Why Music Matters

Alex Dyson Triple J Breakfast Host talks about the importance of music in his life

19 September, 2014/in News/by Why Music Matters

My relationship with music started at age five when I began learning the piano. I would go to a place called The Music Shak after school, and learn which letter corresponded to each note. Back then the music itself was simply a code that I needed to figure out in order to get a scratch and sniff sticker. I had no real connection to the sound or tone of the notes as I hit them. I moved piano teachers and although I began to enjoy music more, I played too fast and loud despite frequent suggestions to the contrary. Around the same time my sister and I used to get up before 6am on a Saturday and watch the Rage top 50. We’d eat mini wheats and bop along to White Town’s ‘Your Woman’, get annoyed when Ricky Martin’s Cup of Life was number 1 AGAIN, and always wonder what the video clip for Chris Franklin’s ‘Bloke’ was like because they never showed it.

Whilst loving the lights and sounds of the professional video clips, I still didn’t totally enjoy playing music myself. Dad forced me to practise 15 minutes in the morning and in the night. I’d do about 12 minutes and round it up. It wasn’t until about year 9 when I heard a song on a commercial for the movie Peter Pan and wondered what it was. It turned out to be Clocks by Coldplay and I went out and found a piano book that had the music. The same book contained Robbie Williams’, Feel and Seal’s Kiss from a Rose. Suddenly music had taken on a different meaning. These publications were closely followed by the Rush of Blood to the Head sheet music, whose songs I ended up loving. I would wait til everyone was out of the house then sing my own improvised words over the “The Scientist” to suit the girl I liked at the time and wanted to hook up with. It ended up having 100% effectiveness. I’ve never told anyone that.

Since then I’ve discovered even more intricate and amazing bands and musicians. Radiohead. Arcade Fire. Sigur Ros. The importance of their music on my life can’t be measured, and I’m not sure how different a person I’d be without them, but I do know that with all of them I’ve felt a connection, and that’s all anyone is trying to do in this world. Music has the ability to penetrate deep inside you when you’re least expecting it, and it’s totally in the ear of the beholder. And I’ve never enjoyed a wet willie so much.

Nick Atkinson from Supergroove tells us how music affects the world around him

19 September, 2014/in News/by Why Music Matters

It was a rainy Sunday in the small and somewhat isolated North Island town of Te Aroha. The gloomy main street was nestled at the base of a muscular mountain. Heavily forested slopes rose steeply above the settlement into a mist that seemed to muffle the hiss of the cars and trucks that passed occasionally. I was there with my girlfriend, happy to escape the city for a weekend and delighted to find a place so eerie and distant from the clatter of suburban Auckland.

The town attracts the odd stray from the main road on account of it’s wonderful hot-springs that well up from the base the imposing peak. But this considerable attraction was usurped by something quite unexpected, something magical and marvellous, something that transported us through time and space in a way we couldn’t have imagined.

As we walked arm in arm towards to centre of Te Aroha we thought we could hear music. It was horse and ephemeral. It had a dream-like quality. As we got closer to the main street the music became a little clearer but it’s source remained a mystery. The tunes were old, from the ’40s of ’50s. Big bands and basic rhythms, voices that crooned and warbled. With the turn-of-the-century wooden shop-fronts and the elderly population, comfortable in cloth caps and cardigans, we felt we’d walked into to a long forgotten episode of life in New Zealand, one that had originally aired when our parents were children. And then we saw the little speakers. Every forth or fifth shop-front had one. They were basic and unpainted. Each bolted to a bracket leaning over the footpath. A few of them had swallows nesting behind them. They were connected to the same wire that sneaked all the way down the main road. The music they played was piped from the local radio station to which they were all hard-wired.

The atmosphere this mono sound provided was powerful. We couldn’t identify any of the performers nor make out the lyrics but we simply floated down the road feeling as though we were staring in our very own period drama.

We soon ran out of main street so we turned around and slowly ambled back to our old hotel. Looking for somewhere to eat we smiled at Te Aroha’s Italian restaurant curiously named Berlusconi’s. The steep hill to the accommodation slowed us a little and the reedy sound from those little speakers slowly faded until we awoke from our time travelling trance with red cheeks and happy hearts.