RYAN BURNS// EXPERIMENTAL + AMBIENT MUSIC CORRESPONDENT

SPECIAL NOTE: At The Sights and Sounds we take music at a deeper level. We just don’t live to tell you about music, we literally fucking live for music. It changes us. Defines us. And in the eternal words of Lana Del Rey, ‘helps us make our lives into a work of art’. So we’d like to introduce you to, at a deeper level, our writing crew. We think a music blog is about community. Where when you connect with a writer, with their selections, their writing–you’ll see bits and pieces of yourself in them.
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Little rejections of the places I came from. Come via shockwaves. Sit back on the waves. Soundwaves. Claw my way into the empty space. The holes in sound. Lie half-fetal and carry, carry myself away. On the merits of a melody, I meet myself head on.

You will know when they go
‘Cause they’ll never light up the silence
And your heart just sighed

I live for the schisms. The places I put my foot down and the earth quaked below. Opened for me. Sheer force of will, to make my life different. Not without its own pain. Sometimes all that’s around me. in my mind. is sucked down.down.down. So I run and I run and I run into the cacophony of sound I created. The clatters, the clangs and the pots up side heads. The ambience of humming an electric feel when your life’s never the same.

You won’t know when it’s time
‘Cause the days don’t warn you that way
And your heart just dies

BIBIO//DYE THE WATER GREEN

These spaces I float in, an escape from the poverty of hopes and mind–the spirits that infused my childhood cereal bowl. Sound, it’s a way to protect myself. From the earth shaking, rocks falling. From the sudden realization that I don’t control the world, it smacks you in the face at will. I’m not some Sartrean hero. No tabula fucking rasa. Subside my nausea in a wall of sound. Like a forcefield over my body. Captain America’s shield over the tachycardic pulse of a boy that believed in Captain America–and greater things, for him. for everyone.
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I don’t always know the impact I have. Just drinks at a bar. On upper University Avenue. With a boy, I knew had cancer. That’d spent the week in the garage he lived in with the door open. Staring from his bed endlessly. Into space, into the Seattle skies. Watched those skies flood his room, over and over. He’d sit in a pool of water placidly. Think about rolling over into the 4 inches of rain, the depths of what he had left of himself. And just not get up. The irony of dying after swimming through an ocean of pain, in a teaspoon of himself.

Lawrence English – And He Sleeps from ROOM40 on Vimeo.

LAWRWENCE ENGLISH//AND HE SLEEPS
That night he didn’t show it. Seemed fine. Save for those little bits of bone peeking through his skin. Where his life’s earthquakes had hit him. On every inch of his epidermis. And those bones waved back at me, said hello. I respected him. Gave credence to the dark ways his tongue danced over dark beers. We shot the intellectual shit. Roared uproariously at the genesis of our lives–that both kept us down.

And I emanated humanity, sent through the osmosis of kindness. Burned a warmth in his blood that he hadn’t tried to rewarm. Not any of those nights he thought himself so cold, so unneeded that cold rainwater was his new homeostasis, the new normal. I bid him adieu. Drunk at 50th and The Ave. And I never knew I saved his life. Until he told me. So, recently. Don’t always know the impact I have. Me, the soul quake generator.
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See the kaleidoscope girl
In the doorway
She’s looking my way
At times

Little rejections, little shockwaves, all the spaces I created. I fill them fucking inadvertently with love. Complex love. Different than what I knew. That wasn’t wrong, just was. Than what was taught to me over the breakfast table in a part of America that time’d forgot.

Let them love. Let them leave. Let the people around me breathe. Let me exhale my own dreams. They do the same. Let them fly, even if only by wings I scotch taped on for them. Propel ourselves forward and never suffocate in a codependence that kills. Know they’ll fly onwards over lands and rocky crags and sitting at kitchen tables I won’t get to see.

When I stare into space
I’m looking for you
And I can see you
At times

YO LA TENGO//I’LL BE AROUND
Quiet confidence. Little trembles of fear. I need to be more assured. To believe they’ll come back. Or not. To shake to the thought that they never wanted to. Even as I sit here, cutting up food on boards in kitchens. Boards I took off the walls of ramshackles that build my heart. Those little places in me I wrestle with myself. Over terror taking my neurons into a trainwreck. That all the seismic change I make. Will lead to untouched dinner plates. Food going cold. Cold stares. Over plates filled with memories I wish we’d be having.

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