this post references dates of album listening because i have been using last.fm since 2011 and it owns that i can do that
2013
this post is about a band i really love and the how and why of how this relationship developed. this one begins, like many great music exploration storyies, when i got an invite to what.cd in Jan 2013. That March my dad and i went to see The Dear Hunter while they were on tour, a band he had introduced me a few years previous, but at the show he was easily over twice the age of the median ticket holder. i honestly felt weird and sorry for him being so out of place but i managed to have fun singing along to Red Hands. i got way more into TDH that year and worked thru all their rarities i found on what.cd and then looked thru the artist connections map at the bottom of the page (a fantastic feature of the site that i've never seen anywhere else).
sometime late in the year is when i clicked on Falling Up and then read about the artistic friendship of Jessy Ribordy and Casey Crescenzo who both show up on several of each other's projects. At one point they had formed the "progressive folk/bluegrass?" amalgamous supergroup The River Empires out of parts of both bands. i had listened to their one concept double album (Epilogue) previously in the year and didn't really get it at the time. after exhausting all other related options, i decided that i trusted Casey's professional judgement and started listening to a "christian rock band".
Jessy and friends had somehow finished and released 2 wildly different albums earlier that year: the artsy atmospheric Hours with its more prog-opera post-rock leanings, and the acoustic ambient Midnight On Earthship professing more openly christian sentiments. i grabbed them both and listened to Earthship (Dec 28, 30) and Hours (Dec 31) as the curtains closed in anticipation of 2014's opening act
2014
i honestly did not super vibe with Jessy's voice at first and i don't think anyone i've played his stuff for liked him on that first and only listen, but of course i quickly adapted and added him to the list of all the other alien/angelic sounding men's voices i like. i still didn't consider myself a fan of Falling Up for most of this new year, i listened to a handful of their stuff on and off but wasn't quite feeling the "click" yet until in September when i finally listened to the tantalizingly 5 hour long "Hours - Audiobook" (ch1-3 Sep 24, 4-10 Sep 25, 11-12 Sep 26) that i had seen scrolling thru the Falling Up what.cd page.
Hours is a gifted teens scifi boarding school yafiction story written and narrated by Jessy in which the opening paragraph describes the first lead character as having "an IQ so high that he was practically Autistic" and let me tell you, the relationship this story has with autism only gets stranger and more unhinged. this is what unlocked my understand of Jessy's art. i'm not gonna speculate on what he knows about himself but i started seeing so much of my own very peculiar ways of seeing myself and the world in all of Jessy's music after listening to him express some radically beautiful interpretations of Autistic Possibility in Hours.
quick side note on some of my music listening neurosis. i was profoundly depressed at the time and so it was very difficult for me to "like" anything and i could only cultivate mere drops of the joy that flows through me now. i would only listen to full albums and i would never listen to any music more than once a day and often i would try to not listen to any music by my favorite bands more than once a week. this was all in service of keeping the music i loved as fresh as possible but it also encouraged me to listen to a lot of new music to find more favorites to put in rotation. this technique served me for many years to keep me from burning out on the few things that made it possible for me to feel real for even a few moments. so as Falling Up became one of my Favorite Bands i was not listening to their music every single day and it took me a long time to start loving them with the strength i do now.
in 2012 i was regularly listening to 10 to 12 albums every single day and doing a lot of origami and playing a lot of the binding of isaac, 2013 i was still hitting 8 to 10 albums a day, and in 2014 i was still listening to 6 or more albums a day. 2014 is when i had started supplementing my perilously mindbending free time with anime about girls going to high school and hanging out so i wasn't listening to quite as much music. i was primed to gel with a story like Hours in that part of how it characterizes autism in its characters is with exaggerated reactions and behaviors that are for sure reminiscent of cartoon exaggeration (for some reason, in my mind i saw the character Olive as Matsuri from Ichigo Mashimaro and another girl as Ana even tho i'm pretty sure all the Hours students are teenagers). there's wild emotional drama and tragedy, wondrous worlds and powers, and a lot of high stakes. i would love any kind of animated or illustrated adaptation, there's so much that can be done visually with the often psychedelic nature of the technology at play.
i have not actually relistened to the audiobook since 2014. i did try a few years back but was so put off by the Practically Autistic line that i immediately turned it off. i just find it funny now. all this to say is that i can not vouch for its content or prose as i'm working off my nearly 12 year old memories. what is important is that it had an impact on my developing tastes in the various arts and spoke to me in a way that felt new and full of possibility. i later learned that practically every single album Jessy has ever been at the helm writing for has (i think) been part of his own paracosm-like multimedia millennia spanning superproject (can't think if it has an overarching name). Hours the Audiobook is the only straight forward narration in the entire saga and Hours the Album shares its track names and order with the book's chapters but the resemblance of song to chapter ends there. every track is full of allusions to events from all over the book and to other albums and i think might refer to events not otherwise known about in the book or elsewhere.
i was just reminded of a profound memory of sitting in a H&R Block in late November listening to the first few tracks of Your Sparkling Death Cometh on my 00s sony video walkman while working on tax return worksheets and feeling like everyone in the building realized i wasn't a human being and that they were all beginning to talk about it.
