Everybody Says Things Are Dead Until Someone Attractive Brings Them Back

Everybody Says Things Are Dead Until Someone Attractive Brings Them Back
by Fescennine

Everybody in performance eventually starts announcing deaths. Melody is dead. Beauty is dead. Tonal resolution is fascist now. Somebody in Brussels kills emotional sincerity every nine months and then everybody else has to spend three years pretending not to miss it.

Meanwhile dancers are still out there throwing themselves across floors to giant unresolved chords like their rent depends on it.

Which maybe it does. God.

Anyway I keep thinking about how long something has to remain embarrassing before it becomes interesting again.

Because there really are sounds that become socially unusable for a while. Not bad sounds. Worse. Beautiful ones.

There was a stretch where if you put an openly emotional string swell into anything remotely contemporary people reacted like you had released doves into the venue. Actual discomfort. Eyes narrowing across festival lobbies. Someone with rectangular glasses saying the work felt “manipulative,” which in certain circles is honestly one step below being tried at The Hague.

Then twelve years pass and suddenly some luminous little creature in translucent trousers puts the exact same harmonic language under distorted percussion and everybody in the audience is having private revelations.

I watched this happen recently. You could feel the room splitting apart physically.

The younger people looked relieved. Which affected me more than I wanted it to.

I always feel protective toward young artists when they start making work that is openly lush or yearning or emotionally excessive because the performance world punishes that instinct so aggressively at first. Especially in music for dance. God. You spend years learning how to disguise your feelings structurally so nobody accuses you of sentimentality. Then eventually one exhausted genius stops disguising it and the entire aesthetic cycle resets again.

Film music goes through this every six minutes, by the way.

One decade everyone is terrified of sounding cinematic and then suddenly there are enormous synth choirs blasting through galleries again while people nod solemnly like this is a completely new emotional experience never before available to humanity.

I don’t mean this cynically, actually. That’s the annoying part.

I think people genuinely forget how much they miss certain sounds.

A suspended chord. A melody that arrives too early and means exactly what it means. Massive reverb. A woman singing in octaves over low strings. There are textures that become embarrassing mostly because they bypass intellectual defenses too quickly.

And ambitious people hate being emotionally caught without their jackets on.

You notice this in rehearsal rooms constantly. The dancers usually surrender first. Composers are worse. Composers will sit there pretending not to be moved by something while visibly breathing differently.

I’ve done this myself. Many times. Humiliating profession.

Also there are practical politics involved. Some aesthetics cannot return until the people who publicly murdered them lose enough institutional power. This is simply true. The arts run almost entirely on socially managed embarrassment.

A choreographer once told me, very seriously, that audiences were “ready for tonal music again,” as though melody had been recovering in Switzerland this whole time.

And maybe that’s the closest thing I have to a theory.

Nothing actually dies. Certain things just become dangerous to associate yourself with for a while.

Then somebody attractive brings them back and everybody acts shocked by how good they still sound.

Rooms You Can Hear

Rooms You Can Hear

by Fescennine

Some music doesn’t feel like a story. It feels like a space.

Rather than leading the listener through a sequence of events—a verse, a chorus, a hook—this kind of music surrounds. It settles in like architecture: walls of tone, corners of silence, pockets of breath. It doesn’t move forward so much as it expands outward, inviting the listener to linger, to dwell.

This is music as environment, not narrative.

Sound behaves like matter. It bounces, stretches, absorbs, leaks. In a well-constructed soundscape, each element behaves like an object in a room: percussive sounds become surfaces, ambient tones act as fog, and sudden silences feel like unexpected doors. The listener is not being told something—they’re being placed inside something.

Some composers think in melodies. Others think in spaces.

A tone decays; a room waits.

In this way of working, composition becomes less about momentum and more about presence. Reverb is furniture. Silence is structure. The question isn’t “What happens next?” but “Where are we now?” A good track doesn’t need a climax—it needs a sense of volume, and not just in the loudness sense.

Some pieces feel like bathrooms: tiled, cold, intimate, echoing.
Others are basements.
A few are closets that should probably remain closed.

Listening to this kind of music is like walking through fog.
You don’t see far ahead, but you feel what’s close.
The world arrives by proximity, not prediction.

This kind of music may not be catchy. It resists repetition. It doesn’t hum in your ear for days. But it holds something. A shape. A pressure. A memory of being in a particular kind of silence with a particular kind of sound.

And perhaps the most moving part is what comes just after it ends:
That three seconds of stillness where the room exhales.

That’s the room.

Fescennine's "Punch This Day In the Face"

Even though I gave this song a harsh name, it really is one of the favorite things I’ve made.

Punch This Day In the Face was created for a dance work for a pre-professional University level dance company in the U.S.A. It a large cast piece, I want to say there were 12-14 dancers in the piece.

From nothing came something.

Punch This Day In the Face was almost lost. All of the files on my computer got deleted including my music files. For two years I thought this piece was gone forever, but one day I remembered that I had sent it to a colleague via email. It was still there!

At the time I was working on this piece, I was living in an old small house, the kind of house where everything seemed to keep getting worse. The living room and kitchen were open to each other and the big kitchen light developed a consistent flicker that neither myself nor my partner at the time had the ability to fix. My worktable was in this space. When Punch This Day In the Face was performed for the first time, as I was watching the dancers, the lighting design and listening to the music, I realised the rhythm of the pulsing tone was the same tempo as that flickering light. 

-Fescennine

Punch This Day In the Face

Fescennine