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Lord Huron

Lord Huron

The nights here have been magnificent, cold and clear with the sky full of stars. The breathless silence of the forest. The feeling that the trees are not asleep, they are waiting. They have a different access to reality than we do. They know everything it is necessary to know. The animals that roam between them also know everything worth knowing. Only we don't know enough. Do you know enough now, or what? the völva in Völuspá asks at regular intervals. Odin has awakened her from the dead to ask what the future will bring. No, we don't know enough, for we know nothing. Over ninety percent of the matter in the universe is unknown. We don't know what it is, we don't know where it is, only that it represents virtually everything there is. What we can see, what we sense and feel, hear and smell, is unable to combine with this dark matter. For all we know it may be as Leonardo da Vinci thought, that vast forests cover the surface of the moon, or for that matter, that there are enormous, invisible cities with invisible people all over the world. We can't see them, we can't feel them, we can't hear them, we can't smell them. They inhabit a parallel universe, in which we are as invisible to them as they are to us. They glide right through us, we glide right through them. What do we know? Nothing. What is time? I have spent fifty-six years on this planet, and I still don't understand what it is. I am, and then what I am, becomes what was - so where did it go? I stand in the silence of the forest and look up at the stars, I shake my head and enter the cabin, and with the faint hush of the waterfall in my ears, I fall asleep. I dream, images I myself haven't imagined glide through my mind, image after image, night after night. In these images time has stopped functioning, for in them my dead father and my dead mother are alive, and place doesn't behave the way I am used to either, one moment I am on the island where I grew up, in the next I am walking along the streets of London. The Russian Orthodox priest Pavel Florensky believed that dreams are one of the entrances to another world, which exists where we are, but which we are unable to see in a waking state. He was thinking of the Kingdom of God. He was also a mathematician, and he imagined death as a transition to that other reality, where the body's spatial extent is reduced to zero and sinks through the surface with corresponding coordinates, is inverted and acquires imaginary characteristics. Bringing the two together seems logical - imaginary numbers are numbers that don't exist, dead people are people that don't exist. But no matter where they disappear to when they disappear, the dead leave something behind. Their music. Their paintings. Their literature. Their films and photographs. And that is where I was headed, to the presence of the past in the present, the trembling afterimage of the dead on the retina, for this is where Lord Huron dwells. A band constructed around fictional universes, where the voices of fictional characters in novels or fictional artists can be heard, from a fictional but deeply American past. If this sounds like a vague, unclear, diffuse and blurry place - for one of the characteristics of the past is that it lacks clear edges - the music that rises out of it is full of presence, beauty and emotional power. Music is a language that can't be fictionalized: what you hear is what it is. The first time I heard Lord Huron, I knew nothing about them. One day one of their songs popped up in one of my Spotify playlists. It was wonderfully catchy and melancholy, located within a musical landscape I was familiar with (and which the algorithm clearly knew that I like), distinctly American, yet with the freshness of the new. I loved it, and bought the album. Long Lost, it was called, and I played it to pieces. The guitar sound, full of reverb and twang, the swelling strings, the vocals that were not averse to 1950s-style sobbing, brief boogie-woogie sections, the country rhythms - you would think all of this would make the music nostalgic. But it