Amor de Días—the duo of Alasdair Maclean (Clientele) and Lupe Núñez-Fernández (Pipas)—just released debut album Street Of The Love Of Days via Merge. (Those of you who speak Spanish know that the band’s moniker translates to “love of days,” hence the album title.) Maclean and Núñez-Fernández worked on the 15-track LP for more than three years, and it features guest spots by the likes of Louis Philippe, Damon & Naomi, Gary Olson (Ladybug Transistor) and Danny Manners. Maclean and Núñez-Fernández will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with them.
Maclean: Classical composers have rock musicians beat when it comes to lunatic delusions. I’m thinking of Erik Satie, who composed a 14-hour piano piece consisting of one short, eerily harmonised piano figure repeated 840 times (“Vexations”) and told his musicians to play “with shame.” Or Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, who believed he had invented a mystic chord. The idea of the mystic chord is great in principle. It’s a chord that suddenly makes everything unclear clear. In Scriabin’s words, it “was designed to afford instant apprehension of—that is, to reveal—what was in essence beyond the mind of man to conceptualize … an intimation of a hidden otherness.” Scriabin thought this chord was made up of the following notes (assuming you’re playing it in the key of C): C, D, E, F sharp, A, B flat and C. If you play it on a piano, it sounds vaguely horror movie soundtrack-ish. It doesn’t intimate a hidden otherness, I’m afraid. Not to me, anyway. Even if Scriabin’s chord doesn’t do it for me, I do like the idea that there is a hidden mystic chord out there somewhere. That at some point, during a gig or a recital or just when three people in the street are whistling at the same time, someone will hit a wrong note and the chord will accidentally be articulated. And at that moment, everything beyond will suddenly come into focus, and we’ll take off our hats as if we’re in church.
Video after the jump.
