Cross posted from (Sounds From) The Hole, our weekly album recommendation newsletter.
There is, I have come to believe, a recurrent phenomenon in modern recorded music that I want to dub interlude music.
An interlude is an intervening period of time, a break between events more significant than itself. In modern music, an interlude is a track on an album, but not really a song in its own right. It will often be a shorter, less musically interesting, transition piece; something to give the listener a break between A and B, or to get from A to B more smoothly. To the extent that an interlude is musical, it will typically only involve a single, largely undeveloped musical idea, and the lack of any real structure. There are no verses, choruses, or movements in interludes, just a little repetition.
Nor is an interlude typically the proper object of musical judgment when considering the quality of an album, except to the extent that it plays its role well as an interlude. It doesn’t purport to be the main event, in other words (and you’d be wrong to consider it as such). It is a break between events more significant than itself.
What I want to call ‘interlude music’ is music that takes the idea of an interlude – a single, largely unstructured musical idea – and instead of using it to bring together, elevate, or transition between the more important cuts of an album, uses it create an album on that basis alone.