The throb of my knee pain is rhythmic. Inflammation, not totally dissimilar to a bass line, is deep and physical. I feel it right now, a stabbing that dissipates then comes back with shocking consistency, like an upbeat followed by a downbeat. Pain is centric to our experience with music: it can be more conceptual, like emotional pain, or it can be explicit and auditory, like a snare that hurts your eardrums or volume that rattles you. Extreme musical – and painful – sensation, is often valued in listening sessions: causing us to mosh or to cry or to know when to skip a song.Â
My knee defines what I can and cannot do. I’ve had some kind of running-induced patellofemoral pain going on for a little over a year. Instead of my knee’s drumbeat bringing me to the dance-floor, it brings me to my bed and to my icepack. A lot of the time, I am to blame for my pain. I’ll go to PT, take Aleve, ice or heat for a couple hours, stretch, wear a brace, and then proceed to climb 463 stairs to the top of the Duomo. Making these choices have allowed me to experience beauty: like the panorama of Florence that I reached after those 463 stairs, or maybe when last week I had a blast playing pickleball. The next day, though, always the next day, my knee locks, crunches, clicks, pops, and throbs. The drumset returns!Â
This constant tradeoff between pain and joy has created a form of body-capitalism. I pay for activities in the form of inflammation. No active deed goes unpunished. I invest and save money by resting my knee and hoping that I earn more recovery. Unfortunately, that market seems to be in a bit of a recession.Â
Perhaps this is masochistic, but recently I’ve been interested in music that is unquestionably painful to listen to. Merzbow’s Pulse Demon has stuck with me the most: I wouldn’t say it rewards close listening, but I would say that after 10 minutes you stop feeling the headache. Pulse Demon tests the limits of what music can be; there is no discernible tonality or rhythm for the entirety of the album, only harsh noise. Unless approached with an academy-endorsed pretension, the album is revolting and best described as useless – useless in that the reasons for which we ‘use’ music are completely removed.Â
What Pulse Demon has proven, over multiple listens, is that music can be found in the most extreme places – like my knees, traffic, a ceiling fan, etc. Repeated listens to Demon peel back layers that sound like melodies or rhythmic passages. The pleasantries we take for granted with music are replaced with uncomfortable, mostly constant whirring. Ambient noise has began to sound musical, thus, the album has expanded my definition of music to include unpleasant or mundane noise.
In a recent MRI for my knee injury, I was typically stripped of my watch, my phone or anything with metal in it. Because you’re confined in a 2 foot-diameter tube without a concept of time, MRI radiologists often set you up with a pair of headphones with some distant – tin can sounding – 2000s variety pop to drown out the obnoxious hum. This time, though, either the radiologist expected me to request the headphones or simply forgot to offer them, because I went into the MRI without any entertainment; it was just me, the magnets, a full-body plastic cavern, and a whole lot of nonsense beeps. As my untracked 30 minutes dissolved, the constant buzzing and beeping of the MRI machine became musical. Pulse Demon makes the MRI sound like elevator music. I might be delusional, but I swear the MRI was playing scales.Â
Despite my convoluted entertainment, I was pretty miserable at the beginning of the MRI. Those transactional thoughts returned to my mind; if I just stick these 30 minutes of un-comfortability out, I can be potentially set on a path to heal my knee injury.
Merzbow’s Pulse Demon transforms painful, ugly sound into music (even beyond its own reaches, like my MRI!). I realized that I have been contemplating transaction when I could be thinking about transmutation instead. How can my knee pain transform what I perceive as banal – or slightly uncomfortable – in my life, to what I perceive as beautiful? Can I reframe sensations that I once took for granted, as gifts – of being close to fully able-bodied, of having the ability to dip in, and, more importantly, out of pain? Finding and recognizing my pain has allowed me to reconsider the mundane as music. And now, the MRI seems to sing to me.
Listen to Pulse Demon here: https://music.apple.com/us/album/pulse-demon/281914115