then we saw the stars again

Arthur Honegger – Pacific 231

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A few favourite travel memories:

Taking a very early bus from Palermo to Catania, leaving at 5 AM and listening to Autobahn and Trans Europe Express on repeat as the sun would rise

Taking a train from Lyon to Turin on my way to my parents’ house, and listening to Boom Boom Satellites’ on the painted desert as the track winds around snowy valleys in the morning sun

Taking a three-week interrail trip with my sister around Scandinavia, and listening to () and Agaetis Birjun.

There is something about travelling that almost commands the presence of music. A synesthetic epiphany occurs, and you are moving in more ways than one. Whether it is your daily commute to work, a road trip with friends or your evening jog on the treadmill, music allows the mind to both focus on the trip ahead and wander to another completely imagined space altogether. And if you ask me, nothing does it better than post-rock.

It must be the tempo, or the instrumentation. Or the fact that there are no lyrics to focus on, and the narrative is ours to make. Either way, few things beat a good 10-minute epic as the soundtrack to a mindblowing trip (interpret this as you want…)
These are interior discoveries, and I find that they work best experienced alone: as much as I love driving around with my wife and kids, I obviously don’t want to get into the same state of mind in that context. And I don’t play the same music at all with them – it just doesn’t really fit.
On my own though, I need to feel this connection to my surroundings through the music, and here we have a paradox: I am both isolated from the outside world and at the same time I become more aware of it, as everything unfolds more clearly in my own soundscape.

The way music can be the perfect companion to a journey was something very close to the heart of many XXth Century composers. These musicians grew up at a time where everything around them was changing faster than ever before: the first cars, the first commercial flights, the first radio broadcasts. Suddenly it seemed that people could just be and go everywhere, almost at once.
The futurists exposed the many sides of progress in their art. Looking at their paintings, it’s easy to see how obsessed they were with technological advances, and a movie like Metropolis is a perfect example of this attraction to the sensual machine.

Arthur Honegger, a Swiss composer, was similarly fascinated by mechanics, and locomotives especially. His most famous piece, Pacific 231, is an ode to one of the most famous steam engines of the time, and everything in the piece is there to mimic its mechanics, from the opening steam blows, to the inexorable pumping of the pistons, to the violent braking and eventual stop at the end.
As an art piece, it is both figurative (you do have a perfect rendition of something everybody has seen before) and abstract (the music is resolutely modern,tonality is definitely not the main feature, and every sensory aspect involved in travelling is merely suggested by sound).

Where this locomotive will take you is entirely up to you. Enjoy the ride.

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Pacific 231 was the basis for this experimental short by French Filmmaker Jean Mitry. it won the best editing award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1949, and it still looks way ahead of its time.
The edited footage is synced to the music, something along the lines of what Michel Gondry did with Star Guitar by Chemical Brothers. Except that Mitry did it old school…keeping it reel.