthwhile, edifying.)

but wait "tempo" and "thickness of things" are impossible to divorce from each other really; how thick something is depends on tempo in a fixed period of time, Zaaargh!--only understanding the obvious now. roundabout and roundabout... (and yes, i don't care for elastica, sigh and aiee...)