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Week 748: “Lo-Velo” by Evenings
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I’ve always been a fan of evenings (the time of day) but I’ve only recently become a fan of Evenings (the musical project of Nathan Broaddus). And it wasn’t until even more recently that I discovered how well the two go together.
I was outside playing soccer on the street with my son on a semi-dreary overcast late afternoon. It’s one of those activities that is monotonous in a good way; you watch the ball go from his foot to your foot until you start to lose track of time, your brain snapping out of it only occasionally to let you know that a car is coming and you need to move to the side of the road to let it pass.
So there we were, enjoying the high of a repetitive physical activity, when suddenly the light shifted.
The sun was starting to set, but because of the near-100% cloud cover, it wasn’t setting in a majestic way. But still, the colours of the world around us suddenly got sharper, as if someone had replaced cold, dim fluorescent lighting with a warmer incandescent glow. Everything was the same, but it all looked different.
We both noticed it.
We didn’t stop playing, just acknowledged that it was cool and kept going. But for the next few minutes I was completely captivated by things. The hints of orange in the sky. The dark blue on the ball. The light blue on his shoes. The colour of his hair. The fact that he was the age that he was, and that this day wouldn’t ever happen again.
It was right around that moment that the song “Lo-Velo” by Evenings popped uninvited into my head, and it stayed there until it was time to go back in the house.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The way he gives rhythm to the looping melody by using a quick ducking-out of volume, rather than percussion or the attack of an instrument. The glitchy, jangly vibe is reminiscent of Four Tet.
2. The way the bass notes change while the melody doesn’t. The melody sounds different each time it loops over a different root note, as if it’s being viewed in a different light.
3. The title. It implies the song’s slow tempo (low-velocity) but write it down repeatedly and it looks like you’re writing “love” over and over again.
Recommended listening activity:
Feeling the permanence of something temporary.
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