Holy Mother of Pearl
ISSUE #243
Last Saturday, I attended the most beautiful wedding, full of friends. One, who oversaw an important music cue, had a brief crisis of confidence under the pressure and couldn’t think of the right song to play before the first would abruptly end. I stepped in to try to help, by a miracle bringing my sluggish mind to Etta James in time—but it was just as hard for me to think in the moment as it was for everyone else.
Afterward, I heard from another friend that he’d said, “I wish I could have just played ocean sounds.” I wholeheartedly agreed; hearing that, I felt a connection. I listen to ocean sounds more and more with each passing day. I am firmly in my field recording era. The sound of every passing stream makes me want to buy a recorder and brave swarms of bugs to get hours of the sound.
Four days after the wedding, I suffered the worst panic attack I’ve had to date, a full-bodied shock that left me fighting to stay conscious for the longest hour of my life. It was brought on by almost nothing, the building pressure of simple tasks. Relief came only with movement, practically impossible with such a light head. At times, the wave of relief that swept through me was sublime, only to be followed by my vision filling with stars, thousands of bubbles rising before my eyes.
This bodily tide was like the sea—of course—the buzzing in my bones pulsing, like a current, the word that bridges electric thrill and massive, lurching movement. It felt like the rests in recordings of whale songs—invisible forces, unfathomable depths. My fight to the surface could only come with time—try to calm down too fast and I’d be crushed by the bends.
Coming down, I couldn’t help but think of that friend, trying to think of a song, any song. I know the numbness of pressure well. Like him, ocean sounds were what I turned to, and I sat down to make a playlist to calm my sea. “You’ve done that a million times,” you might say, but a sagely one would remember that there are many seafaring sub-genres. There are songs for the beach, there are songs for the floor—there are even those for the Great Garbage Patch.
Holy Mother of Pearl is for diving, digging around for jewels of the deep, and trying not to fuck up your life on the way back. The submarine terror of life’s swirling pressure.
Last Saturday, I attended the most beautiful wedding, full of friends. One, who oversaw an important music cue, had a brief crisis of confidence under the pressure and couldn’t think of the right song to play before the first would abruptly end.