2015
back then one of the best parts of finding a new favorite band was getting to experience a new, great album with all the fresh fan reactions and critique. for me, that first album wait was partway through a 2.75 year gap so i was fairly lucky. i preordered Falling Up's self titled 2015 album Falling Up on cd and got early access to the digital version Nov 10 so by the time i got my preorder on the 30th, i had listened to the album a grand total of 5 times (Nov 10, 11, 18, 20, 27). i instantly loved the album but moderated my listening so i could still enjoy it for the years to come.
the 00s christian rock circuit was for sure the home for Falling Up with their 1st and 2nd album but it's clear Jessy had grander creative ambitions. it's with their 3rd album Captiva in 2007 that their scope started shifting. Jessy first attempted to tell a story with that album that's a lot like the one in Hours but the label wanted something with more overt christian sentiment so he compromised with a few particularly upbeat and more lyrically christian alt rock tracks. the bones are all still identifiable and there are a lot of very clear lyrics parallels between Captiva and Hours.
for several years i was listening to music at every opportunity while playing games or doing origami or chores, in part to impress the music sharing community of a vbulletin forum, but mostly so i could get away from THE DEMONS that haunted my mind perpetually. i learned that if i simply stimulated as many of my senses as possible, then i got a break from feeling bad and hopeless all the time (being active or doing something with my hands does help me focus on music, i was not a passive listener at all). in 2012 my younger brother sent me a cracked version of the binding of isaac that he had downloaded and even though i hated how it looked i ended up spending several hundred hours playing muted isaac while listening to music and then i found northernlion in 2013 and started paying attention to indie games and that's probably why i bought undertale on Sept 21, 2015 (note: less than 1 year remains) after my friend had recommended it to me in part for the music.
The back to back release of Falling Up 2 months after The Dear Hunter's long awaited Act IV helped sustain me thru the end up of 2015 and both ended up in my top 10 for most of that next year. i have a strong memory of being driven back from some saturday church volunteer project and listening to Act IV on my earbuds while having a lot of normal feelings and in parallel watching my entire sense of self crumble before me (which would be far from the last time that happened [it is happening right now]).
2016 begins the dark chrysalis era
this is the year i got super into indie games on steam. i had a sort of real job where, when i was alone i would regularly hold up the long pointed letteropener in both hands as if to plunge it into my heart and, all i wanted was to distract myself as efficiently as possible. good God i have listened to so much music and half watched so many youtube videos while playing repetitive procgen video games. i put hundreds of muted hours each into isaac, gungeon, nuclear throne, hexcells infinite, and LOOP: A Tranquil Puzzle Game while listening to music.
one among several Cool things i experienced growing up mormon is that porn is treated like such a serious problem that my dad thought it was totally reasonable to keep the family computer in a very public visible location so none of his good christian children would be tempted by the magic of the webbrowser to seek out "inappropriate content". It is reasonable up to a point, but even as i had experience being legally culpable as an adult for a few years, my now own pc setup remained in the family den where i shared soundspace with my older, louder brother. i spent most of 2015 and the start of 2016 coming home from work wearing my earbuds, unplugging them from my phone and then plugging them directly into my pc speakers. i did not talk almost at all outside of work and outside of telling my dad how difficult it was for me to pretend to be human. that May i finally worked up the nerve to ask my dad if i could bring my computer up to my bedroom, implicitly because i was the only one with a steady income and i felt like i deserved better (i did) but the reason i gave was that i wanted some peace and quiet. that May i bought a kind of nice light wood computer desk from an estate sale for $30 and after some weight lifting and wire routing and wifi futzing, that June i set out on my fated journey of losing my entire mind alone in a dark room (my bedroom was on the second floor so it was a kind of "falling up" into purgatory lol).
no, i don't think that this post has much to do with Falling Up right now but if i'm gonna be doing more posts like this then i need to establish the framing of my dark chrysalis years (2016-2021) where i sorta lost my humanity and had to borrow it from the art that i loved. i felt like i became a vessel for art, my purpose being to experience as much art (music, anime, manga, games) that i could find which made me feel alive for even a moment. i was profoundly depressed so the best life i could imagine for myself was one where i learned how to avoid all pain and anxiety thru cultivated artistic transcendance. i thought maybe if i love enough art then i'll be able to learn how to like myself or even other people (it sorta helped).
i found a lot of value in Jessy's music in this period of my life. I've felt very seen in so many of his lyrics when i was shrinking into the darkness and being chased by something formless and ancient in my mind. i remember reading that the events in Falling Up (2015) all take place in a single house and i was definitely connecting with that album's depictions of surreal action and confrontation in an enigmatically antagonistic house that seemed to swallow me whole. my bedroom has been transformed turned into a chamber of endless time like the gymnasium in Hours and i was blindly floating around in the rafters. i think i miss that dark bedroom. not really, i was miserable almost all the time but it was an entirely predictable world. i spent all my time overworrying about things that were not such a big deal because i had torn myself free from all expectations and become a blank, broken form. in many ways i am blessed, i am lucky that i had the time and space to "give up" and become a blue ghost for several years but unlike Aeva i managed to break free from that Waving World.
