Platform 9 ¾
Listen at spoti.fi/3vcH8jQ • Collab 12 • 11 June 2021
Notes On Notes is a monthly listening exchange series. One collaborator creates a customized playlist, and the other listens and responds with a selection of non-musical pairings. Collaborators don’t know the themes or motivations beforehand, which helps to keep the process focused on discovery and surprise.
“Platform 9 ¾”, the June 2021 collaboration, features Claire Boylan as playlist curator and Annis Saniee as respondent. This month’s collaboration completes the first year of Notes on Notes! This milestone is aptly marked by our collaborators’ meditations on the journeys that we take into the interior realms of our minds. Through music and maps, they invite us to abandon ourselves to inner worlds and chart new spaces of imagination.
Playlist by Claire
Whenever I try to clear my mind, I notice that thoughts and external stimuli—sights, sounds, sensations—ceaselessly emerge and dissolve, bearing resemblance to trains entering and leaving a busy station (if you remember those from the pre-COVID era). Oftentimes I bear witness to my mind boarding one of these trains and being carried away, sometimes so far that I don’t even remember where it departed. This scattered thinking is compounded by saturation and constant stimulation by the media, the 24-hour news cycle, and easy access to unlimited information and entertainment, keeping our attention spans short. For a lot of people—probably for you, definitely for me—this is the default state of mind and I never seem to get to the bottom of it. This playlist is a collection of minimal, mostly instrumental songs with a recurring pattern of repetition. When listened to in order, it might help you enter a ‘flow state’ that is both engaging and meditative, so that the next time you find yourself lost in that busy train station, you might be able to take a brief moment to reflect before you board the next train.
Claire Boylan is of mixed Korean heritage, born and raised in Germany. Besides making it into the top 0.1% of Radiohead’s Spotify listeners in 2020, she is an avid analog and digital photography aficionado, architecture admirer, and a lover of East African food.
Listen to the playlist here.
Response by Annis
“Platform 9 ¾” whisked me away with its irresistible question: the same indeterminate question posed by the hushed drama of a starry night sky, imploring us to let go of what we think we know. Johan Huizinga, the Dutch historian of play and culture, coined the term “the magic circle” to describe the apparent kinship between games, ritual, theatre, and similar activities which demand from us a child’s earnestness and suspension of disbelief. Or, to follow Tolkien’s lead, what is in fact needed is “secondary belief”—a willingness to accord with and uncover the laws of an altogether different world. These are the prerequisites of genuine discovery. Like any good cartographer, our primary task when confronted with the unfamiliar must—as humble visitors—be to observe, chart, and interpret the elements of this new world on its own terms, to the best of our capability.
As with any unknown landscape, the points of reference within the soundscapes of “Platform 9 ¾” seem to have an uncanny way of shifting; with a sleight-of-hand, their strangeness becomes the site of the transfiguration of the sublime. Mystery begets a willingness to be surprised: “here be dragons” (and faeries, for that matter).
This playlist will take you on a tour through a diversity of inner worlds, provided you’re willing to sharpen the creative imagination and enter its magic circle. Having myself taken this ride on multiple loops, I invite you—the player, the participant—to follow along using maps I’ve curated from both historic and contemporary attempts to chart the ever-changing contours of the imaginal realm. Each map is an approximation of the unusual, sometimes puzzling, and often beautiful spaces and terrains you might expect to find along the way. (Tip: zoom in as close as your browser will allow). They are each paired with a selected artistic rendition of sights of particular note visible through the “windows” of this circling, ephemeral vessel; the places I inhabited, however briefly. Additionally, to appease and focus the hungry intellect which may otherwise divert you off the tracks, I have also included brief “legends” to accompany you on your journey.
What you see may be quite different indeed. I didn’t make the rules. I’m still deciphering them.
(Addendum: since I simply couldn’t resist, I’ve made my own playlist in response to “Platform 9 ¾”—another journey through the immateria, as it were, this time treading the waters at the edge of sleep and dream. Listen to Luna River here.)
Track 1: Le Jardin (Roedelius)
Legend
- Immateria
“Oh God, I know this place. I… we. We know this place. It’s… it’s like a recurring dream that I… that [she] had when she was, like, nine or something. Or… or maybe she just dreamed she had that dream. Or she dreamed it once, but in the dream she remembered dreaming it before… or…”
(Alan Moore, 1999, Promethea in Misty Magic Land)
2. Magic Circle
“[Poetry] lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, […] and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child’s soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man’s wisdom for the child’s.”
