Music for Desks: “Ascent” by Corey Sobel
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What is Kevin Drumm’s October (Early Warning)? A short album? A long song? And why has it accompanied me while I’ve worked on my fiction nearly every day since it was released over three years ago?
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I can start with the cover image that first caught my eye in 2017, an ink drawing of a bald eagle by Freyja Drumm. Some might call the drawing crude, but I’ve always found that word to be just another way of saying effective. In the drawing, clusters of black squiggles add up to a flying bird. A couple of long, wavering, horizontal lines below its talons outline a mountainous landscape. The eagle’s wings are raised into an awkward V behind its head, while its beak clutches a fish. The beak and talons are filled in with a simple shade of yellow and a bit of orange at the ends. The sky is white and overlaid by faint blue watercolor washes.
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Press play and you’ll find that the music behind the cover—I’m speaking figuratively here, this is a digital-only release—could be also be called crude, and could be said to contain the same sparseness of color. The composition begins with a modest stack of sustained tones made by a treated guitar, sounds that waver within a modest range, neither abrasive nor smooth. Like all drone recordings, the composition initially strikes you monolithically—and if you’re like me, the first time you hear it you will turn it off before even a minute has passed.
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And yet, if you’re like me, you will find that those tones linger long after you stop the recording; they will have imprinted onto your eardrums just as blotches of sun do your eyes after you’ve stepped indoors. It might take a day or even weeks, but you will eventually give in to your strange craving to hear those tones again. So you’ll press play a second time. The drone will be more tolerable now, if only because you’ll know what to expect, and you’ll manage to reach the two-minute mark.
At this point, another set of tones enters behind the main ones. These new tones move more languidly, delineating a clearer contrast between foreground and background. Somehow, the added density lightens the piece, giving it a serenity that, on second listen, calmed my usual inner fidgeting. It wasn’t long before I realized that what I was listening to was beautiful.
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Beautiful is a lazy description, though, and if you continue to be like me you will have an allergy to any writer who uses that word too automatically. So, in an attempt to better describe this composition, I can try to transcribe what I hear:
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmhmmmmmmmmmmmmhmmmmmmmmmmmm
But that won’t do, either—not least because to achieve something like accuracy we would have to add more lines directly above and below, each differing subtly from the original line—an “r” traded for the “h,” say, or the “m” capitalized to “M”—and this is starting to get a little frustrating, maybe there’s no way for words to do justice to what we’re hearing… until we remember that cover image of the eagle.
Right. These sounds are the sounds of flying.
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This is the peace of upper atmospheres. This is the idea of flying. The dream of it, of being that eagle, the sound of wind steadily pushing past our feathers.
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Is a fiction writer like a bald eagle? The description of the species’ behavior on the website of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology seems to answer with an unqualified “yes”:
• Bald Eagles are powerful fliers—soaring, gliding, and flapping over long distances.
• On the ground, Bald Eagles walk in an awkward, rocking gait.
• Though often solitary, Bald Eagles congregate by the scores or even the hundreds at communal roosts and feeding sites, particularly in winter. These groups can be boisterous, with birds jostling for position and bickering over prey.
• Bald Eagles are often harassed or chased by their fellow raptors and by songbirds including blackbirds, crows, and flycatchers.
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So I am an eagle when I listen to this composition, but I only become that specific eagle on the cover 18 minutes in. At that mark, the tones that have come to feel so lushly enveloping start to thin out again, dying away, giving way to an unexpected darkness. It’s now that you can make out the slow, long slashes sounding behind what’s left of the main tones. These slashes grow louder, more unnervingly tactile, until they start warping the main part of the composition, and then take it over completely.
I’ve spotted something on the ground below. Slowing, circling, I begin to descend. The spaces between the tones widen further and further, and now so much air enters the composition that I seem to hear nothing more than a kind of colored silence: the blue sky rushing past me.
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Finally, just before the 25-minute mark, a pair of quiet clicks: one for each set of talons. For the remaining three minutes of the piece, the tones coalesce into a bass growl that grows louder until it is joined by the initial set of tones that started the composition.
I’m flapping hard now. I am ascending, straining to keep this slippery, thrashing weight within my grasp.
Corey Sobel is the editor of Music for Desks. His debut novel, The Redshirt, is a finalist for the 2020 Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.
