Music never sucks

I prefer a good book to lift my spirits but music is easier to find everywhere, and it doesn’t need to be understood to be enjoyed. I don’t listen to music very often, but I have to admit music has saved me from giving up more than once. I wish I had carried music with me more often in my trips, particularly to scare off wild animals and some stupid people.

Of course nowadays you don’t need to travel to discover new sounds. I go to festivals as often as I can and there’s always a nice surprise, either in the form of home-made instruments, such as the ones I saw Seasick Steve playing a couple of years ago at Werchter, or in the form of exotic and almost extinct languages, such as Xhosa, spoken by Madosini at WOMAD.

Listening to languages I don’t understand always develops a certain longing in me, a mixture of pleasure at foreign sounds and the urge to grasp their meaning.

I’ll write a post soon about travelling and foreign languages, but not today because I’m getting ready for today’s session at BSF.