(Johan Huizinga, 1938, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture)
Track 2: Movement 3 (Floating Points, Pharaoh Sanders, London Symphony Orchestra)
Legend
- Maze
“It is not by chance that, in the ’30s, the constructor of the puzzle was known as Sphinx […] it remains true on the one hand that the riddle posed by the Sphinx was, if
I dare use this expression, blindingly simple, and on the other hand, that what is at stake, in crosswords as in psychoanalysis, is this sort of quavering of meaning, this ‘disturbing strangeness,’ the uncanniness through which the language’s unconscious seeps out and reveals itself.”
(Georges Perec, 2006, Thoughts on the Art and Technique of Crossing Word)
2. Intrigue
“…a sequence of oscillating activities effectuated (but certainly not controlled) by the user […] a secret plot in which the user is the innocent, but voluntary, target (victim is too strong a term), with an outcome that is not yet decided — or rather with several possible outcomes that depend on various factors…”
(Espen Aarseth, 1997, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature)
Track 3: Il Pavone (Maria Monti)
Legend
- Dreaming
“…along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.”
(David Abram, 1996, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World)
2. Mandala
“…by tradition usually circular, but not necessarily so. It is, essentially, a symbolic ‘statement’ in visual form regarding the exterior cosmos, or an aspect or portion of it; or expressing an interior state. (The exterior and interior interpretations are not truly separable). […] This is needed here: to initiate any psychic or magical action, the creation of stresses in the astral ambience is necessary.”
(Melita Denning and Osborne Phillips, 1985, Magical States of Consciousness)
Track 4: Confessions (Jitwam)
Legend
- Paracosm
“For Marcos Novak, an architect, ‘cyberspace is poetry inhabited, and to navigate through it is to become a leaf on the wind of a dream’ (‘Liquid Architecture,’ 229) […] Michael Heim, well-known VR philosopher, spoke eloquently of the ‘erotic ontology of cyberspace,’ widening erotic to a Platonic sense (‘Erotic,’ 59) […] This idea of dwelling in fiction evokes a popular theme of recent film and literature: walking into a story and becoming a character.”
(Marie-Laure Ryan, 2003, Narrative as Virtual Reality)
2. Mythopoiesis
“So who now is steeped in fantasy? Adults. But fantasy — or imagination, to use a more approbative term — in these instances does not end in a private, dreamlike state, unshareable with others; rather, it ends in a new, more expressive reality that can be shared, one in which love’s ineffable character is made public by being coupled with a summer’s day.”
(Yi-Fu Tuan, 1998, Escapism)
Track 5: Coconut Mango (Arrangement)
Legend
- Refrain
“I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior — for Doors –”
(Emily Dickinson, 1890, I dwell in Possibility)
2. Return
“To leave the circumference for the centre is equivalent to moving from the exterior to the interior, from form to contemplation, from multiplicity to unity, from space to spacelessness, from time to timelessness.”
(Juan Eduardo Cirlot, 1958, A Dictionary of Symbols)
Track 6: Modul 29_14 (Nik Bärtsch)
Legend
- Code
“Some simple examples of rhythm:
Repetition of a straight line with alternation of weights.
Repetition of an angular line.
Opposed repetition of an angular line, plane formation.
Repetition of a curved line.
Opposed repetition of a curved line, repeated plane formation.
Central-rhythmic repetition of a straight line.
Central-rhythmic repetition of a curved line.
Repetition of an accented curved line by means of an accompanying line.
Contrasting repetition of a curved line.”
(Wassily Kandinsky, 1979, Point and Line to Plane)
2. Glyph
“Sudoku — a puzzle that adheres to the following constraints:
It must be a nine-by-nine grid.
The grid must be further divided into nine three-by-three squares.
Each cell in the grid must be filled with the numbers 1–9.
No number may be repeated in any horizontal line.
No number may be repeated in any vertical line.
No number may be repeated in any three-by-three square.
The puzzle composer omits certain numbers, and those omissions allow for one unique solution.”
(Peter Turchi, 2014, A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic)
3. Web
“All that remains is the possibility of communication.”
(Captain Jean-Luc Picard)
Track 7: Plateau on Plateau (Susumu Yokota)
Legend
- Eleusínia Mustḗria
“For Hades holds men mightily to a strict
accounting down below the earth;
he sees all things, inscribes them
within the book
of his remembering.”
