The yin-yin power of music

A day of listening to Yin Yin's discography and figuring out the transformative power of music

Today, I heard a band called Yin Yin. 

Now, this is not a band that isn’t new to my ears, per se. I’ve heard their (the band consists of a Dutch duo) music on Spotify but it was always in the ‘singular’. Today, I heard two albums of theirs - end to end. The first album - called The Rabbit That Hunts Tigers, had a cosmic, disco element to it and felt more ‘loose’. If I were to describe, in my limited understanding of music, what I heard, I would say that it felt like an obscure band playing to a niche audience. The second album gave me a feeling that the band is still playing to a niche audience but the sound is more mature. The playfulness of the earlier album is still present across the album but now, there is an introspection lingering in the tracks as well. 

The other thing I found interesting about both albums is how ‘Asian’ it felt. This isn’t simply down to the ethereal vocal snippets in Mandarin (what it sounded like to me) and Thai. Even some of the instruments I heard reminded me of a similar sound from my favourite band right now - Khruangbin, whose lead guitarist Mark Speer has expressed his love for music from both Vietnam and Thailand. Ironically enough, the addition of elements from these Asian countries adds freedom to the music, which probably feeds into the ‘don’t take us too seriously’ vibe. Funnily enough, listening to their music also reminded me of this anime series Maison Ikkoku - probably the greatest romance anime ever made.

Which brings me to an observation. Has my dislocation at a young age and the subsequent exposure to cultures from across the world resulted in a constant restlessness to get on the proverbial boat in search of virgin lands and esoteric cultures? I often wondered what impact the dilution of the concept of home has had on my personality, identity, and senses and perhaps one ‘affliction’ is to become a slave to this curiosity, a curiosity which doesn’t want to merely ‘visit’ another culture but to breathe it  Now, I’ve never had the kind of disposable income that allows me to see every corner of the world and I wonder whether, through books, music and cinema, I’ve tried to satiate this quest to lose myself in another culture. 

But unlike books and cinema, where my imagination has to work overtime to truly immerse myself in feeling that culture, I think with music it’s effortless. I reason that music transports you to another place but in doing so, you float over it. There are no borders, no awkwardness of language and interpretation, and no feeling of context. If I were to visualise the experience of listening to music, I always go back to travelling on a river. Think of a boat on the river Mekong, ambling across, the boatman telling you stories of his land and his people whilst sipping the local poison. You briefly look ahead and see a woman washing her lunch in the river’s waters and giving you a sad, sardonic smile, which seems to be asking, “Must be nice not having any responsibilities.”. There is no judgement because there is no context. You smile back, maybe give her a wave and the boat moves on. 

At this point, a random reader might flippantly ask, what are you smoking, bro? Well, this is where I will commit heresy and state that I enjoy music the most when I am dead sober. Whenever I enjoy music, I am often reminded of something that

Ted Gioia

mentions, and that is good music can put you in a trance. You can’t recreate that feeling easily and that’s probably why when music really ‘hits’, people get dissolved in it and maybe when someone takes drugs, it adds to this dissolution of the self and replaces it with a feeling of freedom that all of us crave, freedom without inhibition. 

The other experience that I find unique about listening to good music is that it familiarises you with feelings you either ignore or refuse to surrender to for a whole bunch of reasons like feeling shame, awkwardness or being judged. With good cinema or a good book, I can keep these emotions to myself, fearing that sharing them would expose me to the same sense of being judged. Think of a book club and how almost everyone says they enjoyed the book even when many did not. But this is where cinema and music branch out. With music, not only will your entire body reflect how much you are or aren’t enjoying the music. As a voracious reader myself, I’ve always found it hard to describe why I enjoyed the experience of reading a book. But for music, I can’t hide anything. You will see it. 

I recently read a moving essay by

Shruti Rajagopalan

which was an obituary to the late, great Zakir Hussain. I read the piece and as a testament to Shruti’s powers combined with the genius of some of the luminaries who appeared in the piece, I couldn’t visualise the setting but I could hear the music. It immediately took me back to Zakir’s Making Music album for ECM - the one label whose music I’ve devoured more than any other, specifically Water Girl. As the first notes flow from the track, how can you help yourself from sitting atop a bicycle on a long, winding village road and observing people going about their daily lives? There is a dignity in their movement, in how the passage of time, when slowed by Zakir’s tabla or Hariprasad Chaurasia’s magical bamboo flute, you realise how much beauty in the world we allow to simply pass us by. 

As the day winds down and so do my adventures with Yin Yin, I am left to ruminate with their track Ascending to Matsu’s Height playing in the background. My dear reader, by now you would’ve guessed that I have given in to gluttony and have polished off their latest album, appropriately titled Mount Matsu. If the earlier albums took you on an adventure in a Thai night market or a Vietnamese underground club packed by rehabilitated communists, this album felt like those scenes in slice-of-life animes where there is a rice terrace and the protagonist has a conversation with an ebullient obasan where she recalls her childhood. Again, obasan doesn’t give you any context, she just starts and the next thing you know, she has taken you on a ride through a Japan that you will never visit but can exist within provided you walk alongside obasan as she narrates her tales. 

By now Yin Yin has stopped playing, there’s probably a sunrise over Mount Matsu but it matters little because obasan’s story is approaching its climax.