Romance Nouveau – Intimacy

And finally, ‘Intimacy’ is done.
As with ‘Surrender’, the Romance Nouveau is an evolution of the original ‘Sensual’ series, and ‘Intimacy’ finally rounds off almost all of the original themes. There may be one more playlist to come, but it’s much less intimate, revolving around infatuation and casual interaction.

The centrepiece for these themes has always been Drophere by dZihan & Kamien. It is the first piece of music that inspired me to create playlists focussed on love and intimacy; fitting then that it becomes the centrepiece of the most personal and erotic of the selections.

1. Four Tet – First Thing – Rounds (1:16)
2. Miles Davis – Blue in Green (5:37)
3. Fluke – Nebulus – Puppy (5:57)
4. Underworld – Sola Sistim – ahundreddaysoff (6:27)
5. Four Tet – My Angel Rocks Back and Forth – Rounds (5:09)
6. Underworld – LikeASwimmer – DinosaurAdventure3D (5:26)
7. Afterlife – Shine – Speck of Gold (5:42)
8. Jon Hopkins – Elegiac – Opalescent (6:24)
9. dZihan & Kamien – Drophere – Gran Reserva (4:29)
10. Yoko Kanno – Fingers – Cowboy Bebop: the Movie (4:24)
11. Yoko Kanno – Know Your Enemy – Ghost in the shell: Stand alone complex (6:24)
12. Yoko Kanno – Dijurido – Cowboy Bebop: the movie (1:55)
13. Yoko Kanno – Rouya – Cowboy Bebop: the movie (3:38)
14. Underworld – Essgee – ahundreddaysoff (2:22)
15. Bent – On The Lake – Ariels (3:21)
16. BT – All That Makes Us Human Continues – This Binary Universe (8:15)

1 hour, 16 minutes.

We begin with the foreshadowing of Sensual 2, First Thing by Four Tet. I really am fond of these kinds of things, even though they most often appear to us in retrospect! That’s the wonderful romantic part of it though, that irrational, romantic part of yourself that starts reading into events of the past and replacing reality with fantasy… ‘I always knew, from this particular moment…’ – that is what First Thing is all about. A look, a word, a brief conversation, the moment you knew that momentous things were going to happen.

Miles Davis’ Blue in Green is actually the only track that survived the cutting of almost all of the casual beforehand behaviour, in that music that is played before any great sexual intimacy. It’s still amazingly sensual, but I always imagine myself slow-dancing with a lover in the living-space of an apartment after a long night out. Slow jazz, glasses of rich, full-bodied red wine, or perhaps the slow and meticulous removal of clothing from one-another.

At first I was hesitant to launch straight into it, but given just how many pieces of music I had to select from, it became inevitable and grew on me over time. Fluke’s Nebulous is a wonderfully erotic piece, beginning slow and then climaxing with all the indulgence of hands pressed firmly against bodies, movements driven by an almost greedy hunger, harsh exhales and involuntary vocalisations.

Sola Sistim and My Angel Rocks Back and Forth are about making love, purposefully, rhythmically, all of the physical aspects as well as the romantic. Shadows in the dark, nonsensical whisperings in the ear, touches of the lips against skin across the body. Sola Sistim in particular speaks volumes to me of losing track of time, when every thought is replaced by the experience of physical sensations. Four Tet’s offering is slower, quieter, and in some ways it becomes more intense, very personally close.

LikeASwimmer, Shine and Elegiac represent euphoria, the almost physical transportation of the body into some other realm where there are only orgasms and thoughts of the affections of lovers. Irrationally blissful, and blissfully indulgent, these pieces are the desire to do nothing else forever other than remain entangled with your lover, kissing, exploring, lying still, moving ever so slowly against the touch of your partner and the shivers of the body as pleasure erupts and washes over the nerves, feeding the brain like a drug. Elegiac begins to slow things down yet again, perhaps also hinting and sexual play and laughter, there’s just something transforming about being at play while naked and in the dark, or in the dimmest of lights, tracking each-other by sound, touch and glimpses of light and shade.

And then dZihan & Kamien’s Drophere.
This for me is without question one of the most intimate pieces of music I’ve ever heard. There is a closeness in it that is indescribable; it only exists in its own musical expression of it. It was the piece that made me fall in love with Madita’s voice, but more than that it shows d&K stripping all of their playful sensibilities back to create something so deeply personal, as if as lovers it isolates you, excludes all other people and all other things, and leaves you entwined together. It’s not just about physical pleasure, it’s that deep emotional entanglement that I guess inspires us to cry sometimes with how deeply we feel loved, and how deeply we love. Tears are wonderful things, and this very complex emotion all tied up in sex and intimacy may for all I know very well be impossible in real life. Like I always say, romance is all about indulgence, and I guess I’m irrational in this sense, that I have a belief that two people can actually know and love each-other to this extent. Hmmm, just listening now as I type, I’ve said too much already. Drophere and the intimacies it suggests are so very much not about words.

Fingers and Know Your Enemy from the goddess Yoko Kanno are explorations of that deeply emotional engagement and its expression through sex and touch. Though they’re both wildly taken out of their original intended contexts, I’ve always been rather talented in translating things like this through their sound. Fingers in particular speaks volumes of very serious, perhaps tearful sex, that yearning never to part, not even upon the inevitable return to the normal engagements of life. The desire to be locked in a world, a city, a house, even a room together forever. Talking, learning, sitting still together and making love. Perhaps it’s the desperation of moments that seem stolen, stolen from the rigours and requirements of life, suggesting healing, evolution, growing closer together and coming to know one-another through the body, complementing all of our engagements with the mind.
Know Your Enemy is a serious piece indeed, and certainly leaves no room for words. In my mind I see… or perhaps create… absolute darkness. Everything is translated through touch, the clutching and the grasping of bodies and bed-sheets, opening eyes to blackness that is like blindness, exhaling in the almost disbelief of the sensation that our very souls are being shared through the points of contact where our bodies touch. Know Your Enemy is obsession, possession, hunger and desperation, channelled and focussed into physical movements in the dark.

