I discovered Erik Satie while in college. The music seemed perfectly fit for such strange and brightly-colored cartoon mornings, rainy afternoons, very sad and lonely drunken nights. Perfectly fit for a dude who felt out of time with himself, a mishmash of incomplete angles and ideas, a dance party, a moonlit walk along a muddy trail, a stranger, a desperate fuck.
The Naxos recording of Satie works performed by Klara Kormendi was one of the few discs I brought along with me when I fled New Jersey for a semester in England. At Fairleigh Dickinson University's Wroxton Abbey in Oxfordshire, a quiet green and gray town that held two pubs, a church, my ex-girlfriend, and twenty-eight determined college students, I often felt very alone. The saddest days of my life, days measured out in tea times and field trips, were punctuated by chocolate waltzes with almonds, sojourns with the princess of the tulips, drinking games with the king of beans. England was beautiful, I was a mess.
I couldn't sleep. Listening to Satie's
Gnossiennes didn't really help. It kept me up. I listened. And as I listened, I stared into the wooden eyes of the dragons and gnomes carved into my Jacobean bedposts. It all made perfect sense. Mine was room 15, the room which separated the queen's suite from the king's, the room where the two would come together to fashion the royal screw. It all made perfect sense. I have no idea of what it all meant. Satie was beautiful, I was a mess.
The music seemed littered with mistakes that were meant to be, that had to be, that were not mistakes at all. It flitted and twirled and whispered and banged, and, somehow, made me feel alright. Things, I need to say, were not all bad. My favorite times — when things were most okay — were those times flushed by honey-colored sunsets and Michelle draping her body across my bed thinking of I don't know what and Pete sitting in my chair scribbling lyrics to songs that would become my best friends, while I strummed guitar, hoping to capture something of what Satie had in mind. It made no sense.
But when I think of piano, I think of Erik Satie. So,
when Monty mentioned that the PSB Alpha B1s might "come real close to nailing the ivory keys," might even outperform the four-times-as-expensive Totem Arros at conveying harmonic fullness, I decided to dig up Satie's Piano Works.
Ah, Monty was right.
I didn't expect — how could I expect?! — the $279/pair PSB speakers to outshine the Totem Arros in any aspect of musical reproduction with any genre of music, but switching back and forth between the two, while enjoying the blindingly beautiful fourth and fifth
Gnossiennes — so gorgeous, so painfully gorgeous — I couldn't help but think the PSBs brought me closer to those strange and faraway days. It wasn't obvious, it was hardly much, but it was so very significant. I don't know what else to say or how else to say it, but to say that the PSB speakers evoked the soul of the music — or, at least, what I understand that soul to be — giving the music an emotional and physical life that extended beyond the silver disc and all the spinning parts, all the wires and whatnot, with stunning clarity and delicacy, to reintroduce me to a real time and place, specific to my personal experience. It made sense — really made sense — of all the incomplete angles and ideas and muddy trails. It moved me, brought me closer to the music, and, in some quiet way, brought me closer to myself. And if that isn't weird and wonderful, I don't know what is.
Thanks, Monty, for the tip.
