Hiya. johnnyoftheWell here. A couple of weeks ago I found myself hospitalised, in severe pain and a 50/50 mix of unable and unwilling to listen to music. It sucked.

Here’s a Digbox about how I got out of that.

So, uh, welcome to a special edition of the Digbox. This is a little unorthodox and perhaps closer to straightforward diarism than anything I’d usually allow to be published about music under my name, but there are circumstances and pressures and maybe even a story behind it. So there: get your shovel.

Around mid-November I picked up inflammation under my wisdom tooth, which proceeded to turn into an abscess. I struggled through work and visited my dentist on the regular, but he didn’t pick up that my increasingly debilitated state pointed to an abscess until it was too late. Next thing I knew, the right side of my face was swollen to three times its usual size, my jaw was locked shut, and I was in a hospital bed with little to do but knuckle down and count the minutes between continuous rounds of painkillers and antibiotics. Up until the start date of this piece, I was only able to listen to music as a frayed-nerve distraction, which I stopped entirely once in hospital because I felt too washed out to process anything and the inflammation had spread to one of my ears anyway. So much for that end-of-year cram.

Fortunately, and I guess inevitably, things picked up. I had a couple of highly moving and fundamentally reorienting experiences with specific songs that seemed so far removed from what I’d come to expect while treating music as a grind that I figured I’d draw up a diary experiment to trace out the correlation between my road to recovery and my path back to music. Goodness knows what any of you expect to get out of this, but by all means read away. 

[“Digbox” – reimagined by SandwichBubble, 2021]

Dec 4th 

Glassjaw – Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence

This was the track that sort-of lifted the lid on music for me, even if – confession hour – I didn’t actually listen to it. No need. I know this one inside out: the verses’ nauseous bassline, the bawling throat-render of a chorus, and that unforgettably desolate coda that sees Daryl Palumbo expend what seems like every last fibre of his dignity and civility into an animalistic isolated shriek. For the unfamiliar, this track is a throttlingly dark insight into inconsolable bodily dysfunction, based on Palumbo’s struggle with Crohn’s disease. It’s no “help me”, no “leave me be”, just a horrifyingly stark “I am alone and no-one can share this with me”. Brutal as all hell. 

I don’t want to compare my experience too closely with Palumbo’s, but I saw this bumped on Sputnik within minutes of an absolutely revolting session involving a sink, extensive retching, and miasmic levels of pus, and I don’t think there’s a single piece of music in the world I could have related to harder. That twin sense of disgust and desolation is fucking awful, far more so than my imagination had any chance of filling in when I first heard this almost a decade ago. Being alone with your shit, sabotaging, horrifying body really is the absolute worst. Fortunately, my sink episode signalled a sharp shift towards healthier times – my swelling abated rapidly, and most of the pain left with it – but I’m still too scared of the power and truth in this song to go anywhere near it for now. 

Beach House – Levitating

If the Glassjaw song was embarrassing for obvious physical dignity reasons, this one was dangerously close to me tripping over my own opinions. I have very little good to say about pre-7 Beach House, although Depression Cherry is the only release from that era I’d consider relatively sound. I’ve broadly written the band off as bland comfort music, I think mostly rightly. However, “Levitating” is perhaps the only song from that ‘classic’ patch where the duo’s songwriting touched on something truly special, and since bland comfort music boded well for cleansing and convalescencing, it was the first track I reached for when I felt sufficiently stable and free of painful ear pressure to the pick up my headphones again. That made it my first song in a week, and probably the first thing I’d heard with full attention in three.

It devastated me. Far more than a mere *good Beach House track*, the shimmery first half thawed me out to the point that the keyboard pulses, treacly overdrive and gorgeous, gorgeous countermelodies of the latter made me feel like a 14 year-old rediscovering music all over again. It was pure, it was more than I realised I could process, and it touched me in a deeply profound way that almost made me question everything I knew about Beach House. The weight of this whole fucking month together with the relief of a light at the end of the tunnel and a massively subsided pain level kind of twisted around and came together inside me like some otherworldly light of healing, and I just lay there with my eyes closed, letting myself lose it as it rose up through me. It was powerful in a way I forgot you can get from music, so singular and satisfying that the thought of queuing another song up after just felt cheap (off went my iPod), and it took at least 10 tissues to return my nose and eyes to a vaguely presentable state afterwards. I’m not sure how much of this will scan to an emotionally balanced readerbase, but also I don’t care. “Levitating” brought me back to life, and – Beach House be damned – I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve ever had with a song.

Dec 5th

Hiperson – I Don’t Want Another Life

I gave it 24 hours after “Levitating” before queuing up another track, by which point a large part of my health and spirit were midway through returning. I wanted something with a quiet strength to it, and this late cut from Hiperson’s 2020 milestone record Bildungsroman seemed like the perfect thing.

