Radial Arpeggio: Some thoughts on how we sing the unspeakable

There’s no cruelty in living life as an arpeggio, except that the ability to stretch notes that far and omnidirectional can turn you into an echo of yourself, (hear Burial’s “Untitled”) which invents a monolithic myth who watches its hero from the future nudging and cheering get here if you can ( I don’t care how). I’ll show you light   now it burns    forever, is the promise on arrival, though the destination always recedes and advances ahead of the traveler. A taunting lantern propels the voice of a sudden narrator fawning over and fleeing that future at the moment of invention, with the brand of romance that doubles as an existential threat. Whatever is ignited by the tone poem sample cannot be extinguished, we’re told. It burns forever, and that vagrant flame is supposed to be seductive. This is the arpeggio as a lifestyle, it only offers itself to those willing to be haunted and compelled by the intensity of their inspiration . It’s a haunt with no limits that both threatens your comfort and leans on you for comfort, a way of using language to expose said hauntedness. 

The Burial song-myth under-delivers context, no title, no attribution for the light source, and in their place the precarious shelter of an erratic dream that becomes the arpeggiated album Untrue, an album about the smoldering fictions that occur in between consciousness and identity. They arrive as stray disparate sounds But we’ve jumped ahead several hundred years by now. Arpeggio is the gospel feeling of escaping labor with praise and spellbinding, uprooted from pure sanctity in order to share itself with secular rapture. It carries the distress of yearning for elsewhere until it turns into an erotics of the impossible now, the now that is inter-dimensional rumors about the ancient never-becoming-always, slurring in the alley between ways. It’s the notes that expand by refusing to complete themselves, un-initiated, non-committal and obsessively attached to one another, they vacillate between cities and centuries like displaced mating calls.

Love notes are all arpeggio, which is to say revolving around the energy that they themselves produce and withhold. Those who are best at love carry these notes like the incandescent fans splayed in the hands of pentecostal churchgoers. The fans are not just accessories, they are instruments that bend and bind the amen air into rushes, the silent tambourines of who's loving you and what light they’ll expose you to, to prove it.

A strutting or buttressing that occurs when a moment interrupts itself and moves between registers, but you can observe its quantum jump, because that leap is marked by singing, swinging, and the lean mercy between song and swing. It tenses, then buckles, tenses again, then unfolds into Andy Bey promising I let a song go out of my heart. He stretches the word sooooong so far it sheds its logical agenda and becomes the weathered lyric of leaving, so long, all vowels and surrendered will. I won’t know sweet music until you return to me, Bey croons. Bleak promise, an ultimatum that turns the perceived self into a phantom.

I’ve been thinking about the chocked up lightheart of the arpeggio as a lifestyle lately, and it shows up again and again for me as a song’s ability to animate reality with its will at the expense of all else. The arpeggio, the frenzy of almost-escape that is really strained staying. I’ll stay, repeating. I’ll stay, cause she’ll be coming back. Keeps me hanging on, in the case of Funkadelic, dangling between stage and spacecraft, romance and sabotage. The patient waiting for the beat or heart to drop becomes an antidote for hopelessness, a jubilance. The arpeggio disavows narrative and linear time as if arrived at in a vacuum or through a parthenogenesis of spirit. It’s the ecstatic indifference in the addict’s chase of a fix, both elevated and sustained, good doomed delusion restrained by the luck of rhythm.

Miles’s funny valentine in Detroit on Clifford’s trumpet. He comes in from his heroin stupor, soaking wet, and makes the grown men weep in arpeggiated hysterical tenderness, and then he abandons them to the revelation he carried into the club like a flood. What a reconciliation with the unknown selves it was, must have been. Not so funny, but so valiant, him walking through the crowd toward the door as the song’s lyrics cry out stay, little valentine stay.  Won’t be coming back, back to the stage, he makes his exit. His tone so tender it’s also dismissive, it doesn’t need you to worship you, it’s nearer to god than thee.

Jason Holiday spoke in arpeggio throughout the tragi-majestic film about him, collapsing in on himself to rise and let us glimpse him through the shadow his mask would cast. Arpeggio was his only companion under those lights. The director Shirley Clark, a white woman, hawkish and vanishing into pretend objectivity, brought him to crisis. Even his ennui trembled with the laughter of near-humiliation turning to shade and shunt. The shadow of his smile, smeared with devastation, his solo arpeggio captured forever. You practice being a ghost by multiplying to the point of tipping over, if you’re Jason making a film about being himself, playing himself like a scripted role, your sound swelling and riveting into schemes gone smooth as ballads. Your portrait is as erratic as his but without the finesse, it needs an amphetamine that only his aura carries, it needs the threat of vigilantees. Jack DeJohnette with Jackie McClean moonscaping. 

