Seventy eight minutes of a familiar soft, aquatic ambiance filled my headphones after waking up in a hospital bed.

Those life-altering doctor’s office calls that everyone dreads after getting routine blood work done? I was twenty six years old and so naive that it never actually sank in. I hadn’t even been to see a doctor since my pediatrician as a kid. 

“We noticed that your blood platelets are extremely low. Is this something that runs in your family?” I didn’t know what blood platelets were. The following months were a whirlwind of being established with an oncologist/hematologist (cancer and blood doctor) and the diagnosis of a rare autoimmune disease: chronic Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (ITP). Without spiraling into tedious medical speak, my aforementioned blood platelet count was dangerously low upon a bunch of retesting with both finger sticks and full blood draws.

Initially, I underwent a chemotherapy treatment called Rituximab (infusions on four consecutive Mondays that each lasted about six hours). It temporarily boosted the platelets, but was unsuccessful in the long run. After more monthly blood testing and rounds of steroids, a splenectomy was scheduled. Just like learning what platelets were, I had to go back to the drawing board to learn exactly what the functions of the spleen are and how removing it would impact my life. Waking up from the surgery, I was equipped with my immortal old 120gb iPod (purchased from my hometown RadioShack in 2007). Its only purpose these days is plugged into the aux in the car, but I’ll continue to do this daily until it dies.

Despite it being a major part of both my social and work life, I can find myself exhausted by the tropes of modern music discourse. Whether it’s the (logical) talking points of algorithms & streaming hell, or every local coffee shop that you frequent pedaling their curated playlists as a moodboard signifier of taste, there’s a point of oversaturation that, from my perspective, seems to make everything blurred with a hint of spurious inauthenticity. 

I’m not merely pointing the finger; I’m a hypocrite and I engage. Perhaps it’s a reflection of my own formative experiences, being immersed in crate digging culture since I was a teenager. I remember hearing Bret Easton Ellis pontificate on his philosophy of passionately seeking out underground media, noting that the counterculture it provided represented a sort of ethos that spoke to him in a way that the popular culture could not communicate (I’m paraphrasing from memory, of course).. As someone who grew up in a rural small town, it resonated and stuck.

Through my post-anesthesia experience though, I learned to listen a little more closely when it comes to sentimental anecdotes regarding specific music. Everyone relates certain records to certain seasons or moods, a formative time period, or something they throw on to sleep or doze off on an airplane. In an online era where everyone is desperate to be anywhere but the present, “nostalgia” is now a limitless machine. But the way in which I associate Yo La Tengo’s The Sounds of the Sounds of Science with my splenectomy and half-conscious listening, it’s now so visceral that I’m always interested in hearing other relevant anecdotes.

Now in my mid-thirties, It’s almost difficult to think back to when the Hoboken trio wasn’t a part of my life. My earliest memories are late night drives home from my first grocery store job listening to 2000’s understated masterpiece And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. The following year, the band was commissioned to do a unique live score at the annual San Francisco Film Festival. The subject matter was a series of underwater short films from French avant-garde filmmaker Jean Painlevé. Like a proto-Jacques Coustea, Painlevé’s undersea films were shot using a waterproof box constructed around the camera. 

The visuals are as mesmerizing as Yo La Tengo’s posthumous audio syncopation: the subtleties of a gentle swaying sea urchins to a microscopic view of crystal formations, eerily resembling a psychedelic liquid light show. The band added commentary on the project years later, when the films were collected in a DVD set by Criterion. “A lot of it just seemed like abstract art, except with fish,” Ira Kaplan commented. YLT have never been strangers to soundtrack work, and in fact, Georgia Hubley is the daughter of influential animators John and Faith Hubley, who happen to be some of my biggest creative influences on my own work.

Recovering from abdominal surgery is painful, and I probably didn’t educate myself properly on it. Maybe after the chemo (be it mild), surgery seemed like a light afterthought. With its shuffling and hypnotic percussion, it’s virtually impossible to not hear the ten minutes of opening track “Sea Urchins” and not be transported back to the hospital bed, IV drip in arm. The Sounds of the Sounds of Silence is all instrumental, of course, with all but one song not eclipsing eight minutes. The band’s shapeshifting palette knows no bounds, but some of their most enduring songs are the epic, elongated jams (looking at you, “Spec Bebop” and “Blue Line Swinger”). 

As the liquified, cinematic textures of songs like “How Some Jellyfish Are Born” and “The Love Life of the Octopus” drifted amid background chatter from the nurse station, I was reminded that several years prior, I actually curated a mix CD with underwater theming. Or maybe it came to me in a hazy dream. I vaguely recalled the sketch of a small crab for the cover. There were some cuts from twangy old surf music, and “Sea Song” by Robert Wyatt. I spent a lot of time waking up and trying to remember what else could have possibly been on that mix.

Listening to the album now conjures bittersweet emotions as well as a sense of the healing it provided, all tied together with that core, singular experience. My experience with ITP has been so unique, particularly during the chemo process and being surrounded by cancer patients (the majority of which were 40+ years older than I was at the time). The process was anxious and scary, especially during the prep when my oncologist had to sit me down to have an intense conversation about an extremely rare but fatal reaction to the infusion. But during the actual treatment and making small talk with the kind patients around me, I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmingly fortunate that I was only dealing with an autoimmune disease, and that my chemo was the mild variety. It was a gained perspective, the type that can only be gained during first hand experience.

Part of the elusive memory is also that I don’t actually recall cueing up the album on the iPod. Like fate, it was mysteriously selected. Most of all, my experience frees up a headspace to be fascinated at how certain pieces of music cosmically get wrapped in not only nostalgia, but those conspicuous moments (healing, tragic or otherwise). Just how many experiences out there mirror mine? It may have taken a combination of getting my spleen removed, obsolete technology and experimental rock created for fish, but I never listened to music (or people’s experiences with music) the same way again.

Mark Neeley is a journalist and visual artist from Cincinnati, OH. A contributing writer for music & arts publication Aquarium Drunkard, his written work has also appeared in publications like Shindig magazine. As an animator of short films and music videos, his most recent personal work Pure Animation for Now People (featuring a soundtrack by Mark Mothersbaugh) is currently on the film festival circuit. IG: @markaneeley Website: www.markneeley.com

Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, and sign up for our mailing list.