Imperfect Cadence, Joe

The idea of the Listening Planet project is really affirming for me. Maybe not in the context of this album, since it's noticeable but often buried in the mix, but I'm just talking generally. I like the idea of some dude just dedicating his life to the pursuit of recording the sounds of nature.

Didn't like ONR. though. Thought his music sucked.

But the Listening Planet, yeah, man. I want to say that it's a noble cause, to record sounds like birds chirping and all that. Even if there isn't a "why," or the "why" wraps back in on itself, just something to do just to do it, just because. On the most basic level, I listened to Imperfect Cadence and realized that I had been taking these natural sounds for granted. I live next to the woods. I can open my window on a morning in May and hear birds chirping. I didn't notice the recorded birds coming out of my iPod speakers at first because they blended in with the background noise that would accompany the listening of any musical album (during certain seasons of the year, anyway). Made me think about how good we have it in our remote corner of the city, how lucky we are to experience wildlife in a way that some people need the Listening Planet to hear for themselves.

Seriously, though, what the fuck is this ONR. shit? Lukewarm adult-pop bullshit that not even the crudest Spotify algorithm would be cold-blooded enough to spit back at me.

The Listening Planet, though! I admire this dude, Martyn Stewart. I feel like we share similar impulses, even though his ambition exponentially outpaces mine by several billion degrees. Like, maybe we see the world in the same way. He hears nature and he hears a story, and his impulse is to capture that story and document it. I totally empathize with that. I feel that within myself too. One time, I was on the 67 bus, and a lady two seats in front of me was ranting and raving about all kinds of conspiratorial shit. So I pulled out my voice recorder and documented it. Not for any reason; there wasn't a "why." I just did it. I wasn't planning on using it for anything. It's not on the blog and never will be. I barely understood what she was saying half the time. But I sensed in that scene some type of story. A story that I would only be privy to for a few minutes, a story that existed before I stepped on that bus and that would exist long after I got off at my stop and that I only had a brief moment with, and so why not try to capture it, document my head-on collision with that story, before it faded gently from my mind forever? I totally get it. Birds are not humans with potential mental health disorders, but they're chirping their story, and Stewart is listening for a few minutes, and documenting the tale, preserving it because it could be a story worth remembering.

But c'mon, what is this shit-ass Grey's Anatomy-core nonsense that I'm listening to over top of the calls of nature? Why is ONR. even here? How is this so bad that I'm finding that I'd rather listen to a goddamn seagull cawing instead of MUSIC?!

The Listening Planet, though, made me think a lot this week, and think deep. Sure, we can brush aside the "why" if we want to, but I think there's a lot to be said about the "why." Why is Martyn Stewart dedicating his life to this pursuit? Why birds? He tells the story on his website about going out into the yard at age eleven to record a blackbird, but he doesn't speculate on why he felt the compulsion to do so. I don't know if I could tell you. And I think there's a big difference between recording birds in a forest and recording a human being ranting on a bus, by the way. The difference being consent. Birds don't need to consent to being recorded. The state of PA is a two-way consent state, meaning that if I were to reveal proof that I had recorded her monologue (there is no proof, I'm making this all up, I've never even owned a recording device), I would be in violation of the law. I need her consent. That's my understanding of it. I don't even really know if I understand the logic behind that. Maybe I haven't given it enough thought. What harm is there in recording someone who is yelling about frogs being gay? I think I'm misinterpreting the law. It refers to "private conversations." Maybe she forfeits her right to audio privacy by yelling on a public bus. Birds don't have private conversations, so their voices can be captured by Martyn Stewart whenever he chooses to boot up the recording equipment. It just seems weird to me that a lot of us spend our whole fucking lives spouting whatever bullshit we want on the public internet (ahem) and then other people get all uppity about something they said being printed onto the digital recording strips, and then also birds are hollering about all kinds of shit like worms and eggs and trees and whatnot, and no one seems to give a shit about whether they even want that hollering implanted into a fucking terrible ballad-stuffed pop album made by a fucking hack.

I probably let myself rant about bird law because I'm bummed out for the Listening Planet, that they got roped into this shit. I don't think I'd listen to 30 minutes of birds chirping on their own, sure, so there's at least that. Maybe this is a good way for Stewart to smuggle his sounds into as many ears as possible, or even to give his work meaning. That's fine, I get that. But I also think that attaching his work to the guileless empty-calorie sub-Maroon 5 bullshit that ONR. is churning out has a real way of degrading the sounds of nature. This can't possibly be the "why" in your life work. You spend literally fucking decades documenting our earth and its wild inhabitants, and what, the reason why you're doing that is to slap that shit onto the intro so some tedious half-baked pop song with fake handclaps and maudlin violins? Was any thought given to this? Just because you have a bird squawking on the bridge of the song doesn't make it art. It's just annoying. And nature shouldn't be annoying! It should be calming!

And it is, in most contexts. I believe the Listening Planet when it makes the case that the sounds of nature are essential to the story of life and should be documented and shared. Just not like this, man. Not like this.

Still... I am appreciative of this experience. After listening all week and writing most of this review, I got a voice memo from my pal Steph. I guess she was walking around town, talking into her phone, as voice-memo-ers are wont to do. But this time around, I noticed something about the recording she sent me. There were so many bird calls in the background. I don't think this is something I would have ever noticed without help from the Listening Planet. I even asked Steph about it, wondering where she was that had so many birds, and she was kinda confused, like, yeah man, birds exist, they are chirping outside. But she hadn't heard Imperfect Cadence (yet), so she didn't know.

Say what you want about ONR. and his annoying boilerplate pop music. At this point, I don't really care. I don't care because it's undeniable that the Listening Planet's half of the album has changed me in some small way. I am more aware of my surroundings. I am more attuned to the sounds of nature. I am calm. I hear birds.

GRADE: 2 pukes out of 5