The Moody Blues: The Magellan of Noise?
In 1969 The Moody Blues released On the Threshold of a Dream, on it is one of the powerful sounds I’ve ever heard. Track one, second one, the noise has arrived. For the next two minutes your mind will struggle to process what it’s being exposed to. Your preexisting rules do not apply.
Physically, the noise is made up simple ingredients. The low is barely audible; a warm tone that lays a steady foundation. The high, the most obvious, is an almost super sonic pitch that drills straight through your head - comparable to the squeal of a television. And the middle, the true bread and butter, is nicely described by the word “void”. The tone is a fluctuating, hollow noise that doesn’t allow you to place it. It has no home. This mid tone debunks everything around it.
Mentally, it is something both unsettling and comforting. You are forced to enter an unknown space, somewhere completely new, but one that you feel strangely intimate with. It is natural, organic even, but you’re so unaccustomed to it that you nearly become scared. It shakes you to your core. Unfamiliarity is uncomforting.
For it‘s true affect, listen to it loudly - very loudly - on repeat. After some time, you start to become very relaxed, yet disoriented, unable to focus.
When listened to initially, you tend to grasp onto the conventional sounds - the orchestra like builds of large, familiar chords. But over time you begin to feel a contempt for these “conventional” noises. You’ve begun to feel comfort in the “unconventional”. At that point, you’re forced to see both worlds. That which you’ve known forever, and that which has only just been introduced. New v. old. Ordinary v. extraordinary.
Today, there are musicians solely devoted to finding a world like this. To uncover noises that have never been heard. To discover something that touches us more deeply than anything before. Hopefully they will. But, unexpectedly, I believe that the current horizon of sound was created over 40 years ago. There was no digital. No fully invested musicians to the cause.
Perhaps, it was The Moody Blues, one of the most unlikely candidates, that pushed the us noise the furthest.
Listen to “In the Beginning”, track one from On the Threshold of a Dream.
-Maxwel Lemberger
