Dilating

“Time dilation is the phenomenon whereby an observer finds that another’s clock which is physically identical to their own is ticking at a slower rate as measured by their own clock.”
Wikipedia

If mathematics rules the world then I contend that music rules mathematics.

Music, in most of its forms is based on rhythms, as to say, successions of silences and sounds following a certain pattern and regularity. It could lead to think that music is a pure expression of mathematical rules. But the musicality and the rhythmic quality of a song don’t stop at the rigorousness of its structure. Rather, a successful piece, one that has a groove is often (if not always) built on the slight differences of rhythms between or inside instruments in the same musical sentence. That small dilation of time (and seemingly space) between each instruments, that ever so small balancing that makes your body wanna move, that is the groove my friend. It is a mathematical regular/irregularity that appeals to our inherent ability to sense and perceive life in anything that surrounds us.

The ancient Greek had a far broader understanding of rhythm. If you’d listened to Plato (or rather Socrate) when he was dispensing his teachings to pubescent pupils (note the etymological root) you would have heard him declare that the rhuthmos is the underlying framework that structures all living activity. The rhythm is behind every move we make or observe because it is an organizing force of nature. I’m not a specialist of Plato so I will stop here on his philosophy, but the way I see it, if rhythm is behind everything we live then the small glitches, then those ever so slight dilations in rhythm between each of our actions may be what creates movement in our lives.

Americano-French duo Berg Sans Nipple seem to have understood this. The song posted today is all about dilation, from the deep, unstoppable, almost organic bass line that makes its backbone to the small piano key-strokes sprinkled from here and there, the controlled outbreaks of drumming and the outer-worldly softness of the voice, every parts of the underlying rhythmic structure of the song seem to distort, dilate and change its texture to that of waves of dark velvet. Waves cradling the listener in a weird place where – like every good piece of music – it seems to invade our world and start distorting, dilating it, changing the view we have on it, the way we live in it.

So listen and dilate my friend, listen and dilate in rhythm.

Berg Sans Nipple – Dilate in Rhythm