Their music has stayed with me because it touches, perversely, on a deeply personal notion of freedom.

The transporting seconds I remember accompany the movie’s protean establishing shots. First, hearing only ambient sound, we see a twig mantis clinging to a tree trunk against a background of blurred yellow fields. The bass arrives as the camera floats over the red rooftops of a small village and lands on an elevated roadway, where a couple named Rex and Saskia are driving to a vacation home in the South of France. They’re festively killing time with some alliteration-based word game, but woven into their interactions is a petty conflict about who should be driving. They end up running out of gas in a tunnel, and Rex abandons his girlfriend with a measure of sadistic fulfillment as she frantically searches for a flashlight. This little trauma is a rehearsal for the bigger one to come.

is a glimpse of a world in which I have control over my time, where I can make meaningful choices about things other than consumption.

First, hearing only ambient sound, we see a twig mantis clinging to a tree trunk against a background of blurred yellow fields. The bass arrives as the camera floats over the red rooftops of a small village and lands on an elevated roadway, where a couple named Rex and Saskia are driving to a vacation home in the South of France. They’re festively killing time with some alliteration-based word game, but woven into their interactions is a petty conflict about who should be driving. They end up running out of gas in a tunnel, and Rex abandons his girlfriend with a measure of sadistic fulfillment as she frantically searches for a flashlight.

he piece of music I have in mind lasts only forty-five seconds, which is shockingly brief measured against the inner world it evokes. In what I now know is a fragmentary motif, a few lowing bass notes rise like bubbles from the bottom of a pool, becoming increasingly ragged as they approach the surface. They get close enough to one another to imply melancholy harmony before they dissipate. The riff repeats only once, a little more achingly. Then the bass hands its figurative duties over to a dulcimer, whose jaunty fatalism carries the mood forward even as a more deliberate structure begins to eat away at the oceanic resonance of those bass notes. As the bass recedes into a supporting role, providing squiggly accents at odd intervals, a mental image slides back into inaccessibility too. In my memory, the soundtrack, by Henny Vrienten, to George Sluizer’s 1988 film The Vanishing, was an expanse of fretless bass only, mournful and spare, diaphanous and purplish, like neon light filtered through glass brick

At the height of its buzz, Toronto is a place silenced.

turns the city’s sonic lifeblood into a lucrative marketing tool for someone else’s gain?

And in this age, how do we learn to feel as if we are connected with each other? How do we learn about relationality? How do we learn that we are what we are only because of the communities we are a part of?”

On sound and freedom

Sounds of life, and of love and protest and the everyday, will always bleed through.