wasn't, at least it didn't feel that way to me, it was rather the opposite, that the music spread out, gathered up these elements and wrapped them around itself like a cape, and in this way made them seem contemporary, which of course they really are, since everything is always the present. Lord Huron's new album, Cosmic Selector, is as full of evocative songs, as beautifully American as its predecessors. The difference, musically speaking, is that they don't look as much to the past, thus adding force to the lyrics, which face two directions at once: backward, toward the ghosts of the past, and up, toward the emptiness of the universe. Above me shone a terrifying number of stars, spelling out the cold indifference of the universe, goes a line in one of the songs. And if you stare up into the night sky, the feeling of utter insignificance is difficult to avoid. It ought to crush us, for we are so obviously nothing, a microscopic anomaly of flesh and blood in an infinite, black and lifeless space, but it doesn't crush us. It is terrifying, this black abyss with tiny pinpricks of light that we live at the edge of, but it is also beautiful. For beauty, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, "is nothing but the beginning of terror we can just barely endure, and we admire it so because it calmly disdains to destroy us." Spent my whole life looking back and wondering who I was, goes another song. I've gotta stop believing in a long-gone past, goes a third. Digging up the past and dreaming of what might have been, goes a fourth. The upward gaze asks where we are, the gaze backward asks who we are. It doesn't get more existential than that. But these mysteries, to which there are no answers, do not stand alone, the loneliness and longing which pondering them brings to the fore is met by something which is its opposite, but no less enigmatic for all that: the music. The world is full of it, it floats around everywhere, streaming from radios and loudspeakers, in houses and cars, parks and supermarkets, in churches, concert halls and concert arenas, or shut in by headphones or earbuds. If we imagine that someone out there in the universe, an alien intelligence, had become aware of our presence and began surveilling us to find out who were, they would soon have noticed the music flowing between people, and perhaps attempted to categorize it, zooming in on America, with its rock 'n' roll, pop, soul, jazz, country, folk, bebop, bluegrass, funk, ragtime, R&B, hip hop, disco, heavy metal, rap, without quite comprehending it - clearly it is some form of communication, so a kind of language, but what is it saying? It glides around down there on Earth, between people - is it a kind of glue that binds them together? For they jump up and down and shout in large crowds, they dance, but they also sit motionless and alone in a room, listening. And some of them cry. Why are they crying? Could it be that the music is like an axe chopping up the ice within them? No, nothing so brutal, milder: could the music like be a warm current causing their inner world to thaw? Once upon a time, long ago, music was anonymous. Just like fairy tales, it was passed on through the generations, and no one knew who had made it. It could come from a place or a time, but never from a person. Music belonged to everyone and no one. It was collective. That seems an alien thought now, when all music created is tied to the person making or performing it, but also a compelling one, because it says something about the nature of music, what music is: it is everyone's and no one's. It flows between us, and it anchors us to the moment, because it is always heard here and now. I, the lyrics on this wonderful album say, burrowing inward. We, the music says, expanding outward. We don't know where it comes from, not really - somewhere someone sits writing a song, but it doesn't come out of nowhere, the music is already there, the notes, the styles, the traditions, which the song arises from or develops further - and we don't know where it is going, whom it will find. Is there anybody out there? We haven't met but I wrote this song for you.

