"At the wedding of a childhood friend, my mother got up and danced harder than I'd ever seen in my entire life. The DJ was mixing a fairly aggressive set of Lebanese dabke music, and somehow, between the poignance of the occasion, the beat's unfamiliar pulse, and the stuttering flash of a strobe light, I caught a glimpse of her as she was at 20 years old."
"Music's ability to suspend, sustain, and reverse time is one of its most powerful and mysterious qualities. The philosopher Susanne Langer believed that this property of "time made audible" was essential to the colorful, parallel dimensions that music can conjure. It also helps explain the wormhole effect, in which moments (and even years) can be compressed into a handful of notes and sprung again in an instant. Few musicians have understood these dynamics as masterfully as Saint Etienne."
At a wedding, a mother dancing to Lebanese dabke briefly appeared as her younger self, illustrating music's power to compress and reverse time. Susanne Langer called this property "time made audible," and music can create wormhole effects that compress moments and years into handfuls of notes. Saint Etienne has, since the early 1990s, mapped dance-music elements onto feelings of longing, optimism, and nostalgia. Tracks like "Avenue" capture love affairs in a crossfade between youthful abandon and adult knowingness. The trio's thirteenth and final album aims to fuse dance energy with tender, temporal emotion and go out with a bang.
Read at Pitchfork
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