Elegant Sound

I’m a hitchhiker between dimensions. While we don’t have the resources to escape our often stressful and repetitive existence, we can afford to take the occasional vacation. Between these fantastic worlds exist pathways, most of which don’t come without consequences. My route starts and ends on the ethereal waves of what I like to call “elegant sound.”

Music is my drug. Massive headphones and stereo systems inject me with it day in and day out. After it journeys down my ear canals and reaches my head, it sinks through to my nerves, veins, bones, muscles, and organs. With the power of harmonies and melodies, music allows us to stroll down a primrose path (if only for a moment).

I love those moments in a song when the sound hits me in just the right spot and the music and I practically become one. My physical self faces this attempt at possession and submits to the sound before I can hesitate.

I disconnect from the world I know and enter a euphoric state where I’m bathed in a sublime, transcendent sound that feels as good as sinking into a warm spring.

All too soon, the music dies out and I emerge from this other world to find only the shallow ambiance of reality. Such abstract environments exist and yet are nonexistent; even if I recognize them, I cannot grasp their true qualities.

At other times the side effects of music include loss of control and a deficiency in perception. My friends and I have gathered at many high school dances, where our worries and concerns dissolved in the mosh pit. Doing this, however, required me to face annoyances like the tawdry pop music blaring from the giant speakers. Tasteless as it was, my body couldn’t help but submit to the raw bass and rhythm of the sound.

As I would start to dance, my sense of time and location would suddenly vanish. My vision became a blur, and the masses of people and flashy technicolor lights morphed into vague shapes. What followed wasn’t merely dancing, but a constant surge of impulses sent through my muscles and joints. This vitality just kept flowing through me until I was soaked in sweat and exhausted. It was as if Lady Gaga and Usher manipulated me like a marionette through their music.

Over time, I developed a bizarre appreciation for this uncontrolled energy flow. Coordinating and controlling all my actions occupies a great deal of my time, and it commonly tires me out by day’s end. It feels nice to let go of those physical responsibilities and let my body just move to the will of music. Contrary to popular belief, a little disarray does a person some good.

Through devices including instruments, scales, rhythm, dynamics, music theory and composition, music overrides multiple frontiers in fantasy and emotion. To me, all songs attempt to go beyond what we know about life and let us take a moment to discover new attitudes and thoughts within ourselves.

Music, much like imagination, liberates consciousness and takes it on a rampant ride through the impossible and inconceivable. Too often we pay attention only to truths and feed our minds on a strict diet of knowledge and certainties. But I think that the time has come for us to explore things wild and abstract; let’s take a moment (or even an eternity) to appreciate and look into everything we’ll never understand. While I know to keep my feet on the ground, I adore every second I get to spend in the skies, the cosmos, and beyond.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to catch a flight on the starship Styx.