"I'll prefer two exist in the end; what a vibration." – Duad, Thirteen Senses
The year is circa 2011. It's the tail end of a transitional era in music history. Physical media is seemingly on the way out. Digital media is on the rise. But streaming services, in the way we now understand them, don't yet exist, not—at least—in a way that's accessible to me or my friends.
In those days, I lived in a couple miles outside a small, rural community and, while high-speed internet certainly existed, it did not exist for my family or most families around me. Our internet access options were limited and we had a satellite connection only marginally better than dial-up (and that margin was comprised simply of the fact that one family member could use the phone while another could use the internet—at the same time!—the speed was otherwise little different).
Also during those halcyon days of the young internet, amid the rise of MP3 file formats allowing the dawn of historically unprecedented access to the world of music, there were a variety of promotional ploys that seem quaint now. Most apropos for my purposes here today was a particular, relatively short-lived fad of artists, labels, and music distributors providing select singles for free. The obvious hope being: if folks downloaded and enjoyed the single, they'd be more likely to purchase the full album or attend a concert or generally just enter the respective bands' various and sundry fan bases, thereby generating a broader set of musical consumers from whom they might extract future profit or clout.
But for my brother and I, these free downloads did not serve a valuable marketing function, mostly because neither of us had a debit or credit card. If we wished to make a music purchase, we had to beg mom and dad. And because we were then entrenched in a rather rigid model of Christian evangelicalism, secular music was generally a nonstarter in terms of a successful petition for our progenitors to make a purchase.
With iTunes’ free single of the week, artist spotlight download cards from Starbucks, and the myriad similar options available at the time (of varying degrees of dubiousness ranging from sketchy torrent sites to legitimate-but-doomed-to-fail startups), my brother and I found a limited sort of musical liberation and agency. When the download was free, no funds were necessary, only an account.
These downloads would sometimes require leaving the computer chugging along overnight, but gradually, over time, we gathered an eclectic library of secular music (which often felt incredibly scandalous at the time). Every now and then, one of our older brothers would burn us a CD containing additional MP3s (sometimes even a full album or two rather than just singles), which we would rip onto our computers and into our iTunes libraries.
One day, in 2011, I was browsing Amazon's selection of free songs for that week. Among them, I found a track called Crystal Sounds by a group called Thirteen Senses. I was drawn by the album art and downloaded the song. It was unique amongst most of the music I was listening to at the time.
Crystal Sounds effused an overall indie rock sort of vibe, but there were interesting classical elements woven into the song that intrigued me. The melody was similarly compelling and was unpredictable in exactly the right ways. I also really loved the vocals and found they matched my own range quite well. The music I gravitate toward is the music I can sing along to with a certain level of ease, so this track checked all the boxes for me and became an immediate staple of my regular listening.
With the advent of streaming services overtaking the mainstream and steadily supplanting local MP3 files, these freebie single marketing schemes became less and less relevant—replaced by free trials to entice subscriptions in an on-demand model of musical consumption, one more akin to leasing an apartment than owning a house.
Although the ubiquity of MP3 musical "ownership" (whether legal or illicit) was comparatively brief in terms of musical history, it holds a special place in the nostalgic corners of my heart. I still return to many of those free singles now and again, conjuring bygone good feelings of a significantly simpler time.
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Fast-forward (another conceptually antiquated turn of phrase) to circa 2015. My brother and I have discovered Apple Music's three-month free trial. I was living in Winter Park, FL for my MFA at the time, and he was in Bellingham, WA, attending Western Washington University. As a way to stay connected while living on opposite sides of the country (as opposite as you can get while still being within the contiguous US), we started taking turns selecting an album of the week.
We'd pick an album, add it on Apple Music, listen to it a few times, and discuss it at week's end. We'd share our thoughts, what stood out to us, what we liked, what we didn't, and so on.
When it was my turn to pick, one of the strategies I would use to make my selection (if I didn't already have something in mind) was to go back through my old library of freebies to select one I enjoyed but had never heard in the context of the full album. It was during one such selection that I returned to the song Crystal Sounds, which, as it happened, was the titular track to that particular Thirteen Senses album.
