We tend to think of music as escapism: that slow train out of consciousness that takes you to a place where all the piles of laundry, dishes, debt, and unheard voicemails from close family members are just specks in the distance. It’s a place that requires no mental or physical effort—just you, some expensive headphones, and your music. On the outside you appear to be just lying there with your eyes closed, calm and relaxed, but inside your head it’s a goddamn circus, a riot of neural activity that science can barely begin to explain.
I like that idea, that there’s always some kind of action, even in the most inert or catatonic of states, when I listen to music. Neural connections lighting up lobes, cortexes, and cerebellums like watching a lightning storm from outer space, small and silent. It’s easy to talk about what's knowable in music—an 808 bass, a power chord, a snare drum, vocal vibrato—but harder to talk about why we know them, or why we recall them, or which memories are triggered when sound passes through our auditory cortex and into the maze of our brain.
Neurological phenomena can sometimes disrupt how we listen to music. Pitchfork contributor Jayson Greene has written about how the music he listens to is related to his extraneous physical energy, and I've noted that my love of noise music is tied to a horrifying sleep disorder I once had. Everything that happens in our brain is in some way connected, even if we can’t quite explain how.
Which leads me to aural déjà vu.
In the early days of scientific studies of déjà vu, a psychiatrist named Vernon Neppe defined it concisely as "any subjectively inappropriate impression of familiarity of the present experience with an undefined past." While neuroscientists don’t really know why exactly this parapsychological disconnect happens, the unifying incident between the many theories is that there's just a little glitch in your brain. What is actually new sensory information (looking at Honda Civic in a McDonald's parking lot) is being processed as old sensory information (a Honda Civic you saw in a McDonald's parking lot long ago). It may be mistakenly filed into the lobe that handles long-term memory, or there may be a delay in the visual signal getting sent to the brain.
The sensation is a fantastic moment of confusion, where we can’t tell if we’re being nostalgic or prescient. And like just waking up from a dream, we try desperately to hang on to that disorienting feeling and figure it out, right up until it slips away from us and the lobes reconnect.
I’ve found that my favorite 21st century music does this: confuses the lobes, confounds what is present and what is past into an "inappropriate impression of familiarity of the present with an undefined past." It creates something strikingly unfamiliar. Simon Reynolds examines shades of this idea in his book on pop nostalgia and the past, Retromania. Reynolds' main concern is with what he calls "pop music's addiction to its own past," and at one point he mentions Daniel Lopatin’s Eccojams, these loops-on-lean that microanalyize little moments from pop music taken from songs like Janet Jackson’s "Lonely" or JoJo’s "Too Little Too Late" as songs that can tug at and reframe our love for the familiar.
Lopatin’s best known for his work as Oneohtrix Point Never, which shifts from skittery, sample-heavy landscapes to the near sample-free drone compositions found on last year’s R Plus Seven. Chintzy synths that could have been pulled from any stock 80s educational film about "the future" are gridded out in warped constellations. He uses technology to remold the sounds-of-the-future-of-the-past, placing them in loops and setting them up at disorientating angles. In a 2009 manifesto-of-sorts, Lopatin got at the core of his aesthetic: "The machines of the past contain prenatal patterns and unborn mythologies that eagerly await for their next chance. And when they storm back from the abyss of history, they are never the same."
While Lopatin dabbles in chronological and philosophical layers of technology, two other artists use a particular musical technique to get at this glitch between the aurally known and the unknown, hauling traditional instruments out of the abyss of history. There’s saxophonist Colin Stetson, whose circular breathing and chaotic overtones make the same kinds of microanalytical loops without any pedals or electronics. Of course, everyone's familiar with a certain kind of saxophone sound, from Coltrane to Wham!, but the way Stetson plays it on his three-album New History Warfare series rips it from the context of jazz and schmaltz. The human-sized bass saxophone becomes the percussion as the pads thwack against the brass body, and Stetson's voice somehow escapes to hum a melody over his arpeggios.
Similarly, there's Dawn of Midi, whose album Dysnomia takes the traditional jazz trio setup and flips it on its head, playing as few notes as possible with no improvisation. Pianist Amino Belyamani plays with one hand dampening the strings inside the body of the piano and based on where he mutes the strings with his one hand, some notes in a chord ring out, and others just stick in the felt pad and fall to a dead percussive sound. Dysnomia is an album of overlapping rhythms, set up in little loops to which are as disorienting as they are always in the pocket. Both Dawn of Midi and Stetson (and Lopatin) owe a great deal of debt to Steve Reich's minimalism and the idea of restraint and looping. But by taking little sections of history and spinning them around, a little wobbly like a basketball on the finger, there is a hypnotic and incoherent sense of living in both the present and the past, unstuck in time.