The likelihood of getting chills while listening to music decreases with age. During our more formative years, while we’re coloring in the pieces of our holistic selves, it’s easier to find a new piece that we haven’t seen before, and to be thrilled by it. The word “chills” implies terror, and great music brings that. It more or less opens a wormhole, usually through emotional channels, that allows one to peer directly, fleetingly, into a chasm of truth and beauty.

Readers of this blog will understand that I, Catbirdman, will show a tendency towards the dramatic from time to time. The language of Keats, while mechanically far beyond my technical scope, will inform the belief system upon which Subanimal Sounds is based. I am not afraid to think big or talk big, and to embrace the naiveté to believe it.

I do believe in spirit and in the unfathomable double-sided coin of wholeness and despair. I believe that such spiritual states can have physical make-up, and that they can be sensed. I believe that it is good to listen, and not to turn your ear away, when a chill of terror takes hold. Underneath all of that, I believe we should respond with love to others, in an effort to help them hear their own music.

These beliefs can be apocalyptic, in the sense that a person can undergo a sea change. There is slow evolution, and there are sudden mutations, epiphanies. But Point Z can appear to be a universe away from Point A. Worlds do end and others begin. Again, I turn to the clean prophet, Mr. Lee Mavers:

Love is all

The world will fall

And this is all we came here for

I hear the ever-distant

Callin’ All

If I am Love’s assistant then I bawl:

“If all the world should fall then let it fall”

And another oft-quoted (by me) lyric from Ian McCulloch:

Aim for stars and hit the sky.

It’s a fool’s errand to be sure, to aim for the unattainable. But that’s what the best music does, so why should a music blog be any different? This is a music blog, and as such, we will be listening on this blog. There will be “For A Friend” posts and “From A Friend” posts. We are all informed by each other. I will continue to prod for comments and increased readership, even if I grow old doing it.

Subanimal sounds are those reverberations of the unseen, the exercises of spirit. They are the vestiges of the chills, the burnt image of beauty, like sunspots on the retina. As soon as you look at beauty, it’s gone. But the subanimal sounds are left in its wake, and are captured here, poorly and crudely. But it’s something.