I loved the album. Crystal Sounds (the single) was the opener and really set the thematic tone for the music to follow. The album itself was teeming with melodically interesting vocals, strange fusions of genre, atmospheric guitars (complete with dreamy reverb and delay), and a really cohesive production.
After that week, as happened now and again with the AOTW selections I particularly enjoyed, I would occasionally go back and re-listen to Crystal Sounds. I still do. By and large, though, I forgot all about Thirteen Senses and, at a certain point, I figured they'd disbanded. I never really ventured into their discography beyond Crystal Sounds, but I knew that their most recent release was from 2014, so I figured they were gone for good and never really gave them much thought, even while I would listen to their 2011 album on a semi-regular rotation.
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Fast-forward once again to Fri, 9 Aug 2024. I'm winding down for bed in the late evening and am finishing up a little reading. My phone buzzes with a notification: it's an alert from Apple Music letting me know that Thirteen Senses just released a new album.
I was perplexed. I recognized the name right away, but I thought they'd long since called it quits. A full decade had passed since they'd put out any new music after all. Two assumptions occurred to me: either a) Thirteen Senses was capitalizing on the current trend of rereleasing older albums on significant anniversaries, or b) a different band going by the same name had confused Apple Music and I was now being pushed a notification about some entirely unrelated music. (As an aside, this happened to me with the post-rock outfit called Caspian, much to my great chagrin and befuddlement.)
Stranger to me than either of the two assumed possibilities that occurred to me, though, was the fact that I received a notification at all. Apple Music sends me notifications so sporadically, with such seemingly arbitrary selections as to endlessly confound any sort of predictability toward what artists will or will not be pushed my way. I have to imagine it’s a pay-to-play sort of thing where artists or labels can send push notifications in a similar capacity as they might target a specific ad on Facebook or Instagram or similar, but I have no idea, really.
Regardless, I naturally opened the notification to sate my curiosity, at which point I learned the new album is called The Bound and the Infinite, thereby dispensing with my initial assumption. I hit play on the first track. It had an abrupt sonic opening that quickly diffused into a wildly slow build. I looked at the track and saw that it was over eleven minutes long, further inciting my intrigue. Once the vocals joined the instrumentation, I realized that neither of my initial assumptions proved accurate; this was new music from the same Thirteen Senses I'd thought had faded into oblivion.
The ambitious opening track hooked me and I listened to the full album as I got ready for bed that evening, but I didn't have the time to give it my full attention.
I listened to the album here and there over the next day or two, and I went back to Crystal Sounds once or twice for good measure. And then, once again in the late evening, I was finishing up maybe my fourth or fifth listen. As I reached the final track, I devoted my full attention to the music for the first time since I started listening that preceding Friday. My plan was to go to bed upon the conclusion of the album, so I sat in Nana's floral chair and let the song wash over me until it reached its climactic terminus. But here I noticed for the first time just how jarringly abrupt the album's final few seconds were.
I didn't like it. It was such a beautiful song concluding such a beautiful album, why cut it off like they did without any aural resolution (especially considering how cohesive and well thought out the rest of the album seemed to be)? And then my eyes widened and I almost forgot how to blink.
No way, I thought. I selected that last track again, skipped ahead to the final thirty or so seconds, turned the repeat function on, and listened closely, staring at the seconds counting down to the moment the album would loop back on itself and restart from the top.
And as it cycled back to the opening track, I gasped, utterly agog. My head almost exploded right then and there.
It's infinitely recursive, I said to myself.
That revelation sealed my auditory fate for the immediate future. As of the time of this writing, I have literally only listened to The Bound and the Infinite since that moment, stopping only when I need to, or when I need a break from music entirely. But I have invariably resumed playback from wherever in the album I was when I last hit pause.
And in this way, I've been lost in the album for days on end. Every song is the first song. Every song is the last song as well. And each and every track is also the exact middle of the album, too. As soon as you finish, you've already started again. There is no beginning or end, not in any objective or meaningfully definable way, at least.
I am as Sisyphus with his boulder. He and I serve out our karmic sentences on parallel Möbius strips, neither of us permitted closure or finality, leaving the philosophers to wonder, "Is Sisyphus happy?" while I'm left wondering the same of myself.
