Back when I was in high school, I had a friend named Sam who used to brag about his love of Nurse With Wound. Whenever he had one of their tapes in his Walkman, he’d hand me his headphones and wait for my reaction. All I heard when I put them on was what sounded like an torturous mix of TV test patterns and fingernails on a chalkboard. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to listen to such noise. When I asked him what he enjoyed about it, he told me he found it “calming.” He had ADD and, according to him, the high pitched feedback soothed his nerves. I remember shaking my head in disbelief and thinking “this kid’s kind of a freak.”
Now, eight years later, I know exactly what he was talking about. I don’t have ADD, but I do have serious anxiety issues and it’s quite easy for me to feel overwhelmed. When my neighbors play their music too loud or I’m stuck on a noisy bus, I tense up and panic sets in. If I’m listening to anything remotely melodic on my stereo or my iPod, it begins to irritate me, because I can’t focus on a linear melody with two or three competing sounds in the background. But if I’m listening to something noisy and repetitive, like drone or noise music or certain kinds of doom metal, I’m far more able to calm down and ignore the extraneous noises around me. Because the music is repetitive, I’m able to relax my need to follow a melody, and because it’s noisy, I’m able to take comfort in the fact that nothing around me could be noisier than what I’m listening to.
Another benefit to listening to this kind of music to drown out outside distractions is that once you turn it off, your calm won’t be easily disturbed. The feeling of calm you get from listening to something like Stars of the Lids’ Avec Laudenum can be punctured by something as innocuous as a knock on the door, whereas if you’re listening to something as clamorous as Prurient, it might take an air raid siren to really unsettle you. Maybe listening to noisy music can be a way of training our nerves not to tense up when we hear loud and unwelcome noises. I can just imagine group therapy sessions where everyone sits on the floor and tries to relax as horrible grinding sounds blast out of a PA and an instructor screams through a megaphone.
And you thought yoga made you feel relaxed…
MP3 :::
Sunroof! – Untitled
Nurse With Wound – Two Mock Projections
