Elihu Pearlman, Shakespeare professor at the University of Colorado (he of the shuffling gait, Nosferatu-like bearing and incandescent brilliance) used to love a good shaggy-dog sentence in the Jamesian or Joycean vein, in which a well-tempered argument develops methodically and with a kind of structural certainty, but slowly begins to list off-course, like an un-manned boat at sea, devolving but still buoyant, unspooling and spooling out with haphazard and somewhat irresponsible disregard for the mixing of metaphors (here digressions give way to sub-digressions, to brief bright epiphanies, long indulgent qualifiers and turns of the screw, fits and starts), something like a series of Russian nested dolls stacked one inside the next, all of which for the purposes of this blog is neither here nor there: more germane is Professor Pearlman’s reductive claim that there are only two stories that have ever been told: man leaves town, stranger comes to town.

And that begs the question of plot, which to me has always been the least interesting thing about a book. Or a film, for that matter. Or, perhaps especially, a piece of music. To me it’s not what happens but how it happens that matters. Words tend to become so much flotsam and jetsam, leaving us overstuffed or hollow or tangled in their web of associations, unable to unpack and parse their meaning. They drive us up into our heads and away from our hearts and our instincts, where so much of knowingness and beingness actually lives.

Music, though, or at least the best of the music, lives in that liminal realm of pure being that enjoys freedom from fear and judgment. I like songs where the vocals are sublimated or unintelligible or larded onto the back end of an otherwise perfectly fine instrumental track. Here I’ve selected a few songs from my collection whose vocal arrangements and lyrics are secondary or barely there, and whose music videos have neither story nor movement, nor rising action nor falling action, just a static image one can either look at or not look at as one chooses.

– David

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La Ritournelle

“La Ritournelle” speaks to that suspicion in all of us that we might secretly be Sysiphus, pushing and pushing our massive stone up a hill, and that’s life: forever becoming but never becoming. Mysteriously though, four minutes deep in this not-terribly-unpleasant purgatory, Sébastien Tellier’s voice emerges, and the sky parts, and the stone slips out of our grasp and down the other side of the hill, and we are free. What do the lyrics say? I’m not quite sure, and it doesn’t matter.

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Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

In the same way, “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow” lays out a thorny sonic thicket, a Grimm Brothers fairy tale for the post-industrial age. But as with “La Ritournelle,” a somewhat beset opening gambit gives way to bright and wildly ecstatic breakthroughs, crashing waves of sound, bursting out from terrestrial limits like supernova, with breathy vocals undifferentiated from the song’s many rich layers. It’s the best of several great tracks by the German producer Ulrich Schnauss, a solo artist who in live performance comes across as a harried mad scientist with keyboards and laptops for beakers and test tubes. The revelation at 2:52 is among the great moments in music.

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Four Corners

Sam Prekop’s Dadaist lyrics, withheld until late into the song, mean nothing as narrative, but everything as soundforms, as perfectly flowing nonsense emblems of American English. Peppier than the other songs in this playlist, the Sea and Cake’s “Four Corners” nonetheless sets out conditions that it honors with great patience of repetition, then with a quarter-turn at 2:31 becomes something at once quite the same and completely different, suggesting that our struggles will pay off, that interminable hard work will be reborn in bliss.

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In a Beautiful Place Out In the Country

Influenced by David Koresh of Branch Davidian fame, “In a Beautiful Place Out In the Country,” from the Scottish analogtronica outfit Boards of Canada, repeats a single auto-tuned refrain: “Come out and live in a religious community in a beautiful place out in the country.” It’s the come-on of a disturbed prophet, handled here with such compassion and shimmering beauty that the fiery vision of heatwaves and Armageddon we remember from Waco news reports resolves into silence, like the souls who choose to follow their spiritual leaders beyond the gates of eternity.