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This time let's rewind. Let's bring it back to circa May of 2022. Since childhood, I've been prone to some conceptually upsetting psychological states that can only logically culminate one way. In the days of my youth, the seeds of this psychic crescendo manifested as obsessive-compulsive tendencies and major depression. But in April of 2022, those germinating seeds sprouted to the surface and, that following month, their presence became impossible to ignore.
Beginning that May, and for the next four or five months, I inched rapidly along the spectrum of suicidality toward its ultimate endpoint. I'd long experienced what I've seen termed "thoughts of morbidity" in a helpful infographic, i.e. wistful thoughts of one's own death, but not necessarily by one's own hand. And even before experiencing such explicit morbid thoughts of this kind, I'd long found conscious existence to be tedious at best. In fact, if you were to go back to the primordial, incorporeal, metaphysical essence of what would become my lived experience and—before my birth—given me the option to either exist or not to exist, I would have chosen the latter without hesitation.
I have, at times, been grateful to be here, but I've never been happy that I exist. More than that, though, the world has long seemed to agree with me. Not the world as in the individuals who know me—who care about me—but the world as in the emergent complexity of the ironically impersonal systems we call society. I have never felt that I belong here and, by and large, on a social level, the feeling has been mutual.
But that longsuffering existential fatigue found new urgency in late spring of 2022 when I transitioned rapidly—suddenly, terrifyingly—from passive yearning for an end to this mortal coil and into an active state of near-constant suicidal ideation. Whereas before I would sometimes experience brief moments of suicidal ideation as an exasperated reaction to a particularly bad bout of cyclical depression or sensory (or cognitive, or emotional) overwhelm, in 2022 it became my new baseline. Instead of spiking into ideation during moments of acute duress, I would spike into suicidal intent.
I have yet to develop a specific plan that I could actualize, and I have never made an attempt, but I have also done a damn good job of avoiding opportunity, which has been very intentional. The fact I’m still alive is not an accident and is not incidental; it is a deliberate act of psychic defiance.
Suicidality is a wildly isolating and lonely experience. It is incredibly difficult to describe to someone who hasn't experienced it, not because the experience itself is all that complex, but because most people seem to be remarkably uncomfortable with the very idea that someone would willingly—even enthusiastically—choose death over continued existence, especially as a matter of preference rather than as an escape from acute distress.
But that's where I find myself. I don't feel like the majority of people I interact with on a day-to-day basis fully appreciate my existential reality. Everyone who has interacted with me for approximately the past two years has interacted with me while I've been suicidal. I manage it well, but even so, barely a day has gone by since May of 2022 where I haven't—at one point or another throughout the day—wanted to kill myself.
And I don't mention any of this for sympathy points. I'm actually pretty nonplused by this reality—it's just a mundane part of the psychological landscape for me these days; it's no longer novel or confusing. It's not unlike someone else who lives with an ambiguously terminal or otherwise degenerative illness. It might kill me today, tomorrow, ten years from now, or not at all. I have no way of knowing. I simply know the likelihood is high that I'll eventually become another data point in another morbid statistic.
I don't say this with any judgment as to whether this is good or bad, either. It is what it is. I find no value in moralizing on the subject. And, ironically, the more that value judgments enter the picture, the more likely my death by suicide seems to become.
We don't moralize cancer. Let's stop moralizing suicide.
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Fast-forward just slightly one last time to Mon, 12 Aug 2024. I'm in the shower and I'm listening to The Bound and the Infinite for the umpteenth time since it released mere days prior.
I don't normally use the repeat function when I'm listening to music. And that's not to suggest I don't repeat albums. Last year, I listened to M83's Fantasy in full literally more than two hundred times. When an album scratches a particular itch, it goes on heavy rotation until that itch has been thoroughly scratched.
But even with my obvious (and, realistically, clinical) proclivity for repetitious listening, I don't love the mindless lack of intentionality the repeat feature provides. (Once again, please note, that this does not contain a negative value judgment on my part.) Generally, even when I know I'm going to repeat an album or a song, I want to press play every time I do so. The moment between the end of the album or song provides me with the opportunity to shift my attention, which I leverage for emotional, cognitive, and nervous system regulation.
With The Bound and the Infinite living up to its nominal implications, though, I found that I was indeed bound to its infinite recursion. Thus, I pressed repeat button and haven't deselcted it since.
