Extra Life: AEM006 Extra Life

"When he sings about the dog-eat-dog mentality of modern life on “I Don’t See It That Way,” he’s not just painting a confession of personal experience, he’s letting us in on the discussion as if to say, “you’re a part of my world, you’re implicated in this giant social web, where do you stand?” As Looker explains, this is by no means accidental: “What inspires Extra Life on a more general level are my personal experiences and feelings, conscious reflection, pure willpower and most importantly communion with the most unconscious levels of intuition. The unconscious processes are what’s most important because that’s what imagination really is. Any sensitive person can have intense emotions, any intelligent person can reflect on them, and willpower can always be summoned; but when these things resonate with the Unconscious, both personal and collective, that’s when the music takes on the mystic power I aim for. That’s why very different people can relate to Extra Life, people with different experiences, tastes, backgrounds. No matter how personal or esoteric the source is, Extra Life aspires to the universal.”

B-side “I’ll Burn,” an acoustic version from a split 10” with the Dirty Projectors’s Nat Baldwin (Shatter Your Leaves, 2009), originally on the debut LP Secular Works (I and Ear, 2007), foregrounds one of the most present forces in Extra Life: Medieval music. Listen to how Looker flexes his melismatic muscles like a modern-day Machaut, a fittingly gorgeous vehicle for sad, humble lyrics. “Medieval music is beautiful and cold,” he told me, ”It’s some of the most gorgeous, serene, entrancing, transcendent music ever. Even though it’s thoroughly pleasing to the ears, and hardly ever dissonant, it’s still so alien in many ways. The medieval sense of melodic unfolding is so exotic and subtly nuanced, I can’t even claim to have a full grip on it. There are a million nerdy musical details which I love about Medieval music. But I think for me it’s really about the spirit of it. This was a time when not only did everyone believe in God and lived every minute quaking in fear and love of him, but they had a correspondingly devout belief in the power of music to change consciousness. All medieval music is just radiant with the deep belief that music is a movement of the soul. You can feel that conviction emanating from it. They believed that tuning systems and musical intervals corresponded to relationships of the planets and stars. Cosmic harmony, music of the spheres. To them, how two notes were combined wasn’t just an issue of aesthetics but one of the highest cosmic, moral and spiritual order. Half the bands in Brooklyn right now can’t even work their guitar pedals. You see what I’m getting at here? I also love Medieval music because I feel it has this real sense of humility, in a way which I could see as both dark and enlightened. It doesn’t sound proud or self-congratulatory like classical music or later European music. There’s this sense of Man as a tiny insect crawling the earth, totally humble in the face of invisible forces which could either uplift or crush him. It’s shrouded in darkness and abasement but it aspires upward toward the divine. It’s the sound of a culture starting over from nothing after Rome burned. The start of the Age of Pisces, Christ’s age. I think you can feel this in the music. In a way I guess it’s a far cry from our current cultural spirit, but if our civilization destroys itself we’ll find ourselves again in something like this Medieval state: hanging our heads before God, picking through ruins and using our imagination to interpret omens while we pick through burnt books, shards of bones and cell phones.”

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