I’m some reasonable amount of time into a recorded mix from 15-20 years ago, Sasha or Tiesto or something. And I can imagine the DJs playing, in some kind of pre-megaclub auditorium or dark rectangle of a room like they apparently had back then. In front of them, synthesizers and amplifiers and mixers and other devices that passeth all understanding to the mere enjoyer; a low line of blinking metal boxes. And while I know they must physically be supported by a table, in the atmosphere, it’s easy to imagine them suspended in nothing, floating in outer space.
Which makes sense, because existence outside of truly conceivable boundaries – that things can be, in a realm where we humans cannot really imagine being – is what comes across from sounds those devices make. Maybe it’s because of the sound George Lucas decided to assign a blaster bolt, or the kind of sound in between a whoosh and a scrape that comes out of the back of a spacecraft in movies when it accelerates, accompanied by a flat plane of some pale blue substance that is somewhere between flame and smoke. Or that other professional imagination-shapers placed little blinking bleeping lights on the dashboard of every spacecraft cockpit we’ve seen.
But the random-but-rhythmic beeps in an intentional assortment of high pitches; electric-resonant arcing noises; threadbare little walls of sound that pulsate at such a high frequency that they can only be described as shimmering, like points of brightness on a rippled surface in the sun, or maybe, stars seen at the correct angle through the windshield of an X-Wing in turbulence (though turbulence in space probably physically impossible); all of these, our brain associates with a human presence in black nothingness, and stars, and colorful spheres floating alone. Anything like these sounds are the soundtrack for an endless expanse seen through a glass barrier. So that when we hear them, our pavlovian response is to feel like we’re on the edge of all that’s known, on the doorstep of all that is unknowable, alone, and ever-changing outside of regular time.
For some, who in spite of all luck and outside effort, grow up with learned or inborn agony for normally chilly days, surrounded by a lot of other people who aren’t much to ponder the world or other matters beyond; well, put them in a dark room with space sounds, arranged in tonal intervals and consistent rhythms proven by experience and science to control a person’s imagination, and let them hold their arms out and mouths open.