(Aeschylus (c. 525–456 BC), in The Complete Aeschylus: Volume I: The Oresteia, 2011)
Track 8: Incantation of the Stars (Susumu Yokota)
Legend
- A Bao A Qu
“On the stairway of the Tower of Victory there has lived since the beginning of time a being sensitive to the many shades of the human soul and known as the A Bao A Qu. It lies dormant, for the most part on the first step, until at the approach of a person some secret life is touched off in it, and deep within the creature an inner light begins to glow […] But only when someone starts up the spiralling stairs is the A Bao A Qu brought to consciousness…”
(Jorge Luis Borges, 1974, The Book of Imaginary Beings)
2. Chronotope
“Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history.”
(Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel)
Track 9: Waterfall (Laura Allan, Paul Horn)
Legend
- Mundus Imaginalis
“‘…a precise order of reality, corresponding to a precise mode of perception.’ […] a world created by and through the creative imagination, and of which it is itself the organ of perception. As spiritual topography, this imaginative world really exists ‘outside the exterior location’ and independently from our fictions.”
(Ali Shariat, 1991, Henry Corbin and the Imaginal: A Look at the Concept and Function of the Creative Imagination in Iranian Philosophy)
2. Transfigured Landscape
“…symbolizing both the earthly paradise and the heavenly land, which while being hidden from the eyes of fallen humanity, remains existent in the world of spiritual light that is manifest to God’s saints. It is an unshadowed landscape, in which each object is made of exceedingly precious substance and where every tree and flower is unique of its kind.”
(Titus Burckhardt, 2009, Art of Islam, Language and Meaning)
Track 10: Kirinaki Shima (Ichiko Aoba)
Legend
Resonance
“…a vehicle which can take one as high as one is capable of going, whether on the path of identification with the inner tone, as for the singer, or, for the listener, on that of entry into ‘those temples in the high spheres that can be opened through song only.’ For the seven notes of the modes can be heard as the notes of the planets, the wandering of the melody through them felt as a journey around the spheres.”
(Joscelyn Godwin, 1987, Harmonies of Heaven and Earth)
Track 11: Unfurling of young leaves (Tomoyoshi Date)
Legend
- Home
“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”
(Gaston Bachelard, 1958, The Poetics of Space)
2. The Gift
“Be still, my soul, and steadfast.
Earth and heaven both are still watching
though time is draining from the clock
and your walk, that was confident and quick,
has become slow.
So, be slow if you must, but let
the heart still play its true part.
love still as once you loved, deeply
and without patience. Let God and the world
know you are grateful.
That the gift has been given.”
(Mary Oliver, 2015, from Felicity)
Track 12: Ragas in Minor Scale (Philip Glass, Ravi Shankar)
Legend
- Turangalîla
“‘Lîla’ [in Sanskrit] literally means play — but play in the sense of the divine action upon the cosmos, the play of creation, destruction, reconstruction, the play of life and death. ‘Lila’ is also love. ‘Turanga’: this is the time that runs, like a galloping horse; this is time that flows, like sand in an hourglass. ‘Turanga’ is movement and rhythm. ‘Turangalîla’ therefore means all at once love song, hymn to joy, time, movement, rhythm, life and death.”
(Olivier Messiaen, 1991, Turangalîla-Symphonie CD liner booklet)
2. Magic Circle (Part II)
“The circle as such, however, has a magic significance. It is drawn with great care, all sorts of precautions being taken against cheating. The players are not allowed to leave the ring until they have discharged their obligations. But, sometimes a special hall is provisionally erected for the game, and this hall is holy ground. Games, of chance, therefore, have their serious side. They are included in ritual.”
(Johan Huizinga, 1938, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture)
Track 13: Ganesha (Alice Coltrane)
No legend.
At the feet of the divine.
Pipe down and listen.
Track 14: Raga Madhuvanti (Alap) (Kaushiki Chakraborty)
Legend
- Unison
“You will yourself in tune with the string. Your intention drives your voice, and as the union becomes real you say ah. When your unison with a string is true, you seem to merge into it, to disappear, and all your fantasies […] disappear too, at least for a breath.”
(W.A. Mathieu, 1997, Harmonic Experience)
2. Open Sesame
“…to come forth at the sound of one’s voice.”
(Normandi Ellis, 2012, Imagining the World Into Existence)
(per-t, the hieroglyph for “seed”)
Annis Saniee (he/him) is an Iranian-American climate adaptation specialist by trade and variably an amateur pianist and cartographer, bibliophile, gamer, oneironaut (of sorts), and magician-in-training (^_~). Relics of his outdated writings and compositions may be found in this archive.
