SONG: “Collisions”
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on BBC, 2 Sep 2020, “Black holes: Cosmic signal rattles Earth after 7 billion years”, as used in the post “A black hole bigger than a hundred suns”.
ABSTRACT:
For whatever reason, I started September off earworming myself with the Parts+Labor cover of Kanye West’s “Runaway.” I have two primary musical modes, I think: quiet (mopey) indie pop, and very crunchy noise. Parts+Labor is a noise band, though a lot of their songs are surprisingly melodic.
So for weeks, this thing was a synth bass line and a drum part (of which I grew more fond the more I tweaked it). Then, a guitar part finally emerged – I knew I wanted some kind of counterpoint, but wasn’t sure what it should sound like. Turned out to be more Syd Barrett than Parts+Labor, but that was fine. And then… well, originally, I was thinking of making the vocals a mass of voices. It fit the theme of the song, and I like that trick of multi-tracking vocals over and over and over until they’re as much texture as words.
But I’ve been trying to work on the vocal tracks for clarity here. I side-chained them against the guitar parts to give them some room in the mix, and made one vocal track the primary and let the others sort of fill in the hard left and hard right space, and a fourth track that hung out with reverb on it a little lower in the mix. The verses are just two tracks duplicated, while the choruses have more of that massed voices feel … as well as filling in the guitar part with a double tracked part that hopefully feels something like black holes slamming into each other at a point in history when Earth was still mostly molten rock.
Yes, black holes. They’ve shown up in songs here before, and they always seem to bring out my crunchy side. I wanted the lyrics to be exultant and to convey the orders of magnitude the discovery encompasses – 7 billion years is an unimaginably long timeframe, and 142 suns is absolutely enormous, even if that size does represent a weird mid-range of black holes, smaller than a galactic center but far more massive than our solar system.
One of the things I like about black holes is the idea of singularity, of gravity that folds in on itself so hard that time ceases to work the way we’re used to. Space and time are part of the same thing, of course. A hole in space, a well that brings light to a standstill, is also gap in the passage of time. And this is about two of them colliding in a way that we can feel it a planetary lifespan later. In a way, everything that has happened on Earth has happened with this collision going on somewhere in the background.
The fact that it was discovered with lasers was just perfect, aesthetically.
The song turned out pretty good, if you like them loud.
LYRICS:
At the LIGO-VIRGO lab
The beam detects a ripple
The light waves dropped a nickel
Space collapsed and time is on the slabAfter seven times a million
Times a million years
We still feel it tremble
Bending like the sun was endingAdd a hundred forty one
For better sense of scale
Like Jonah in his whale
If both were masses made of
starsCH
Collisions
The way that hydrogen divides
When mass comes home to dieA redwood takes a tumble
In some silent jungle
The glacier calves
In a lightless ocean blackMass desires a vortex
Where words surrender context
Where light cannot escape
But we can feel the shapeWhere space somehow gets shattered
By colliding mounds of matter
Worth a dozen, dozen suns
And they’re still not doneThe ghosts of crashing cars
And the scars they left to see
Are wounds in gravity
Are wounds in gravityCH
Collisions
It’s an accident at magnitude
It’s slamming absolutes
Collisions
The way that hydrogen divides
When mass comes home to dieIn the LIGO-VIRGO tunnel
The lasers felt a distant rumble
Like the universe was shaking
Seven billion years of breakingThe glacier calves
In a lightless ocean black
Where light cannot escape
But somehow we can feel the shapeLike Jonah in his whale
If both were masses made of stars
If both were crashing cars
And the scars they left to see
Were wounds in gravity
Were wounds in gravity
Were wounds in gravityCH
Collisions
The way that hydrogen divides
When mass comes home to die
Collisions
The way that hydrogen divides
When mass comes home to die