Hundred Waters. Wow. I discovered them on the livestream of this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival, which they opened. They instantly gripped me and kept their hold on me for the entire hour they performed. Just as I was starting to get tired of the low-key, emotional quality of some tracks, the band suddenly broke into an uptempo jam, long called-for and all the more memorable as it clearly stuck out from the rest of the set.

The thing that first caught my attention was the singer’s crystalline, breathy voice. However, when I later took the time to listen front-to-back to their second, latest album, “The Moon Rang Like a Bell”, I realized I was on to much more than I had initially thought. I was reading along with the lyrics and couldn’t help but notice how the words and the music were so intricately intertwined. You would regularly have the music echo the meaning of the words, and vice versa, and in the end you had a highly coherent tableau made of complementing palettes of emotions. This ability to combine multiple vectors to convey one message is something I truly admire in music artists. This coherence can also be found at a larger scale, that of the album, with the track order making total sense — and understandably so, considering it was the very first thing the band had agreed on during the making of the album.

In a way, they already had a scenario prepared, and just had to materialize it by composing suitable music and coupling it to suitable lyrics. Not too much fumbling around. This fact was mentioned by band member Trayer Tryon in a very insightful and revelatory interview for The Line of Best Fit. In that same interview, Trayer gives a track-by-track explanation of the mixing of the vocals and how they relate to the subject and lyrics of the song. This is in my view a very rare move for artists, and by disclosing what to pay attention to, Trayer gives us keys to understand the music better. In the end, this is profitable to both listener and artist, as the former will grow to appreciate the music even more, and the latter will be sure that the listener understands what he’s going for. The artist would be judged on his own merit and not be left misunderstood.

Of course, music isn’t math (though Boards of Canada would differ), and people should be free to interpret music whichever way they want. Curiously enough, this is a standpoint fiercely defended by the band, whose name incidentally alludes to Friedensreich Hundertwasser, an Austrian painter who also believed that people should have their own personal interpretation of his works. This affiliation to Hundertwasser’s ideology might explain why Trayer bucked at the interviewer’s invitation to further explain the meaning of the songs. He answered that the band had its own interpretation of the album, but that they did not want to reveal it because that would mean imposing their interpretation on the listeners.

At this point, I’m growing more and more interested in the extent to which art should be explained to us, and whether an artist’s view of his art has the same value as that of the audience. I should think not, yet I find diligently picking up on interesting musical gestures and slowly solving the puzzle of the artist’s intention to also be quite interesting and rewarding. If artists told us everything there is to know about their tracks, the listening process would probably be less intellectual and prone to serendipity; we would be less inclined to explore some of the artistic ideas that the musicians unknowingly came upon.

Another interesting subject is the link between creation process and end result, and how the former should maybe be screened from the spectator. When you admire a work of art with no clue as to how it was made, you wallow in some sort of blissful ignorance. As you learn more about the creation processes in general, the artist’s magic might fade in your eyes. Case in point: in that very same interview, decidedly revealing, Trayer discloses that the distant, broken-up sound of the piano in “Broken Blue” is in fact bandleader and multi-instrumentalist Nicole Miglis playing the instrument on Skype during an online rehearsal with the band. The resulting sound turned out so interesting that the band decided to keep it for the recording.

Although I agree that the effect is convincing and fitting, the idea that I’m listening to someone playing piano through Skype spoils the pleasure a tiny bit… so maybe I would have been better off not knowing that fact. On the other hand, I’m all the more inspired by the impact that such “accidents” can have.

Anyway… I haven’t listened to their first album yet (saving it for a rainy day!), but I’m sure it will be fascinating to discover the band’s origin and how their latest record compares to it. I also heard that they cherished their music videos a lot, and that for them they were like the other half of the songs. I will definitely check them out sometime soon, too.

Besides that, I will be seeing them live in Paris in October (imagine how excited I am!), and I was offered a free digital download of their second album as a reward for my booking in advance — thanks!

You might be interested in my concert review of the aforementioned concert!