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About 
Lord Huron

The nights here have been magnificent, cold and clear with the sky full of stars. The breathless silence of the forest. The feeling that the trees are not asleep, they are waiting. They have a different access to reality than we do. They know everything it is necessary to know. The animals that roam between them also know everything worth knowing. Only we don't know enough. Do you know enough now, or what? the völva in Völuspá asks at regular intervals. Odin has awakened her from the dead to ask what the future will bring. No, we don't know enough, for we know nothing. Over ninety percent of the matter in the universe is unknown. We don't know what it is, we don't know where it is, only that it represents virtually everything there is. What we can see, what we sense and feel, hear and smell, is unable to combine with this dark matter. For all we know it may be as Leonardo da Vinci thought, that vast forests cover the surface of the moon, or for that matter, that there are enormous, invisible cities with invisible people all over the world. We can't see them, we can't feel them, we can't hear them, we can't smell them. They inhabit a parallel universe, in which we are as invisible to them as they are to us. They glide right through us, we glide right through them. What do we know? Nothing. What is time? I have spent fifty-six years on this planet, and I still don't understand what it is. I am, and then what I am, becomes what was - so where did it go? I stand in the silence of the forest and look up at the stars, I shake my head and enter the cabin, and with the faint hush of the waterfall in my ears, I fall asleep. I dream, images I myself haven't imagined glide through my mind, image after image, night after night. In these images time has stopped functioning, for in them my dead father and my dead mother are alive, and place doesn't behave the way I am used to either, one moment I am on the island where I grew up, in the next I am walking along the streets of London. The Russian Orthodox priest Pavel Florensky believed that dreams are one of the entrances to another world, which exists where we are, but which we are unable to see in a waking state. He was thinking of the Kingdom of God. He was also a mathematician, and he imagined death as a transition to that other reality, where the body's spatial extent is reduced to zero and sinks through the surface with corresponding coordinates, is inverted and acquires imaginary characteristics. Bringing the two together seems logical - imaginary numbers are numbers that don't exist, dead people are people that don't exist. But no matter where they disappear to when they disappear, the dead leave something behind. Their music. Their paintings. Their literature. Their films and photographs. And that is where I was headed, to the presence of the past in the present, the trembling afterimage of the dead on the retina, for this is where Lord Huron dwells. A band constructed around fictional universes, where the voices of fictional characters in novels or fictional artists can be heard, from a fictional but deeply American past. If this sounds like a vague, unclear, diffuse and blurry place - for one of the characteristics of the past is that it lacks clear edges - the music that rises out of it is full of presence, beauty and emotional power. Music is a language that can't be fictionalized: what you hear is what it is. The first time I heard Lord Huron, I knew nothing about them. One day one of their songs popped up in one of my Spotify playlists. It was wonderfully catchy and melancholy, located within a musical landscape I was familiar with (and which the algorithm clearly knew that I like), distinctly American, yet with the freshness of the new. I loved it, and bought the album. Long Lost, it was called, and I played it to pieces. The guitar sound, full of reverb and twang, the swelling strings, the vocals that were not averse to 1950s-style sobbing, brief boogie-woogie sections, the country rhythms - you would think all of this would make the music nostalgic. But it wasn't, at least it didn't feel that way to me, it was rather the opposite, that the music spread out, gathered up these elements and wrapped them around itself like a cape, and in this way made them seem contemporary, which of course they really are, since everything is always the present. Lord Huron's new album, Cosmic Selector, is as full of evocative songs, as beautifully American as its predecessors. The difference, musically speaking, is that they don't look as much to the past, thus adding force to the lyrics, which face two directions at once: backward, toward the ghosts of the past, and up, toward the emptiness of the universe. Above me shone a terrifying number of stars, spelling out the cold indifference of the universe, goes a line in one of the songs. And if you stare up into the night sky, the feeling of utter insignificance is difficult to avoid. It ought to crush us, for we are so obviously nothing, a microscopic anomaly of flesh and blood in an infinite, black and lifeless space, but it doesn't crush us. It is terrifying, this black abyss with tiny pinpricks of light that we live at the edge of, but it is also beautiful. For beauty, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, "is nothing but the beginning of terror we can just barely endure, and we admire it so because it calmly disdains to destroy us." Spent my whole life looking back and wondering who I was, goes another song. I've gotta stop believing in a long-gone past, goes a third. Digging up the past and dreaming of what might have been, goes a fourth. The upward gaze asks where we are, the gaze backward asks who we are. It doesn't get more existential than that. But these mysteries, to which there are no answers, do not stand alone, the loneliness and longing which pondering them brings to the fore is met by something which is its opposite, but no less enigmatic for all that: the music. The world is full of it, it floats around everywhere, streaming from radios and loudspeakers, in houses and cars, parks and supermarkets, in churches, concert halls and concert arenas, or shut in by headphones or earbuds. If we imagine that someone out there in the universe, an alien intelligence, had become aware of our presence and began surveilling us to find out who were, they would soon have noticed the music flowing between people, and perhaps attempted to categorize it, zooming in on America, with its rock 'n' roll, pop, soul, jazz, country, folk, bebop, bluegrass, funk, ragtime, R&B, hip hop, disco, heavy metal, rap, without quite comprehending it - clearly it is some form of communication, so a kind of language, but what is it saying? It glides around down there on Earth, between people - is it a kind of glue that binds them together? For they jump up and down and shout in large crowds, they dance, but they also sit motionless and alone in a room, listening. And some of them cry. Why are they crying? Could it be that the music is like an axe chopping up the ice within them? No, nothing so brutal, milder: could the music like be a warm current causing their inner world to thaw? Once upon a time, long ago, music was anonymous. Just like fairy tales, it was passed on through the generations, and no one knew who had made it. It could come from a place or a time, but never from a person. Music belonged to everyone and no one. It was collective. That seems an alien thought now, when all music created is tied to the person making or performing it, but also a compelling one, because it says something about the nature of music, what music is: it is everyone's and no one's. It flows between us, and it anchors us to the moment, because it is always heard here and now. I, the lyrics on this wonderful album say, burrowing inward. We, the music says, expanding outward. We don't know where it comes from, not really - somewhere someone sits writing a song, but it doesn't come out of nowhere, the music is already there, the notes, the styles, the traditions, which the song arises from or develops further - and we don't know where it is going, whom it will find. Is there anybody out there? We haven't met but I wrote this song for you.

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