On Saturday night, I saw Claire Rousay and Martyna Basta perform together at Berlin’s Volksbühne, as part of CTM festival.
Rousay was on her laptop and an upright piano, while Basta played electric guitar and zither and performed mostly wordless vocalizations. I was deeply moved by their enigmatic invocations.
On the train home from the concert, my thoughts wandered from the echo of that beautifully strange music in my head to a recent passage from Basta’s newsletter.
In that note, she ponders the question of what to write about and reveal to the world – and what to keep to herself.
“Too often it seems a better option to contribute silence to this world”, she says. “Or to keep something a secret in times of such voyeurism and exposure.”
In another newsletter, she writes: “I still think it’s always a good day to hide and it’s still my favorite thing. Quietly observing things from afar.”
I know that feeling. Throughout my life, I’ve often felt as if I was living it as a spectactor, watching things from a certain distance. That perspective used to make me feel lonely – not anymore though.
I deliberately choose not to get entangled in a web of commitments and desires. Retaining my autonomy has been a constant negotiation with community, society and the world at large, and sometimes a real struggle as well.
That’s why I can deeply relate to this passage from Claire-Louise Bennett’s novel Checkout 19, which I’d copied to my Kindle clipboard.
In this part, the narrator leaves her hometown of London for a few days in Brighton, without telling anyone about her journey or her whereabouts.
And that was all there was to it me on the bed no texting no emailing no one knew where I was it wasn’t as if I told my parents or my housemates, perhaps I’d told Dale. Probably I had but quite often people didn’t know where you were what you were doing nor how you felt about it either. You just had to lie there oftentimes, that was all there was to it. And I loved that feeling of no one knowing. And went on loving it. Treasuring it. I treasured it really. Privacy. Secrets. But it became more and more difficult to get that not-knowing and the deeply glamorous feeling that came with it and now it doesn’t exist at all the outcast minutes of the day gently claw at you, over here, over here, and it’s harder to know where you are or what you’re doing and how you really feel about any of it. One’s on tenterhooks nearly all the time and there’s nothing remotely glamorous about tenterhooks.
I believe there’s a common thread in Basta’s thoughts on sharing and oversharing, hiding and observing, and Bennett’s protagonist bemoaning the glamour of being truly alone in the world, unseen and unfollowed.
I believe that both of these things are part of a bigger thing I like to call the re-enchantment of the world.
Our world has become increasingly focused on efficiency and rationality, a process often referred to as ‘disenchantment’ that began with the age of enlightenment.
First the white spots on the world map ceased to exist. Then slowly, science replaced belief and work replaced religion. Finally, digitalization and the rise of surveillance capitalism led to an all-encompassing transparency.
The writer Paul Kingsnorth calls that dystopian tech-industrial complex we all inhabit now “the machine”. That system is designed to keep our minds busy. Its constant avalanche of stimuli keeps us from dreaming and from turning our focus inwards. As we’re all forced to live in the machine, our everyday lives lack magic and mysticism.
But music and arts are exclaves where magic and mysticism can still prosper. They can help us re-enchant our world.
The quotes above are about summoning a state of allure by keeping things private, doing something without a virtual audience or even thinking about one, and truly cherishing those moments: Not reacting or broadcasting, not even feeling the urge to tell anyone where you are and what you do, not documenting the present moment for anyone.
Just existing for the sake of being in the world, not as a means of communicating about it.
A lot of music these days is part of the machine – functional music; music that’s constantly overcommunicating, with protagonists feeding the audience’s voyeurism. That type of music is just part of the avalanche of content designed to capture your attention.
On the other end of the spectrum, you will find the spellbinding music that Claire Rousay and Martyna Basta made together on Saturday night.
Yes, there was an audience – a physical one, not just an idea of one –, but the music didn’t want to communicate anything specific or rational. Those sounds didn’t spell things out. The artists didn’t even speak to the audience once.
They re-enchanted my world, if just for an hour. But the effects were still palpable throughout the next days.
Find some bits and pieces for your own re-enchantment below.
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