A Seasonal Non-Sequitur

For many, the joys of summer are signified by the phrase 'cloudless skies'. I, however, side with Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society, whose manifesto affirms:

WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned
and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.

We think that they are Nature’s poetry, and the most egalitarian of her displays, since everyone can have a fantastic view of them.

We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day.

Clouds are undoubtedly one of the highlights of the natural world. And their formation obeys one of the most poetic principles of physics: like pearls and the bubbles in champagne, they condense around atmospheric impurities known as 'condensation nuclei'; particles that are anomalous, unwanted, adulterated.

This is also the principle that informs the music of the Argentinian actress-turned-musician, Juana Molina (pictured below). Her subtle, off-kilter songs condense around "mistakes", as she explained in a 2006 interview with the Independent's Phil Meadley:

"I had a problem at this big folk festival in Seattle when the rented keyboard I was using wouldn't load my music samples. The audience were waiting a long time and a few yelled out that I should just sing with my guitar, so I started to sing the keyboard parts with the voice, and it sounded great. So when I returned to the studio I decided that I should sing like the keyboard notes, and that the behaviour of the singing should follow suit. Even if it was out of tempo or didn't fit with the other notes, I had to sing it. So a new world of de-tuning and out-of-time notes opened up to me. I discovered that the note that didn't work at the beginning becomes so beautiful that you build everything around it. It's like the story of the ugly duckling that grows up to be a swan."

A profoundly skewed song such as "La Verdad", from Molina's third album Son, is as beautiful as any pearl or any cloud. I don't long for cloudless skies this summer, not when so much of what is great in this world is founded on imperfection.


Sources:

"The Manifesto of the Cloud Appreciation Society". http://cloudappreciationsociety.org/manifesto/ [accessed 13/05/09].

Meadley, Phil. "Juana Molina: A Musician Taking Flight", The Independent, Friday 21st July 2006. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/juana-molina-a-musician-taking-flight-408661.html [accessed 13/05/09].