Yoko Kanno continues with Dijurido and Rouya, and we lead into Essgee and Bent’s On The Lake. These really are expressions of intimacy itself, they previously made up the Intimacy bracket of the second Sensual playlist. These pieces are about lying together in darkness or dimness, perhaps talking a little, perhaps not. Being together, knowing, perhaps realising the depth of how much we love one-another. There is some abstract of appreciation, of humility and gratefulness, of fanciful, wistful fascination at how involved we are – surreal, unreal, yet so very very close and tangible. Slow, gentle kisses, soft brushing of the fingers, caresses, lying in a half-doze and eventually falling asleep. All things, in some romantically contrived way, are complete.
Essgee in particular I feel to be about acceptance. Perhaps a bit of a strange idea given the context of the previous pieces, but it’s an acceptance and embracing of everything that the other person is. At this point I guess all the raw, physical action has gone, heads are not so passion fuelled and sensation ignited, but thoughts are perhaps still fuzzy in the haze of the aftermath of sex. Still, you think of your lover, knowing their quirks, knowing that your imperfections are exposed to them, knowing that you’re vulnerable and realising that you trust them. In the darkness perhaps an unseen smile, or a subtle exhale of laughter through the nose.

On The Lake just seemed to fit to begin winding up the playlist. This piece always amazed me, because it actually does sound to me as a musical expression of a lake, perhaps early in the morning, surrounded by trees and shrouded in a little fog. Perhaps we sit on the end of a short jetty, perhaps on the balcony of some house away from home, wrapped in a blanket together. One of us may have made tea, but we may not have gotten up at all since settling down, talking and dozing for so long. Nevertheless, the lake itself isn’t a requirement, but the sensation of being awake together in the sunlight perhaps is very much in evidence. The touch of a cold nose against the cheek, the murmurings of affections, touching hands to faces and running fingers slowly through hair. Feeling the weight of each-other’s bodies against our own, a wonderful, comforting and very welcome weight.

All That Makes Us Human Continues, by BT may seem like the strangest choice of all, and certainly I rarely if ever extract anything from This Binary Universe for a compilation, this being only the second time. I was almost happy to end with On The Lake, but checked my running-time and saw that I still had plenty of room yet. On a totally separate listening session, I cued up This Binary Universe, and I’ve always found the entire album to be a great work of intimacy on many levels, not just a lovers’ or romantic and sexual one. The opening piece though struck me, and it has done so often in the past, as some amazingly huge and at the same time amazingly intimate expression of closeness, entanglement, and ultimately love. The mind is transported across entire universes of experience, words spoken, moments in the dark, tears, pleasure, arguments, times apart, reunion and the sharing of experience. Time seems to compress and extend, fold in on itself, shatter apart and merge together in an all encompassing incarnation of everything the relationship is, including the emotionally powerful expression of sex and touch. For me, All That Makes Us Human Continues encapsulates love itself, and a life lived in love, lived cultivating the idea of love, expressing it, learning about it and becoming inescapably entwined with its vast and personal ideologies. Include then a lover, and it expands exponentially yet again in some seeming impossible yet very real advent.
While almost all of the pieces of music in the playlist very clearly are intimate and personal, BT’s piece seems to be irrationally grand, but there’s a grandness to intimacy, there’s an unquantifiable, frightening and thrilling scale of it, that two people can be so involved in one-another, and after-all, this is what the entire selection is romanticising. All That Makes Us Human Continues is a fitting way to wrap the entire expression up, launching us off into a life of uncertainty but of never-ending and always evolving affection. It is intimacy absolute.

There you have it, the Romance Nouveau series is more or less complete. I have a handful of tracks from Sensual that never made these lists for various reasons. Some never fit in each progression, and some unfortunately didn’t fit the mood and themes. Some excellent pieces in particular are Yoko Kanno’s ever playful Slipper Sleaze, and two of Aya’s amazing tracks, Nobody Knows Me and You’re Not The Only One. If anyone has a more sensual voice than Aya, I haven’t heard it yet. There are also some newer tracks to my collection that may be suitable for a fourth iteration; Samantha James’ Angel Love springs to mind, and if there is to be a fourth Romance Nouveau, it would be complimentary to these three which in effect happen in the order that they’re posted here. The fourth playlist would be about that flirtatious, playful sass that originally had its own early bracket in Sensual 2 after Four Tet’s foreshadowing. I’m not sure I would have entirely enough music for it, and while I would probably be content with a compilation that didn’t have the same climaxes and conclusions that I usually structure the playlists with, I may not be happy with its vagueness from a progression standpoint. I tend to try and have all of my compilations end with the two fictional roles growing more close to each-other, it’s both a natural and an intended direction for me when exploring this subject matter. Nevertheless, there may just be enough music around to fit the mood of intriguing infatuation, playfulness and uncertainty to create another list – only time will tell.

I’m glad I have these lists posted, they are among my most focussed themed playlists. Next I will be posting a series much more personal, and much more dire, I’m yet to decided whether or not I will record my notes on how I feel about each song. At this point I am of the mind to keep them private, at the most, notes will be kept very brief. I doubt very much indeed that I will ever forget the purpose of each song in the series.

Next comes ‘Write To Stay Alive’.