Hiperson are a difficult band to write on, but their mystique, their frankness and their plainness fascinate me more and more the longer I peer at them; they’re steady and unphasing, but I find myself opening up in a way I rarely get for new discoveries. There’s something at once defensive and candid to vocalist Sijiang Chen’s wonderfully clear Mandarin vocals, as though she’s channeling something authentic but is constantly wary of how much she wants to let go. Likewise, her bandmates’ rock arrangements are crisp and refined, almost drab on first inspection but impeccable in the spotlight they place on her. Hiperson are an overlooked – or emerging? – group, and the discipline and honesty of their sound seems to me like one of the only worthwhile places indie rock has left to go. I mean that; there’s something immensely refreshing, if patient, to their style that sounds ever more essential to me as the rest of the genre incurs steady increments of jadedness year by year – but anyway, this track specifically speaks to me a little bit more. It’s like sitting beside a small lamp in a space of vast darkness and finding a strange, very real kind of contentment there. 

I’m willing to get on a bus again with the criminals

Driving halfway up the hill like black wax

To that small town like candlelight

To have a late-night meal once again with everyone

sings Chen, an unassuming yet highly memorable testament to life’s small treasures. The honesty here is that it feels more like a torch song than a joie de vivre anthem, remarkably well constructed as such with its dirgelike pacing, almost stiflingly simplistic production, winding, vaguely Slint-like guitar pangs, and occasional hauntings of droning reverb. The whole piece feels like Chen reaching to assert that title statement (another life; she does not want), but struggling at first to lay it down with conviction; there’s a lot to doubt and hesitate over in this dark, dour life, and the composition confronts this quite openly.

However, the band see her through, vocal harmonies giving strength to her chief refrain, until the track supersedes itself entirely with a minute-long instrumental outro, half post-rock climax and half weary drone, guitars coursing and churning as a march rhythm rounds things off with a brittle sense of rigour. To me, it’s the sound of how having *just* enough strength or *just* enough conviction can feel like the most powerful thing in the world, even if you’re approaching things from a position of weakness. It’s a spartan climax, not an “epic” one, but as I vamped my volume and let it batter my ears like slow thunder, I don’t think any other piece in the world could have warmed my blood quite the same way. 

Dec 6th

Gidge – Seems to Be Getting Closer

Today was a bit of an in-between deal: my pain levels were low, my face was more or less restored to the shape of a…face, my voice was almost back to normal, I had a little more energy than I knew what to do with, and yet I still wasn’t up to acting like a real life sustainable healthy person, precocious overestimations aside. I shaved the back of my neck to pass the time; I bought a chocolate chip muffin from the hospital store to see if the finger-wide gap accommodated by my slowly slackening jaw could take it (went pretty well until a moment of discharge thwarted things, but then again it was a big muffin).

Point is, I was washed out and a little bored and wasn’t looking for anything extra affirmative in music as much as something to tide me out. I’ve always liked Gidge: the pair’s patient microhouse beats aren’t necessarily my usual thing, but I find they have a wonderful knack for unravelling a simple motif into an enduring atmosphere. Like much of their latest album, “Seems To Be Getting Closer” veers on the kitsch end of things, but the delicate alternation of glitches in its serene vocal sample and an impeccably paced set of beats give it all the contour it needs to sustain its titular light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel effect. It’s a gorgeous piece, half fragile and half uplifting until it hits a certifiable bliss-out of a climax and takes me the hell away. I wish it hadn’t brought me back; a longer fade-out would have been much appreciated. Wonderful song.

Dec 7th

Today represented a significant and far-reaching milestone: I realised I was bored as all fuck. I think yesterday was a transitional kinda deal where I started to outgrow the hospital and the whole State of not being healthy. My body wants to be healthy, and it feels most of the way there! Why can’t I do normal people things? I’m tired of having an evil wisdom tooth that wants to lock my jaw and poison and kill me. Fuck that noise – I want my jaw to open up so I can get out there and eat some pizza. I want to catch up on TV. I want to ride my bike. I want to see my girlfriend. I want to go back to work, holy shit, I want to go home and do some bloody laundry for all the joy that would bring. 

This boredom gave me the resolution that it’s perhaps time to start treating music like a filthy consumerist hog once again. The whole one-song-a-day thing has been wonderful and eye-opening, but it’s time to welcome music back into my life wholesale now; nothing else fills in empty hours quite the same way. Here are a few key tracks I kept myself sane with, and after that I guess this little diary-feature will have run its course. 

Macaroom – Tombi

This track is a hard staple, effortlessly dreamlike, childishly danceable, catchy as death, full of subtle glitchy flourishes and conveniently the easiest thing I’ve managed to transfer to my friends’ stereos since I moved to Japan. It’s the best daydream anthem and quite possibly the straight-up greatest pop song of at least the last decade, and it normally hits me like a warm shower whenever I’m out on the streets or in someone else’s car. What I didn’t know til now was that this delicate delight of a shy bop transforms into an outright banger if experienced, say, propped upwards in bed with a festering level of unreleased energy. Hot damn, I haven’t wanted to dance so hard in so long. Try it, kids: sit on your sofas, shuffle your shoulders and tell me you’re not a hair’s breadth away from letting out your best Anything Dance. Fuck me, this song is pure gratification. I remember a while back in Song of the Day, Doof said it was weak by the standards of the genre – like that troglodyte knows what the “genre” is or has experienced anything close to a daydream in the last twenty years. Modern classic. 