Your mother buckling from the belly in grief and weeping at the news of your father’s death. A long arpeggiated hallway carrying her sobs back to themselves. My father was my first arpeggiated hero and the source of my love of broken notes held and arched eternal. He was willing to let his own voice, his own pain, or his own rage, stagger through him in order to get beyond himself. He was willing to deny himself to transcend himself, and to break down or break out into song with that intention. To leave so the notes could be heard without the distraction of their source. He handed my mother her arpeggiated and sometimes evil grieving.

Together they handed their ongoing stuttering note to me and I just watched it in silence for a while, suspicious, even a little nauseated by being given so much and finding the test so natural. Nice and Easy, in Tina Turner’s voice. The roughness of repeating syllables like the terror of events that scroll in a loop, is softened by the willingness to both assume and exceed what you are given. An overdose of blue notes, this arpeggio. To isolate one and make it the ten thousand things, the patron of the blues mysticism of having it all. Sun Ra’s “Outer Nothingness,” which gets us back to George Clinton’s decision to stay at the site of shipwreck and serenade it, float it back to the black surface of the night sea. Which element of a note you choose to suspend midair and observe from every trembling angle is your life’s defining scene, your arpeggiated destiny. You could get stuck there, it has to be a murmuring which, if you get stuck on it, will offer itself as the prism through which all other notes can be accessed and diverted back to love’s rutilated arpeggio. 

I use this acoustics of suspended animation or suspended devastation to move between dimensions. It teaches you how to buckle in grief and comedic hysteria at the same time, forget that they are different until we’ve collapsed back into now, wet cheeked and grimacing. Pleasure and pain are the same here, they don’t just make one another possible, they insist on arriving together. This arpeggiated union is different from the loop because it never returns to the beginning, it redefines beginning and source as a series of interruptions. It’s denialism that way, nihilistic, that feeling of being swept away by an emotion that makes you forget or reject what you were swept away from and yanks you into the moment. It’s the swooping in of invisible saviors which are really the unsayable microtones between words and events made possible only by singers who cannot lie, who cannot mumble, who cannot stay without articulating every shadow of sorrow and rejoice in the a, in the comeback dad even though it’s almost as fulfilling to mourn you as it is to have you alive. It’s almost the same thing. Eventually, you cannot differentiate between the two emotional states and it’s time to take up singing or hustling yourself. To catch him and Jason and Miles in the same agony and write them a trio or duel in the place of the death scene. Humiliation ritual. If you walked around the house humming off-key for fun my dad would shout you’re flat! And make you start again. Always drilling the space between privacy and performance into us like an architect of what I’ve become, satisfied by the impure and empire driven blurring of record and memory. He would make you bring the song back to life even if he couldn’t come with it. He’d demonstrate flat so you could fly.

Arpeggio is different than crescendo because arpeggio fluctuates, it’s not all highs, it resolves lows to the horizon, it takes what it’s given and imbues it with so much grandeur you forget there was lament in there at first. It tends toward renunciation and gets beyond the hierarchy of feelings so that hurt is as important as celebration. It’s the life I pursue and the only one I surrender to, naively, until I can hear myself in the future correcting a private pleasure: start over from the top, that was a little flat, bend the note, sing it as if it's suspicious of its own impression. Again. Less cryptic, it’s not crisis, it’s chrysalis. 

Arpeggiated delay. Prince Rogers Nelson was found dead in an elevator on my birthday in 2016. Seven years later, trapped in an elevator alone for an hour in Midtown, Manhattan— shaken and screaming cluttered arpeggios into the void until I buckle and sit on the floor like a statue facing a television screen with glazed eyes. The arpeggio allows you to disassociate in real time without letting go of the feeling, you just send it between floors in the soul, and survive your dread by recording it as divine comedy. This bid to remember what occurs in the space between the note and its hold and how it’s held, came over me like a crusade and made me so versatile and satellite-like I turned my back to the screen, accused it of being too flat to function in these earth symphonics, and waited for it to turn into a human being on the other side of the metal door, prying me out of my own ballad. I had been falling up, they assured, when the door finally opened. I’m one of the defiant ones and such is our song, arriving unannounced, playing softly in the background as the suspense you mistook for silence.