Crescendo, Tension, Pleasure...(that's what she said?)

 So I am going to start this post off by saying I owe it completely to one thing...hip hop music.  That being said, we will arrive at the reason later on.  So I've been struggling for some time with balance in the crazy world of avant-garde innovative hipster post-punk nihilistic apocalyptic impressionistic free-jazz noise existentialistic crescendo oriented DIY postmodern.....indieness? I don't really know what any of that meant but I kind of touched on it in my art post. Art for art's sake.....you're an artist if you dress like, act like, listen to the music of, eat at the restaurants of....well whomever culture calls artists at the time.  It's all part of my constant struggle to be self-aware, continually re-inventing myself, not necessarily my values or the core of who I am, but simply realizing that I may be a very different person in a year...or tomorrow, and that what I adhere to today I may not tomorrow. If I met me a year ago I'd probably laugh at myself. If I met me five years ago I would most certainly laugh at myself.  Where was I?....Oh yeah self examination...anywho all of this is to say that in thinking of things like the kind of paintings I like, the kind of books I read, the movies I enjoy, the music I listen to, I like to look at their parts, why I like them, why they make me feel a certain way......(alright quick side note, it just hit me that my posts take so long to develop/actually get to the point, because I like to try and express the ways in which my mind works.  This is not an easy task because my mind operates in peculiar ways and so I suppose expressing my train of thought and the ways in which one of my ideas connect to and seed the next, seems, well, chaotic to say the least. Thank you for bearing with me in this moment of........self examination)....Well looking at the popular trend of instrumental ambient crescendo post rock that is oh so popular in independent music today (and which I myself enjoy and play) what is it we like so much about these bands?  I believe the key to the feelings music like this give us can be wrapped up in one word, tension.  Now stick with me here, because here goes my mind.....most high levels of human physical pleasure come from the absence and anticipation of a basic desire/need.  Take for example when you have not eaten in quite some time.  Think back to one of those incredibly long days that leave you dead. You overslept and did not have time to grab breakfast before work, but that cup of coffee seems to be doing a fine job of killing your hunger.  Well soon enough that creeping feeling of hunger finds you, but of course you don't get a lunch break. Well after your shift your sister, wife, mother, brother, roommate, whomever it is in your life needs you to do that thing for them that is time consuming and urgent so you go straight from work to do that because, well, you're just that kind of guy/gal.  Anyway you get the picture, your day gets filled up and you haven't had a chance to eat. This pain in your stomach makes that moment when you finally make yourself a turkey sammy and chow down, oh so much better. It could even be a sub-par sandwich but it tastes like a feast of the gods because you are famished.  Why is that?  Well let us think back earlier to your maelstrom of a day.  The whole time that pain in your stomach grows, you feel your blood sugar level dropping, you get short tempered and light headed. That entire time you are anticipating that mediocre sandwich. As you become more and more irritable there is a growing tension. The more you think to that Utopian future in which you and the turkey sammy are together at last, the more the tension grows.  That growing tension actually has some pleasure in itself, because of the anticipated plateau of satisfaction.  Nevertheless that tension is what brings absolute ecstasy when heaven between two slices of wonderbread is in your hands. Now let us relate this to music.  Those post-punk ambient rock songs with those guitar riffs that use way too many pedals to get that ambient spacey sound make us feel so awesome, because of their structure.  Those songs are built with ups and down, climbs and drops which eventually lead to a climax of epic indie rock goodness.  It is not however the plateau of the song we love most.  It is of course, that moment right before the zenith of the ballad that we long for most.  Those few seconds when the tension meets the satisfaction is what makes us feel like we want to climb a mountain.  Hey remember that one time when I said this post was inspired by hip hop? Yeah that was cool....well Joe McElroy and myself were listening to my new obsession, P.O.S He introduced me to this amazing rapper that evening and we were talking about how indie music should incorporate more rap the way P.O.S incorporates rock into his hip hop. Well one of his songs we listened to is called The Brave and The Snake. I realized this song does the same thing, especially at the beginning of track, that an Explosions in the Sky song does. It builds tension.  It does this in a very different way however.  Instead of ups and downs of building guitar lines and cymbal crashes, it uses the absence of sound to build tension.  The beginning of this song is fairly simple and steady, but gives you an ominous feeling.  The entire time this instrumental intro to the track is going on there is an overbearing feeling that something is about to happen, that a bomb is going to go off. Twice during the intro several of the samples and instruments drop to a low hum, this absence of sound, similar to the absence of food in your stomach on that long day we talked about, builds the tension.  Of course these drops are only a tease to keep you hanging on for that moment that....BAM! P.O.S breaks the silence with an explosion of intellectual, fast paced lyrical genius.  I suppose all of this is just an incredibly long winded way of saying, it's cool to look at things in a different light.....sorry it took so long.
Here's that song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx1OCJ2gbEA
Cheers!