music that reminds

so i was just thinking about music that reminds us and why its so important that music, good music, fulfills this function

incidentally i am doing this while listening to satellite anthem icarus, a song by the boards of canada....

and what im finding when i listen to music that i count as good is that it transports a part of me back to another time that i can associate with that music. its not even necessarily a good time or bad time, but it is inevitably a time when i felt a very simple emotion. pure satisfaction, pure hatred, pure peace. and what im finding is that a lot of these emotional instances exist earlier on when i was younger.

and maybe its not so much that they exist earlier on as much as the wash of time has simplified the feelings. like right now, while listening to satellite anthem icarus i am reminded of a summer afternoon years and years ago when i drank ice cold milk in the heat and ran outside and immediately resolved to climb a tree in my front yard. i remember how difficult it was to get up to that first branch and how i scraped up my wrists to get farther and farther and how i finally made it up and it wasnt a very tall tree but i still felt like i could see the whole world from there if i just looked hard enough. and i remember that feeling with the summer sun beating down on me and the tree leaves shining and swaying and catching a breeze i could never have caught had i stayed on the ground that day. and this song is reminding me of how i felt like life was perfect in that instant. how i felt like no one could take away from it because i was untouchable in that tree and the sun loved me.

the song itself is not really that awesome. hell i dont even think its that original. the main thing that makes it good is its power to remind, to associate itself with an emotion once felt and thats part of why music can be so devisively subjective. i never heard of the boards of canada when i was that young. back then i was still listening to aphex twin religously and dj mark farina. maybe what im seeing are fractions of influence that i am exploring and searching that lead me back to the music i loved then. at any rate... i love music that reminds