Julian Lynch - “Terra”
Just like the rough-hewn painting that adorns the album to which this song lends it name, “Terra” pivots on the muddling of textures and sensory vagueness. There are the earthy browns and greens suggested by loose acoustic strums and loping hand percussion, sure (‘terra’ means ‘earth,’ after all), but this is far from a totally rustic affair. The lead voices—saxophone, harmonica, spacey synth, and Lynch’s own timid-Muppet voice—carry an air of warm urbanity in their misappropriation. There are more sun-lit brownstones in the downcast wail of the mid-song harmonica break than there are wooden front porches. And yet the way Lynch blends in traces of sitar (or something sounding very much like it) and the way the chords lilt among themselves, snaking slowly down an imaginary river, puts “Terra” in a distinctly heady, spectral space as well. By evoking these various sonic realms in tandem, this song becomes pleasantly rootless, drifting between moods while quietly wondering if drifting itself is the more useful feeling.
Julian Lynch - “Terra”
Before I try to actually talk about this new Julian Lynch song, I feel I must briefly outline an idea I’ve been toying with since I read that Poptimist about James Blake and Brian Eno last month, namely that there are two essential questions that all music writing / criticism seeks to answer: How did this sound get here? And now that it’s here, what is it doing? That second one especially seems to have a lot of other common questions rolled up into it. The question of “why,” to me, mostly ends at “because the artist chose it (in however abstract or concrete a sense) and wants it to do something,” and the question of valuation—Is this good? Do we like it?—is a practical expression of what a sound is doing.
I say this because I often find myself at something of a loss for what to say about new little homespun songs like “Terra.” Laying out core values helps work against the impulse to pull some twisted, grandiose theory out of my butt in an attempt to make the song ‘matter’ more than it maybe does and justify my writing about it at all (before you say anything: I realize the irony in saying that while in the middle of ostensibly ‘deconstructing’ music criticism). Sometimes all a sound is doing is making you want to dance or reminding you of the TV shows you used to watch as a kid and that doesn’t mean it’s bad or not worth understanding.
Many of the sounds on the title track to Lynch’s forthcoming full-length—the acoustic guitars that twang like sitars, the hand drums, the tambourine—come from the mid 60s, when music from India became a fashionable influence on pop and contributed heavily to the idea of psychedelic rock. The more melodic voices (saxophone at the beginning, harmonica in the middle, and synthesizer at the end) come from the subsequent decades where there was both a nostalgia for the authenticity of rootsier music and an excited interest in futuristic possibilities. That’s about as much as I can say about the “how” question, the historical road by which these things have come to be paired together in recognizable ways. And in a sense, recalling older music is also part of what “Terra” is doing as a song, but I tend to think that, along with many of his Underwater Peoples compatriots, Lynch uses the recalling of old music to engender a feeling of comfort and wistfulness. Hand drums have a softer, earthier sound than a drum kit, as do acoustic guitars and Lynch’s perpetually mush-mouthed singing. When combined with “Terra”s 7th chords and reverberating, melancholic sax/harmonica/synth leads, they add up to a sound that retains much of the viscous, easy-flowing air of his previous work while employing rawer textures that, by virtue of not being subsumed in effects and distortion, feel more familiar and immediate (thus, again, comforting).
Judging by the increased attention to Lynch’s music in the last year or so, I’d say another thing this music does is show us quite plainly that comfort, nostalgia, and wistfulness are some important values we ascribe to music. On some level, lots of people want to feel these things without necessarily drawing them out of their own experiences (i.e. not just listening to the music you personally liked a long time ago). Building music like this is an act of recognizing not just the personal, but also the collective longing for that experience.
