A few months ago I noticed that some mornings I'd have a bit of tinnitus going on when I woke up, a ringing in my right ear especially. As soon as I was up and out of bed it would go and generally I live in environments where there is noise so it wasn't too much of an issue. I'm putting it down to a Bob Mould gig in 2019 that definitely had some long term impact on my right ear- he was loud that night, really loud.
This week it's been worse. There have been periods where the house has been very quiet without Isaac in it and I've shied away from playing music because I couldn't work out what to play and what effect it might have. Last Saturday afternoon (the longest Saturday afternoon I think I've ever experienced) I was distracting myself by scrolling through endless crap on my phone and I made the conscious decision to play some records to distract from the tinnitus. I started with a pair of Durutti Column albums (Short Stories For Pauline and then Another Setting). Both hit the spot, Vini's delicate, warm guitar, his echo and delay FX and pedals buoying me somewhat. Then I moved onto some of the ambient Americana albums I was playing earlier this year- Promise by SUSS, Cerulean by Nashville Ambient Ensemble and Altar Of Harmony by Luke Schneider. This took me well into the evening. There was definitely something about the sound of those records- the pedal steel guitar, the ebbing and flowing of warm drones and synths, cosmic ambient Americana - that really helped, not just with the tinnitus but with the feelings of grief too. Mournful but with the promise of hope too.
In October SUSS released an EP called Night Suite, inspired by being on the road. The tracks are all named after places on Route 66 between Albuquerque and Los Angeles and 'the endless horizon'. Tragically the day after they completed the recordings Gary Leib, the group's synth player and film maker, passed away and a new sense of loss of was sunk into the tracks. The EP is at Bandcamp and the eighteen minutes of all five sequenced together with road footage is here.
6 comments:
Listened and bought, that was a rather lovely way to come round on a Saturday morning. It a grey flat day and this suited it. Hope your doing as well as you can Adam.
Never heard of this mob before but really enjoying that. Thanks SA and as Jake says hope all is as well as it can be given the circumstances (fist bump emoji)
I'm glad you've kept the blog going and you're using it this way. I hope in some tiny way it helps.
I'd like to listen to this on that particular stretch of highway. It's a very contemplative drive--scrub and mesas and desert and occasional striated hillsides. Nothing manmade for miles and miles of it. An absolutely massive sky, interrupted by mountains depending on where on the map you've reached.
Music seems to be doing you some good, Adam, and I'm glad for it.
Thanks all.
This is lovely music, Adam. Glad to read and hear that SUSS provided some (literal) relief for your tinnitus. Beautiful photo, too.
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