A Burial at Sea, Sant Feliu de Guixols, TZVR

Some Tuesday. 

Five pm, I wake up. My schedule is again fucked, as usual. As I grab something to eat from the leftovers of the dinner I missed, I open my computer and rub my eyes to be able to focus on the screen. Too much light. I open fucking facebook, because I kind of lost my phone during a Halloween party and that's now how I contact people and manage things, and I talk to a friend didn't really expecting a response. There's an event giving me notifications, although this time, it really interests me. For some reason a group I had heard exploring obscure places of spotify is coming to my small town this night. You tell me the odds. I've been knowing this for weeks and still I have made zero preparations to go. I'm supposed to do a report of this. What are reports about? I don't even do them anymore. The charger of my camera is broken. I should borrow one (what I deeply regret not doing right now) and listen to the group again to have it fresh, but I forget about. My memory is not as good as it used to be. Whatever. It doesn't matter. Fresh perspectives are good, I guess.

Starting or ending my journey, as usual, there is a scene of me walking somewhere far. This time is the house of a friend, in which basement-rainforest we have conditioned a place for us to place a couple of desktops, computers and a sofa. I spend all afternoon searching and matching images from google to a made up set of magic the gathering we are making god knows why until a blue screen of death takes it away it all.

I guess that was the sign that it was time for me to just go away.

I start my way into Atzavara Club, you know, the place next to the old slaughter house and in front of that red cross thing. Its freezing outside, and it's a long walk. Almost an hour from where I stand, and that considering I walk fast. But I don't really mind. I like walking. I heat up on the way, inside my own mind. I spend there a lot of time.

When I arrive, there's already a pack of people there, despite being really early. One group I identified as the guys I went there to hear and the other just your usual group of semi-unknown regular folks. My friends were at the backstage, back-staging. You kind of gather those here from time to time. Friends I mean. Some people you see passing by during ages and then you make terrible conversation topics with them one night. I think it's how it works, but don't quote me on that.

More people arrived. The group started eating and then preparing. We made a fire and talked a bunch of stuff. Mostly around music, but not directly about it. The group is supposed to be post-rock, but I know nothing about that. A couple of times I have ended into a couple of youtube videos about music explaining things out and I don't last a minute inside. What are you really talking about when you talk about music? I don't really know. I feel like the only thing that really matters at the end is what you like and what you not, and you can't even trust most people about them telling the truth about that. Not even to themselves.

In the inside, a woman took a stool next to me, asking me if I didn't mind. I hold an empty beer in my hand and don't know where to stand. I've smoked a couple of cigarettes outside, and my fingers are now fidgeting.

I haven't been going concerts for a while. Or out, in general.

Sometimes I come, here, when I'm not on one of those phases where I can't tolerate music. The bands are nice, most of the time. The sound really loud, you can't hear yourself a lot of times. Everybody is a musician. There's not a lot of people, enough to know someone new if you want to, and enough for being here on your own without anyone looking at you as if you don't belong. Or you just can come with someone. Sometimes not knowing everyone just makes it easier to ghost out. One time I did it after paying the entry but before actually seeing the group. I still regret doing it, and missing young mountains, but sometimes you just know when you have to go.

I stand up and just walk in front of the band. It happens often, in small concerts and stages, that a distance between the band and the public is formed. Sometimes I fill it just to help, this time I just wanted to be closer to see. Ambient lights fade, and the concert starts.

During the times I can't stand music, it loads me. But it was during one days when I listened to this guys for the first time, and I liked them anyway. Sometimes I would like a vacation off my mind, even if it's only for a few minutes. When I feel that something tries too hard or too obviously to make me think or feel a certain way I just gag. Imagine someone trying to feed you incredibly heavy food when you are incredibly full. And even when you are able to do it again, you remain blocked. I guess sometimes all you can really sense and really need is a bed made of clouds of melodic and ambient sounds followed by a fucking punch in the face to depressurize your mind. 

It's a couple of songs in, and I realise I haven't been listening at all. At least consciously. I just disconnect sometimes, maybe I was just accommodating to the sound. It happens, like when you restart a song or an album because halfway through you realise you haven't been listening or enjoying it hard enough. But I can't rewind here. Come on, concentrate, you are in a concert. Enjoy it, or else.

When I recovered my senses something felt off. I didn't even remembered how they sounded. Was it instrumental what I liked so much a long ago? It felt like as if it lacked something, intensity. Maybe the singer had a cold and couldn't sing, and they were reserving him for a bigger day of the tour, I didn't know. Maybe I didn't remembered them that well, or remembered to like them not because I did but just because I wanted to. I had to write something out of this, after all, and I don't like to lie. The guy who looked like the front man had a microphone, but it was sideways, not really looking like being used soon. It was really starting to worry me, a couple of songs deep already, when it started. The guy just in front of me dropped his guitar and grabbed a trumpet, and then, worrying about the lack of vocals was a ridiculous mistake of the past.

He started to talk, only like how through music you can talk. Everybody was silent and listening. I could see in detail every note he sung, how he breathed after, and the frontman drop its guitar and closed his eyes. The bassist was nervous, and the drummer, really tall. It got really quiet, and the trumpeteer started to made single notes, every one of which was impossible to be any other than what it was. It was unbelievable, it was reading my mind. Just when I though I really needed one, but that note didn't even existed in my mind, he found it through the chaos and transmitted it through my spine. The melody was growing, organically building up. Slowly, during what felt several hours. Adding a guitar, battery and maybe a chorus to the sky. The other members of the group, the public and myself were barelly cointaining ourselves to burst in a blast of sound (at least that was what I imagined) and the trumpeter was red, blowing strong, and all I could feel was my own head racing and my vein next to the front-head in tension and ready to explode at any time. He barely could breath and I felt like I stopped to do exactly that. My hearth was racing, without thinking about anything at all. Without moving a muscle I was turning crazy. Suddenly I remembered that scene where Dean Moriarty screams to a piano man and refers to him as God, and laughed a little. Someone looked at me, confused. What was wrong with me, what was I laughing about?

But I don't judge him, I understand him now. Being alive is a hell of a drug.

Then it exploded and after ended, really in calm, as the sea, like if everything was already said and needed no more.

I inhaled with relief, satisfied and emotionally exhausted, sweating and breathing like if I had just run a hundred miles. If it had happened in a theatre, I would step up to clap and then leave. And thats what I did. I turned and people were clapping, as if nothing had happened. Next to me was a friend of mine and I grabbed and swallowed almost half of her beer and made myself room outside the small crowd. The show will go on a couple more songs, but to me was already done. Next to a few newcomers and in the distance I listened to the rest of songs, even clapping and chanting (some songs had lyrics, after all) and doing that kind of things people do when they do to this kind of crazy and surreal places.

Who in their right mind would go to concerts anyway, it's cold at places, there's too much people or too little, five euros is a lot of money and the music is too loud.

Another group played next, but that was already too much to me. Everybody said they were great and I believed them so hard that I didn't even needed to corroborate it. I just waited in the garden for someone to go to a home close to mine, and after the whole thing finished and the police came to tell us to make sure of it, returned home, smoked one last cigarette, and faded inside.