I listened to the same "song" 76 times in a row.

The time that shrooms and The Books turned me into a shambling lunatic

The first time I ever did shrooms, I chopped up what seemed to be a modest amount and brewed them up with a load of black tea, then went upstairs to sip my mug in bed. While I waited to come up, I started putting together a playlist of songs I thought would be interesting to listen to while tripping, and somewhere in there I figured the Books would probably sound great. Do you remember the Books? A magical band who, on the basis of vibes, fit perfectly into the notion of ‘00s indie, but who in more material terms were the greatest practitioners of the much subbier-subgenre of “folktronica.” They’d chop up library music, PSAs, newsreels, educational films, and the like; record their own improvisations on traditional instruments and chop those up too; and pour it all into a massive library of bespoke samples on hundreds of wheezing external hard drives that became their kit for creating nostalgic-yet-alien folk tunes. Anyway, the Books were one of those bands I listened to a lot but, because they eschewed conventional lyrics, didn’t actually know which songs I liked best by name. So, at random I chose “P.S.,” the final track on The Lemon of Pink, and added it to the end of the queue.

By the time “P.S” got around to playing about 30 minutes later, I was becoming Quite High, and I found the track so fascinating that I played it again immediately after it finished, and then three more times for good measure. And then, since it was already on the playlist five times in a row, I decided to make that block loop again. Now is probably the time to mention that “P.S.” is not so much a “song” as it is a 55 second collage of clips of two men and a woman giggling and gasping, as though almost but not quite starting a conversation.¹ I’d recently discovered sound poetry, and as I got deeper into the rhythms of the recording, I decided to record myself doing non-verbal vocal improvisations along with the track, using the voice memo feature on my phone.

As I sat there, growing more tie-dye-eyed by the second, I began to fancy that each repetition of this five-song sequence represented a loop in time, and that each time I returned to the beginning I was doing so with… knowledge I could use to… to like precognitively improve my interplay with the voices in the recording, man. Each time a new loop began, I took to muttering the word, “Begin.” It was around this point, sitting on my bed with one headphone in my ear, recording myself growling and scatting in the dark along with a recursive loop of laughing voices, that I realized I could hear other voices—specifically, those of my roommate and a few of his friends, who, it turned out, could hear the weird noises I was making through the bedroom wall and were becoming somewhat concerned. This sent an icicle of dread directly into my guts. While the things they were saying were actually quite kind (“Is he okay?” / “Yeah, I thiiink so, he just did some mushrooms earlier.” / “All by himself? That’s scary!”) the fact I’d been overheard by relative strangers was enough to make me spiral into a panic.

I called my then-girlfriend, who was out having drinks with a few of her friends, and inquired, as calmly and quietly as I could (the walls had ears!), whether I might be able to walk over to her apartment in a bit. She gave the affirmative, so I pulled my gigantic parka (Ottawa, winter) over my pyjamas, dropped my phone in my pocket with one earbud still hanging in my ear, and began shuffling down the rapidly strobing purple streets toward her place, chainsmoking the whole way to maintain my sanity as I mulled whether I might have triggered some latent heretofore-unknown strain of schizophrenia in my genetic code. (Adding to the unearthly quality of the journey was the fact that my phone’s voice note app was still open in my pocket and connected to my ear, which meant that I was half-enveloped in an ambient swishing noise I thought of as ‘pocket music.’) When I arrived at my girlfriend’s place, I cut a surpassingly strange figure: sockless in yellow Chuck Taylors, red flannel pants, and a t-shirt, pupils like eclipses and hair matted to my forehead. I spoke in a weird, halting cadence I’d picked up from matching the cuts in the “P.S.” loop (my girlfriend said it reminded her of a 5/7/5 haiku), and I would periodically look away from her in mid-conversation and murmur, “Begin,” under my breath. When her roommate got home, she asked if she could go say hey to her, and I replied something like, “I don’t want to say. You can’t, but. I do not know if. You should.” Despite being thusly held captive, she tended to me sweetly,² and after a couple of hours I came back to myself, accompanied by the instant melancholy that marks the end of every trip I’ve ever had to this day.

I have never listened to any of the recordings I made that day. They’re probably lurking somewhere in the dying memory of an external hard drive in a forgotten drawer. But I did check my last.fm account the following morning, and discovered I had listened to “P.S.” 76 times in a row, or roughly 70 full minutes of this:

I can only assume I would’ve had a pretty different trip if I’d chanced to pick a track like “There is No There” or “Tokyo”! But, in its own botched way, even my self-inflicted delirium seems within the sensory world the Books constructed with The Lemon of Pink. Here’s co-Book Nick Zammuto speaking on “Bonanza,” from the liner notes of the 2016 Temporary Residence reissue:

“I think the most important part of the track is the simple sense that the spoken word is a kind of music on its own. The human brain is particularly emotionally attuned to the music of speech, quite apart from its literal meaning. […] It is deceptively difficult to retrieve this infant-like kind of hearing, but when it works, the round formants of the vowels to the open and closed hi-hats of sibilants and plosives, to the dramatic pauses of inhalations, [it] becomes all consuming, taking up the full range of human hearing from the lowest lows of masculine chest resonance to the highest highs of the feminine ‘ess.’ Indeed, there is so much more to language than its literal meaning. It carries everything from gender, to mood, to age, to birthplace, to sexuality, all without needing to know the meaning of the words.”

And further, regarding “Explanation Mark”:

“…absurdity can break into the mind in ways that rationality cannot. It’s as if the front door to the mind is locked and guarded, probably because of nonstop attempts to burglarize the mind through the manipulative language of advertising and other kinds of propaganda, but absurdity allows you to jump the fence, run through the garden and get in through the back.”

Speaking more generally about how their compositions came together out of sampled bric a brac, Zammuto writes that he and collaborator Paul de Jong “often talked of a ‘critical mass’ within a track, where the cloud of elements was so charged with quality and potential to react that, as if by a force of nature, a structure would precipitate effortlessly.” That also speaks to the conditions under which one becomes inspired by a piece of art to make something of your own—some charged electrons from that cloud finding their way into the listener’s head, meeting whatever’s floating around in there, and precipitating an entirely new structure. Thanks to my pot of bitter tea that night I had my head all the way up inside “P.S.,” and there’s something lovely about the fact that track’s queer “potential” lit up for me like an invitation. It’s just a pity I didn’t have thicker walls then (spatially or emotionally) to allow me to really play inside it.

The Books were a key to me, as for so many others I knew, into other ways of thinking about music, whether as a maker or as a listener—and other ways of being, too. When I hear them still, I can almost feel my spit thicken and my pupils growing wide again. They had that quality and potential in everything they did.

1. The samples are clipped from an interview the Books did with radio journalist Patti Schmidt for CBC’s Brave New Waves, isolating all the small human stutters and “umms” and embarrassed titters—a very Booksy conceit.

2. And, in fact, around this time she recorded a very cool Books-inspired theme song for the campus radio show I was hosting.