One of the joys of being a kid is taking stuff apart.
Maybe your parents replaced the old rotary phone and gave it to you to play with. Or maybe there was a toy you’d had for years, and the combination of boredom and curiosity was too much to resist. Or maybe you just wanted to know how something worked.
There’s a specific age at which this happens. I think it’s somewhere between age 7 and 9. Up until that point, most kids just go for pure destruction- pulling stuff off shelves, knocking down the sandcastle your sibling spent hours building- but as fine motor skills become sharper, that destructive impulse turns into a desire for more civilized, controlled entropy.
The drive to take stuff apart and figure out how it works might fade a bit as we get older. Perhaps once we start paying for things ourselves we become less likely to want to dismantle them. But our curiosity never dies.
I think that’s why I enjoy the “Song Exploder” podcast so much. It’s a simple idea; musicians and songwriters talk about the creative and/or technical process behind one of their tracks. Different elements of the song are isolated, quirks and backstories revealed, and at the end, the song is played in full…only now, it sounds completely different because you know it that much more intimately.
“Song Exploder” is a great way to find new music, and to hear old music as new. I can’t recommend it highly enough. To hear the episode on “Kusanagi” by Odesza, which reveals the meaning of the song’s title and the benefits of dropping things on tables, go here. If your ears are as curious as mine when you hear music, you’ll like it.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. I love it when EDM acts like Odesza slow things down a bit. The high energy still comes through, but it’s more of a fading, end-of-day energy.
2. The four-chord sequence that opens the track is an unresolved loop, but when the bass enters, it sits on the tonic at the start of each sequence, giving the song its centre.
3. The odd vocal sample (the source of which is revealed in the podcast) provides a nice high-frequency contrast to the boomy bass.
Recommended listening activity:
Purchasing a pile of used electronics and a screwdriver.