Supercar – Playstar Vista

“Tombi” got me on a rise, and I wanted more of that posivibes grooveable midtempo adrenaline drip. “Playstar Vista” is one of those magical songs that takes two simple ideas and weaves something perfect between them, those being a rise-and-shine set of bright rock chords underpinned by some groovy derivative of a breakbeat doubtless siphoned from contemporary Shibuya Kei, and triumphantly superloud bursts of blazing heartwarming shoegaze guitars that obviate any need for a chorus because that, ladies and gents, is the kind of repeatable segment that belongs at the heart and soul of a great track. Similar to “Tombi”, I didn’t realise this could be a headbanger until now, but my ears are open and my spirits are up. 

Sonic Youth – The Diamond Sea

Turned out that “Playstar Vista” got me a little too pumped; it was around midday and I suddenly felt ratty and stir-crazy, so I ditched my headphones til the evening and spent the day playing Age of Empires on a recently rebooted laptop. At this point, I think the “magic” of my rediscovering music has mostly worn off and there’s not much future in this piece beyond me stewing about my boring overcooked feelings. It is time for an endgame! 

I threw on “The Diamond Sea” right after lights out, aiming to rinse out my ears a little. Sonic Youth have been on my mind a lot lately, mainly thanks to Kim Gordon’s memoir, which I read this week half out of longstanding interest and half out of pain distraction when things were, uh, less endurable. I remember she singled out Washing Machine as one of their absolute best-sounding records at that point in time, and said “The Diamond Sea” had been recorded in one take. Boy, does it show; this thing is more seamless than I remembered and you can tell its various jams and drones lean on band chemistry in ways that overdubs and splices could never hope to replicate.

I found myself drifting out of consciousness during the final drone section, but this was distantly in tune with the piece; as the guitars swelled up to their monumental final noise climax, my senses came back in perfect sync. It was a perfect “holy fuck what’s happening” moment, frightening for a moment as I blipped in and out of that sleep paralysis state of liminal consciousness and felt like my brain was being flooded by otherworldly feedback, but ultimately held steady by the track’s steady pacing and patient dynamics. But really, all this is something I, or anyone, could have experienced in any state of health, awesome as it is. Time for me to shut up; that’s enough digs from the last few days, I’m in a good state of recovery and will be out by the weekend, thanks for reading, and those kids on the Washing Machine album cover? Turns out their heads are cut off because the band forgot to retain contact info after the shoot and therefore had no means of obtaining legal permission. Epic. 

Dec 10th

Bloodthirsty Butchers – -100% & -100% No. 2

One final reflection. My good pal MiloRuggles, privy to the ongoings of this piece, persuaded me to take a little more time off and give the whole delayed-listening deal one last shot for the sake of a little resolution. I was unsure whether this would end up performative or not, but obliged after a quick shuffle binge on Dec 8th. My stir craziness and boredom have largely worn off by now; I get discharged tomorrow morning, which is a huge relief, but I’m more conscious than ever that I still have some time left to make a full recovery, that my body is on the emaciated end of things, that my jaw still doesn’t open widely enough to consume, say, sushi, and that transitioning back to work next week may not be a walk in the park. Onwards and onwards. 

Life goes on, attritionally, unromantically but, with the right attitude, perhaps quite satisfyingly. The two “-100%” songs near the end of Bloodthirsty Butchers’ wonderful slowscuzz trek Yamane have been very important tracks to me for good ol’ one-foot-in-front-of-the-other action for quite a while. Something about their plodding tempos, muddy guitar spillages and tuneless refrains really speak to me when keep going is a more precious sentiment than being the best version of yourself, or whatever horseshit. There’s real, persistent, unhurried grit in these tracks, and if they’re the polar opposite of headphone music then hey, no harm in making do. 

Now, about that resolution. This past week has reminded me of the uncanny, heart-opening power that a sincere, engaged relationship with music can sometimes deliver into my life, but it’s also reminded me to be cautious not to take this for granted or commodify it in a way that this piece has so far done its utmost to avoid while delicately skirting. In a day or so, I’ll probably be back in full consumer mode, listening to a reams of music that gratifies or inspires me, and also a lot of cursive flim that I don’t really believe in. I think this can be okay. I don’t think a lot of music – most music, maybe – is worth believing in, and I don’t believe that corny resolutions about the power of music amount to much without some awareness of the amount of bilge you end up wading through to find the songs that stick, or a concession that sometimes your favourite tracks, even in a seemingly opportune moment, aren’t going to hit you at their best because this isn’t a guaranteed science and your whims don’t entitle you to those kinds of special moments. I’ve never had trouble picking bones over this, but at least now I feel a little clearer about the real, rare strength that the likes of “Levitating” and “I Don’t Want Another Life” can suddenly conjure when the moment is truly right. I don’t want to concertedly live for those moments – that’s a little close to entitlement for me – but just knowing that they can and will find me when they need to is enough to believe in for now. Out I come and on I jam.