8 minute read
My First Winter and an Album About It by Alberto León
by nofidel
My First Winter and an Album About It
Alberto León
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Last Winter Term represented my first proper winter experience. I had been wanting to see, feel, and touch snow since I can remember, but I finally got the chance at almost 20 years old. Getting into details about that experience is a little bit complicated. I loved it, but it also kind of sucked. While the snow never stopped to awe me, at some point I got sick of feeling the weight of the wind in my face and also 90% of campus being a slippery hazard. Clothing became a limitation, and I at least took the time needed to layer up into consideration when planning ahead. The temperature conditions plus a couple of COVID outbreaks usually punished socialization. The pain of walking at 9:00 in the morning to class in -22°F (or -30°C in the more alarming Celsius) three times a week took a toll on me.
However, this time of amazement, pain, and solitude made me relisten and give a new perspective to some albums I had already listened to. These albums, directly or not, are related to cold. Their album covers, the titles of their songs, the sounds they use, and their overall atmosphere convey that cold sensation; similar to how an afternoon could feel independent of weather conditions, that fatigue and tiredness that survives sun and snow. This was not my first time listening to those albums, but this was my first time experiencing in a more direct way that sensation of cold. Where I’m from, the average temperature on a day is around 75°F, maybe a little bit more, and that is true year-round. So, as expected, listening to these pieces while experiencing what a winter feels like gave me the opportunity to grasp new sensations and perspectives, different from my initial impressions about those albums. The original plan was to write about three, but I realized I was extending myself into writing about the album that most accompanied me during the term: I Want to Be There by Sadness. Sadness is the name of the solo project of Illinois based artist Damián Antón Ojeda. This album has been associated with genres such as Blackgaze, Atmospheric Black Metal, Post-Metal, Shoegaze, Ambient, and others, but the first genre I believe is the most appropriate label to this project.
Image: Billy Bratton
Traditionally, Black Metal and its sub variants are associated with the cold and dense forests of Scandinavia and Central Europe. You can easily make the association by looking at the imagery of Black Metal groups, and –at least for me– the dense tremolos feel like walking through a blizzard. This is especially true for projects like Paysage d’Hiver and Bekëth Nexëhmü, whose focus is to create that same dense, cold-but-eerie atmosphere. Dissidents of the destructive aesthetics and connotations of the traditional Black Metal scene created something called Blackgaze. I would not call it a fusion, but rather a middle point between Shoegaze and Black Metal, as both genres are known for their distortion and density. This middle ground allows synths and the sweeter breaks and melodies usually found in Shoegaze to coexist with the louder and rougher riffs found in Black Metal. I would not like to spend more time discussing both genres because the comparisons and differences are almost infinite. It is an extremely dense but bittersweet album, encasing everything I described about Blackgaze, and bringing the best out of Black Metal and Shoegaze. Its weight, materialized by its dense and loud riffs, feels like walking through a blizzard. Each song, not counting the interlude, has a slower, calmer part, made up by a simple guitar riff or a synth arrangement, which is there to end or build up the heavy and crushing atmosphere made from the layering sound of guitars. Thematically as well, this album departs from what is usually associated with Black Metal and takes up a more down to earth, sincere, and melancholic approach. Even if the lyrical content is minimal, all the elements of the album convey the feeling of being away from a loved one. The album as a whole is a love letter to somebody who is not next to us, or in front of us, but should be. It doesn’t necessarily translate to a break-up kind of
album, it might be, but I think the album plays in such a way that that distance is up to interpretation. In my case, this album encapsulates the feeling of distance, being far away from everything you love and cherish, with the musical elements of the album building up that sensation. This album represents both the experience of enduring the extreme cold and the dense snowstorms of Minnesota, and the expansive sound of the album resembles the vast distance between me and love. This album feels like the perfect way of saying “I miss you” to everyone back home, and it feels perfectly catered to my situation.
Its first track, In the Distant Travels, starts with a heavily compressed drone before exploding into a layering, tremolo, guitar progression. For me, this song feels like walking through campus, in the middle of a heavy snow, with clothing and ice limiting your mobility. They both feel like a beautiful endurance, as contradictory as it sounds. You experience both discomfort and fulfillment but one tells you that the other is missing. Everything could be easier if you stayed back home, but here you are getting your face slapped by the wind and the snow. You don’t know if it will be worth it, because you’re still looking for what could make you happy even if you think you know it. When the song turns into a calmer, post-rock track, it mimics the sensation of being wherever you were heading to. It’s a short moment of introspection when I usually remember who I love, which makes me miss them even more. This song is not really uplifting, but rather an intro to the confusions of love and distance.
Image: Billy Bratton
The second track, and my favorite, I Want to Be with You, feels like walking through one of those really cold, stale, and quiet days. It starts with a melancholic, simple riff that repeats itself for at least a minute. A riff that unexplainably makes you drawn to who you love. Then, the riff adds drums, which make the song feel like a march –a march through the heavy snow on the floor, while enduring the pain of the cold in the little exposed skin between your layers. The riff transitions into a layered version of itself, accompanied with tremolos and heavily distorted vocalizations of the artist, which blend together into layers and layers of nostalgia, happiness, and heartbreak. Then, a short verse is heard:
When the song turns back again into the simple riff, you realize that song represents your loneliness. This throws you into self-awareness of all the confusing feelings from the experience of being in a college far away from home during a proper winter, the strongest of them is loneliness. Everyone you love is far away from you and the weather and the workload makes it hard to enjoy the company of others.
The fourth and title track, I Want to Be There, starts with a heavy, drone riff. But then, the middle of the song transitions into a beautiful synth arrangement. It feels like it sparkles, like all the stars in a beautiful clear Northfield night sky. This song is there to bring out the beauty from this confusing and sort of destructive mix of emotions. That middle part is like gazing at the stars: realizing not only that time flies and you’ll meet who you love eventually, but also of every fulfilling experience you’ve gotten from this adventure called college. And those feelings reaffirm themselves even further when the song explodes again into layers and layers of guitars, but following the bubbling melody of that album. “Love for me is an extremely violent act,” philosopher Slavoj Zizek says at the beginning of The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. This album represents the violent and destructive nature of love. Not necessarily because it doesn’t work but rather how it could make us feel under certain circumstances. It’s an album that destroys and builds back afterwards. It’s an exercise about understanding your own feelings. This is how I would describe I Want to Be There by Sadness.
