Teach me to breathe, uh huh

Typically Syd sounds like he’s still learning the song, or making up the words, or even making up words and word-sounds as he goes along and without knowing yet where the lines come in over the (pause for breath) chord changes. At the start of the second verse he breathes in for the first line (…), misses his cue, faltering on the c in Colonel, then starts it again, firmly this time: Colonel in gloves... Is it a song about breathing? Could be: Chugging along with a funnel of steam, he sings, like a walking locomotive on a cold frosty morning. If it’s in you…  

Another gentle intake of air, dding a small inaudible void to the end of the opening line of this song for Martin Luther King: “Once upon this planet earth...” (…), where the thought itself seems to catch the singer’s breath. And who wouldn’t gulp at this point ? Though not only is it that kind of song, but it’s Nina Simone, a living incarnation of all those paralinguistic vocal sighs, whispers, shrugs and ellipses of the breath through which a voice connects the material body of its singer to the pneumatology of a larger cosmic energy.

Edward James "Son" House, Jr., known for a possessed spirit exorcised in moans, groans, growls, gasps and chain-gang hollering, and here on the late recording of the epic Shetland Pony Blues,* a heavy guttural breathing that sounds like a snorting workhorse halfway up the quarry path, or the painful respiration of a working man treated like a mistreated animal. “Why don’t you catch my pony, now saddle up my black mare?” Son House, as every White Stripes fan knows, died in Detroit (1988, cancer of the larynx) and is buried in the Mt. Hazel Cemetery, near Grand River and 7 Mile.

* From the Legendary Rochester Sessions, recorded at the home of Son House by Steve Lobb, September 1969.

Written by Lindsay Buckingham, I always liked the song, but not particularly the unappealing image carried along in the continuous “oh!–ahh!” male/female vocal exchange of excessive breathing: the thought of Buckingham and Stevie Nicks in some kind of physical face-off with each other. Not sure why I felt any better when I found out it was actually Buckingham performing both parts, pitch-altering his own voice to make it sound more feminine. One man and his body; more honest, more desperate, perhaps ?

In his book Breathless, Allen Weiss explores a relationship between early sound recording and French Symbolist litterature, where breath, in each case, is situated as “the figure of a symbolic system of exchange that regulates eroticism and life itself.” Both writing and the recorded voice mediate between the breaths of life and death. But just as Weiss finds in the music of Debussy a subtle key to the “metaphoric relation between la petit mort and la mort, between orgasm and death…” both are just as ravishingly expressed in a single sound of the body by the New York rapper Foxy Brown : Uhh.

If not exactly a sound of breathing, it did take Laurie Anderson to breathe the word Ha, before processing it through an Eventide Harmonizer and letting it run like a pulse of breath. The Harmonizer was popular for voice-effects in the mid-1970s, used in live shows by Led Zeppelin so that Robert Plant could double-track his own breath (a whole lotta nothing?). David Bowie used it on “Fame” for the parts where the song’s title rises in pitch, like he’s on helium, and falls, like he’s on hexafluoride (No chemicals were used in the harming of this record, I wouldn't bet). If aspects of fame are like the lifting and deflating of a balloon, the image of a pumped up superman* comes to mind in Anderson’s song. Apparently intended as a version of the aria “Ô Souverain, ô juge, ô père”, (O Sovereign, O Judge, O Father) from Jules Massenet’s 1885 opera Le Cid, it also, in different ways, points to Elizabeth Bishop’s poem O Breath: “something moving but invisibly …  flying almost intolerably on your own breath.” 

* Friedrich Kittler reminds us that Alan Turing’s prototype vocoder, developed for encrypting wartime telephone conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt, was named after Delilah, “who in the Book of Judges tricked another warrior, the Danaite Samson, out of the secret of his strength.” Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha… Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Friedrich Kittler, Stanford, 1999

Ralf Hütter : “the bicycle is already a musical instrument on its own. The noise of the bicycle chain, the pedal and gear mechanism, for example, the breathing of the cyclist, we’ve incorporated all of it in the Kraftwerk sound, injecting the natural sounds into the computers in the studio. When your bike functions best, you don’t hear it – it’s silent, there’s no clicking, just shhhh – you’re gliding. It’s the same when you’re in good shape and you’re in form and you’re riding your bike, you hear nothing – or maybe just a little bit of breath.”