Now, on this particular evening, I experienced a suicidal trigger while rinsing the shampoo from my hair and I groaned aloud in response: I want to fucking die.
And then the song changed and the album reclaimed my attention. I swayed with the sonic rapture gripping my conscious awareness.
Okay, I added, I can die later, but I have to finish this album first.
And then I laughed.
There is no finishing this album. There is only pausing it.
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I hold to no religious credo and do not find spirituality to be practically meaningful for me in any way that isn't fully satisfied by entirely material substrates, but there's something particularly Buddhist about all of this. The interminable, recursive cycle loops forever and ever in karmic repetition; I’m lost within a downright Escherian temporal tesseract, trapped experiencing birth and life and death and rebirth (and so on) as I spiral inward and outward and upward all at once. I'm entombed in the catacombs of the eternal now.
Here's another truism about my conscious experience: I have no choice but to exist. I am here, oftentimes much to my chagrin, but here nonetheless. And because I have been here, I was always going to be here. And because I was always going to be here, I always have been and always will be.
But my existence is an exhausting one. According to some studies, my brain potentially processes up to 42% more data while at rest than those in the neuromajority. And I do mean data in the most comprehensive sense possible. To wit, I have long felt like I can see the seams in reality, which gives rise to what appears to be an atypically acute sense of self-awareness at multiple levels, as well as a bent toward hard incompatibilism, the combination of which results in a conscious experience more akin to a first-person observer rather than an active agent. (And as an additional aside, now that I’m saying this, I’m wondering if I may need to later unpack what the above paragraph means in less implicit terms.)
It's hard for me to empathize with any sort of individualism. I don't even view myself as an individual. What is "Jesse" but the emergent phenomenon of myriad collaborating organs, made up of unfathomably numerous cells, comprised of functionally infinite atoms, etc., etc.? At what point do I become "individual"? My consciousness seems to me to be little more than a post hoc rationalization of an array of preceding physiological and environmental realities borne of incomprehensibly vast intersecting systems that are themselves emergent from still further intersecting systems going backwards in time all the way to the Big Bang. More than that, even: my physicality and my consciousness are both constituent parts of a significantly greater whole called society, which is itself only part of a greater planetary gestalt, which…you get the picture.
There are no individuals, only systems. Look eternally inward or outward and it’s systems all the way down; it’s systems all the way up.
What's more, in moments of grounded lucidity, I actually don't want out; I want in—further and further in. Like with The Bound and the Infinite, there is no finishing; there is only pausing and resuming, only life and death and rebirth cycling over and over again until the heat death of the universe. And who knows what sort of universal rebirth may exist beyond that?
In those moments when I press pause, it doesn't remotely matter when or where I resume playback. It's always the beginning—just another rebirth, just another reincarnation.
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Here's a parting bit of irony for you. Recall the moment I described while I was rinsing my hair, when I wanted to die. What caught my attention enough to distract from the sudden intrusive suicidal thoughts were the opening lyrics to the song Duad, with which I opened this post. What caught my attention was that very first line, in which I mistakenly swapped a homophone and dramatically changed the meaning of the lyric.
I heard, "I'll prefer to exist in the end…” which was profoundly beautiful to me and shook me from my suicidal cravings. But, as written, the line itself actually goes, “I’ll prefer two exist…” which makes sense when you consider the title of the track and how the rest of the lyrics explore duality (e.g. “Is it I? Is it you and I forever?”). Even with the homophonic confusion, though, both sets of phonetically identical lyrics are deeply meaningful to me: with one emphasizing that existence will be preferable to its opposite in the end, and the other emphasizing the fact that the individual cannot exist but for its relationship to the collective.
But more to the point of my initial misinterpretation of the song, the intense dichotomy of being both suicidal and preferring to exist drew macabre laughter from my lungs. I laughed because I had listened to the album literally dozens of times by that point and I had no desire to stop; I was trapped in a loop I did not want to leave, which was a dramatic contrast to the loop of my waking life that I very much do want to leave.
It was a small, mundane moment, but it felt entirely stabilizing, like I'd once again found a tether to my humanity, allowing me to carry on for at least another lap around The Bound and the Infinite.
And there, in that moment—or, here, in this eternal now—I understood a simple truth somehow simultaneously self-evident and conspicuously elusive: Sisyphus is finally happy.