art – Philbert’s Phables

Good Passage of Nerves at Yuyintang Park with Nerve Passenger (edited for clarity and wording from LiveCNMusic version originally published 9/14/2021 at https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/BXbJCeBzY2Lrl_fI93v0wQ)

Saturday night packed a crowded Yuyintang Park in with Nerve Passenger to kick off their China tour: Let’s get to it.

– Philip Hsu, Contributing Writer

all photos courtesy of Shot in the Dark

The name Nerve Passenger is deliciously neurotic. Coupled with their new album name Before I Become You and the whole teenage nightmare watercolor thing going on and I already had high hopes going into the show. And the good news is that NP has taken a lot of ideas out of their Nervous sleeve and are running with them nicely, bubble machine behind the back and all.

Talking about performance ethos, Nerve Passenger has stage presence, controls the crowd well with audience interaction, and drives through with sound and power in the right places in the right songs. What starts with Baroque guitar riffs pull into dreamy lamentations about love and loss and shouty bangers that the crowd already knew how to sing yesterday. The three-piece band shows tightness, but not overly; it’s relaxed and loose playing with precise attention to detail. Nerve Passenger have built a BMW and are content to have it sit in a parking lot during a thunderstorm with the windows half down, as the driver tokes on an e-cig and their passenger sits in the backseat listening to the alternating roar and whimper of humanity.

Rain imagery pervades Nerve’s songs, and in Clown and other works we see the flower that blooms by a riverbank on a gloomy day, bright but none will pluck it, as the one who they would have wanted to give the flower to is gone. The fist closes around the flower’s stem. Nerve are writing from the heart, in the “drenched in wine” style of ancient Song poets and Norah Jones alike, but with more attention to the feeling of a desolate city street in the dark hours of AM, where the wind has cried in its fury and rhythm a name, although it is not Mary.* Warmth could come through more, as could lightness.

Nerve Passenger has command of their act, and it’s great to see them fill spaces with throngs of their own fans and multiple highly recognizable songs. It’s a well-deserved and exciting start to their touring season, and while it will take these Captains of Crania just a little bit more work to get to “breakthrough” energy and music levels, it won’t take that much more time from what was on display tonight. Anyone who wants to get in on this Solitary Boat, best not to wait long.

*It sounds more like a Stephen, actually.

I elaborate on facets of the Light State of consciousness, see my previous post for details

Three further notes on the Light State: First, Liberty is an especially prominent figure in Liberty Leading the People and will probably draw most people’s initial focus, just as certain loud noises or disturbances generally attract the same amount of Foreground processing regardless of who is experiencing them. But there can be substantial variation in what attracts the Foreground processing of different individuals, especially if the perceptive range is not dominated by any given stimulus. Observe, for example, the below painting by Kandinsky. What initially attracts the attention may vary from person to person.

Second, there may be instances when Foreground processing may almost recede to the Background, such as when completing repetitive or relaxing activities. This activity can be likened to a landscape painting, such as Van Gogh’s below, where no particular spot demands foreground processing attention and instead it is the cohesive whole of the painting – the cohesive whole of Light State consciousness – that prevails.

Landscape with Olive Trees, Vincent Van Gogh

Third, there remains the question of the subconscious. Freud did not find this concept helpful, using instead the idea of the preconscious and unconscious minds to encompass what others would normally describe as the subconscious. Preconscious is easy enough to explain using art, such as in the Arnolfini Portrait below: The symbolic meaning of the oranges, dog, mirror and various carvings in the painting can be consciously recalled separately from one’s direct perception of the objects, just as thoughts in the preconscious can be recalled to the conscious mind.

But where Freud found little difference between the unconscious, which could not be recalled, and the subconscious, I see the subconscious as being the part of the unconscious that cannot be actively recalled, but can manifest itself in conscious behavior to the extent that it can be identified as the subconscious. If a person behaves poorly towards people of a certain race without knowing it, they are unconscious of the reasons behind this behavior. If they are called out or come to certain realizations about the nature of their prejudice – if that is indeed the reason behind their behavior – then the subconscious is revealed, much like a surfacing submarine now reveals its existence.

All this is to say that dreaming transcends all three states – Bright, Light and Dark. We can experience survival mode while in a dream and wake up in a sweat. We can experience dreams very similar to our normal waking experiences or experience heightened states of mental and physical arousal. And we can dream without really knowing we are dreaming at all. So can a machine dream? Stay tuned…

Tag: art

Gig Recap 现场回顾: Nerve Passenger 神经旅人 (育音堂音乐公园 2021.09.11)

Dream a Little Deep Dream of Me (II)