Woo! Woo! Woo! Breathe! One and then the two, two and then the three… Then you gotta BREATHE, then you gotta (gasp)… Brooklyn rapper Fabolous (John David Jackson) hails the perfect storm of wild life across the five boroughs of New York with a lyric describing the city as a giant respiratory system via a litany of breathing apparatuses – hospital life-support systems, fire fighters' smoke masks, doctors’ stethoscopes ; all kinds of urban respiration problems, from getting punched in the gut, feeling the suffocating pressure of the city police, or just riding airless subway; as well as the pleasures of being out of breath – having sex, smoking weed, being chased up escalators and down passages, breezing through cross-town traffic in an open-top coupe, or leaning into the dizzying blasts of wind from the bridges overlooking Manhattan, a place where the oxygen of life is filtered through the desire to keep going : “I pace myself (…) and just take a deep breath”*

* On the thematizing of breath in song, honorable mention to the great Kate Bush. Her song Breathing tells of the air-poisoning impact of nuclear fallout from the perspective of an unborn child in its mother’s womb:  Outside / Gets inside / Through her skin / I’ve been out before / But this time it’s much safer in / Last night / In the sky / Such a bright light / My radar send me danger / But my instinct tells me to keep / Breathing (Out, in, out, in, out, in…) / Breathing / Breathing my mother in / Breathing my beloved in / Breathing / Breathing her nicotine / Breathing / Breathing the fall-out in (Out, in, out, in, out, in, out, in…) / We’ve lost our chance / We’re the first and last / After the blast / Chips of plutonium / Are twinkling in every lung / (…) Leave me something to breathe / Oh, life is breathing 

Roland Kirk Roland Kirk could breathe his musical life spirit into a clutch of flutes and saxophones at the same time. A nose flute might redirect a small part of his air stream into melody while the larger body of his internal weather system funnels out blocks of notes sustained in long passages of circular breathing. Serenade To a Cuckoo (From I Talk With The Spirits, 1964), is a Roland Kirk classic. Offset by bird calls and whistles and a few punched yeh’s at critical moments, the murmuring breeze of his breath provides a second voice to the song of the flute as the tune winds its way through the trees apace with the cuckoo, ah ! 

A familiar Portuguese tongue softly chants the word ‘sound’ (som), followed by a strangely simultaneous inhale and exhale of breath that vibrates the space of the recording. Is he meditating? Having a cigarette? Or both, maybe – didn’t cigarette advertisers and the Swami Rama* try equally hard to convince us that breathing is the bronchial pathway to another level of consciousness? Som again, bigger breath. Som again, breath again; then some words – som, mar, amarelanil, mare, anilina amaranilanilinalinarama, som, mar silêncio não
som – a word game, or a kind of spoken concrete poetry with a fluid theme: references to liquid and the light of colours, tones or rhythms of the ocean, the tide, then the sounds** of the words, like a gust of air or crashing waves. Caetano’s body is a communicating conch shell, or a vessel on the ocean, slowly evaporating into its own silent abyss like a cloud. Mar, silêncio, não som…

Alan Vegaaaaa… Karaoke-aaaahhh:  Frankie Teardrop-aah / Twenty-year-old Frankie-aaa / He’s married, he’s got a kid-ah /and he’s workin in a factory-ahhhhhhh / He’s workin’ from seven to five-ahhhhhhh / He’s just tryin’ to survive-ahhhh / well let’s hear it for Frankie-aahhhh / Frankie Frankie-eeeyeeearhh  / But Frankie can’t make it-oohhhhh / Coz things are just too hard-er-ahhhhh / Frankie can’t make enough money-ah / Frankie can’t buy enough food-ahhhh / Frankie’s got evicted-ahhhh / All my tears for Frankie-eeeooohhh / Oh Frankie Frankie-eeeyeeeahhh / Oh Frankie Frankie-eeeyooeahh / Frankie is so desperate-eyaaaha / He’s gonna kill his wife and kid-hurrghh / Frankie’s gonna kill his kid-hurhmmmm hurrhmmm / Frankie picked up a gun-ahurmmmmm / Point it a six-month old kid in a crib-ahghhurugh / Oh Frankie-aherhhah / Screams / Frankie looks at his wife-haoergh / He shot her-ahhhh (screams…)  Oh what have I done-erghh? / Let’s hear if for Frankie / Frankie Teardrop-ergh / screams, nervous tick sounds…

Guru’s a’ha a’ha a’hah… is the familiar mic-check test sound of hip-hop’s reflexive breathing voice. Perhaps first heard in this way on the early Rapper’s Delight (Sugar Hill Gang, 1979), the voiced breath now features strongly in Beatbox tradition, even as part of Mark Splinter and Gavin Tyte’s Standard Beatbox Notation (all those continuous fricative sounds, f and s, for example, that can be aspirated – breathed in or out – are given typographic and phonetic transcription using diacritical marks, such as the tilde ^ [^k ^p ^tss, for example], to indicate that a sound should be made either by sucking inwards or by breathing inwards, rather than by the usual outward breath). Above the crowds, above the clouds (…) reigning/raining down, holdin’ it down…  Above the Clouds would be the song for Aether, Greek god of “the bright, glowing, upper-air” breathed by all of the gods and forming a protective barrier to the cosmos beyond. Air is a sound of life and dreams and a good one to remind us of Guru (Keith Edward Elam), the influential Boston emcee and student of the teachings of the Nation of Gods and Earths, as well as the voice of 8-ball in Grand Theft Auto. (RIP Guru, April 19, 2010)