On Interlude Music

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.

What I mean by this is an album that seems to be entirely made up of interludes, of tracks that consistently only explore a single idea, before jumping onto the next one. However, not such that they are a single unified string of tracks that seamlessly blend into one another. For then they would be pursuing the same musical idea. (This is why I wouldn’t consider Dark Side of The Moon interlude music.) Rather, I see interlude music as a series of distinct, but related musical explorations.

Such an album is more like a collage, or patchwork quilt, than it is a portrait or landscape painting. It is built out of discrete, self-contained units that are clearly not strictly continuous with the whole, but which have been brought together into one. However, at the same time, these units don’t stand by themselves either. It is in their being situated within a patchwork of disjointed but parallel lines that they come into their own. They’re something like the musical equivalent of an anthology movie like Night on Earth, or a collection of short stories like Dubliners, works that have unity in difference.

I take the defining features of interlude music to be something like the following. First, most of the songs have to be short, within the 1- or 2-minute range and only a couple can be around, or much longer than, 4 or 5 minutes. If many of the tracks are as long as, or longer than this, we inevitably experience them as the songs around which the interludes are arranged (like the short tracks on Fragile by Yes), rather than as further, equally important pieces of the puzzle.

Second, the tracks need to lack a traditional song structure. There must be something apparently fragmentary and incomplete about each song; they cannot have a tidy beginning, middle, and end, they must be a single, musical spasm. This means that each track will, in an important sense, be internally homogenous, the unfolding of a single idea.

However, and this is the third point, given that each track must explore a different musical idea, it follows that the tracks must be heterogeneous with respect to each other. Which is to say, there must be a constant and unsettled discontinuity between tracks, one that, despite a consistent musical or conceptual vibe – which all great interlude music has – never rests at one mode of expression, but instead generates a constant stream of new ones.

Finally, it often won’t make that much sense to recommend individual tracks to someone, rather than the album as a whole. After all, the individual tracks are often a single musical idea, that was the whole point. But a single musical idea is often not that interesting, by itself. Interlude music is about the way that a series of these ideas hang together. The tracks stand in a series of ordered relations to each other, and their particular place within that order is partially constitutive of what it is that makes them good.1

But enough setup. What is actually out there? The following albums I consider to be interlude music, in the sense just discussed:

• Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band – Trout Mask Replica (1969): this off-the-wall masterpiece and its smattering of spasmodic, art-blues vignettes perfectly encapsulates interlude music.

• Minutemen – Double Nickels on the Dime (1984): almost 50 tracks and only one of them above 3 minutes. A terse, math-punk classic, the musical equivalent of buckshot, and textbook interlude music

• Guided By Voices – Alien Lanes (1995): short, punchy tracks in their trademark slacker-rock-power-pop style, and the band apparently doing whatever they feel like on each track. (I could equally have put any other album of theirs on this list that I’m familiar with. This one just happens to be my favourite.)

• Madvillain – Madvillainy (2004): MF Doom and Madlib’s only collaborative work (and masterpiece) is a perfectly constructed series of fragmentary vignettes with a breathtaking ability to maintain, despite constant changes, a singular sonic vision, and vibe.

• Nx Worries – Yes Lawd! (2016) & Why Lawd? (2022): Knxwledge and Anderson .Paak’s (frankly very underrated) pair of collaborative albums are both satisfyingly episodic strings of tracks with an overall clarity of purpose rivalling Madvillainy.

• Yaya Bey – Remember Your North Star (2022): do not let the cool, effortless vocal and instrumental transformations of this album distract you from its fundamentally transitional nature, as it constantly and abruptly evolves from one sound to the next.

Music critic Piero Scaruffi once wrote the following of Trout Mask Replica:

The most notable difference from the earlier albums is the duration of the cuts, for the most part very short…The album is by all accounts an anthology of chaos in all its musical forms. For as deeply varied as they are from one another, these twenty-eight cuts are many versions of the same devastation. Trout Mask Replica is above all a collage of abstract paintings, each different from the other in color, intensity and contrast, yet they’re all homogenous in their “abstraction.”

And I think this captures the spirit of interlude music very well.