Some of the most powerful music is discovered at six in the morning and it’s sometimes very specific to those late nights of no sleep and a zombie-like state. So we decided to start Late Night Music. If we find ourselves listening to a song between 2 and 6 in the morning, we’ll post it between 2 and 6 in the morning. See you out here, fellow insomniacs.
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In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for contructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.
–Rollo May, existential psychologist
I’ve long found that my best ideas (or, at very least, my favorite ideas, the ones I remember and cherish) come late at night when I am alone, listening to music or surrounded by the sounds of silence–I have bouts of what I’ve long suspected to be tinnitus, so in addition to the sounds of New York City, there’s often a buzzing in my ears even when all else is quiet; I should probably turn my headphones down when I walk. In these moments somewhere along the cusp of creativity and benign madness, exhausted delusion and true clarity, a hole feels as if it opens up, inviting me to other realms of thought and inspiration. These late nights are as close to religion as I come at this point in my life, a commune with something that feels beyond me and my immediate space.
The video for “Hiking / Fif Dim” from producer MNDSGN (whom you might remember from his excellent collaboration with Danny Brown, “Sweeney Song,” from a few weeks back) seems to tap into this sort of transcendence through solitude, using two beats to chronicle a beautifully shot, loose narrative of a lone woman who finds access to a new world through art (or, at least, that’s how I choose to read it). It’s an effective, straightforward representation of a concept words fail to adequately capture, a fusion of two vastly different beats (the first jazzy and loose, the second atmospheric and electronic) that similarly embody the strange journey.
Watch “Hiking / Fif Dim” below and check out MNDSGN’ excellent instrumental album, breatharian, here.
