INGRID (ENGLISH VERSION)

COLOURLESS IDEAS

I've always loved islands, always had a soft spot for them. In fact, I'd much rather spend my holidays on an island than anywhere else. When I lived in Australia, Ingmar and I would often take our holidays on the islands of Oceania. The word "island" holds a special significance for me. On one hand, it represents a place you reach after a long, arduous journey, much like pirates in fairy tales who sail the seas for days and finally reach a deserted island. On the other hand, it also represents a place where you're safe, because it's not easily accessible to others.

Around the mid-2030s, I started delving more into Linguistics. As I've mentioned before, I was particularly interested in the syntactic aspect of language and how language structures its sentences with mathematical logic. I read a book considered the be-all and end-all of linguistics: Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures. One of the concepts that struck me as particularly fascinating was the idea that language operates on two levels: the surface structure and the deep structure. The deep structure deals with how a sentence is fundamentally constructed, its meaning, and the relationships between words and phrases. It's the sentence's initial form before we apply grammatical rules, like subject-verb agreement or tense. The deep structure is closer to the mental representation of what we want to express. The grammar comes into play in the surface structure, which is the final form of the sentence, as we actually speak it, after it has undergone various transformations.

Another concept I found intriguing was the theory of "islands." In linguistics, an island refers to any element that behaves independently, as if it's isolated from the rest of the sentence. In syntactic theory, islands are structures within a sentence over which other structures cannot pass. To make this clearer, think of questions or relative clauses as containing islands, because you can't just place the word "who" wherever you want. You can say, "I don't know if you've read the book," but it would sound ridiculous to say, "Which book I don't know if you've read."

However, the third concept that particularly inspired me and would go on to occupy my thoughts for months was the correctness of sentences. Chomsky wrote that language is so creative that you can generate endless structures that may not make any logical sense, yet are perfectly syntactically correct. To illustrate his point, he coined the famous phrase "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously." When I first read it, I found it both hilarious and incredibly clever. I remember calling Brian to ask if he'd read the book.

"Quite difficult," he said. "You need pen and paper; it's like doing maths."

Hmm, not exactly. You just need to draw tree diagrams if you want to advance your understanding. Although I do have a deep appreciation for the logic and precision of mathematics, what inspired me about Chomsky's phrase were precisely the opposite reasons. I thought about how the way we articulate a sentence depends entirely on what we want to communicate. For example, the phrase "Tomorrow we'll go for a swim" could serve two different communicative purposes. On one hand, it might be a promise you make to your kids when they're begging you to take them to the beach. On the other hand, your wife might ask, "Shall I invite the neighbours over for dinner tomorrow?" and you respond with, "Tomorrow we'll go for a swim." In the second case, the utterance isn't a promise but a refusal. This kind of relativity doesn't exist in mathematics. One plus one equals two, end of story. So, I enjoyed Syntactic Structures not just for their mathematical precision but also for their imprecision, as exemplified by Chomsky's amusing little sentence.

I loved it so much because I saw a parallel with music. The way each person perceives music is entirely subjective. That's why there are so many different interpretations of songs, and even more so of classical pieces, where supposedly classical music has an exacting precision in how the score is played, but there are cases where an entire work might change, and it doesn't ruin it at all. So I began to see parallels between the syntactic structure of language and music. I thought about how I could translate conceptually paradoxical and seemingly incoherent phrases into music and lyrics. I wanted to write songs that would explore the relationship between structure and meaning and the idea that something seemingly incomprehensible could have deeper significance.

In May 2030, I began composing an album, but this time I did something completely different. I moved my synthesizer into the Art Room, which, as I've mentioned before, contained all sorts of strange objects. There, I began experimenting with sounds. No, don't get the wrong idea—I didn't change my method of composition. We've said before that I'm a writer, so I can't compose outside the box. I simply used sounds in my music that were pleasing to my ear and which I felt appropriately represented the melodies I was thinking of at the time. However, this time I decided to change the sounds of the synthesizer. I didn't use my usual sounds, nor those that pleased me, but rather those that didn't sound right to my ear. It's a completely subjective feeling. I don't know if others noticed the difference or if they simply thought I'd changed my sounds.

When we met in the summer to record the album, I still hadn't written the lyrics. The truth was that nothing was coming to me at the time, even though there had been stories accompanying the songs. We had booked recording sessions at Rockfield again, and for the first time, I played my demos to the rest of the band. I told them my ideas about using incoherent sounds. And then Vivian said:

"If you want to do something really paradoxical, why not try making music without a melody?"

"But how would I do that? It wouldn't be music then; it would just be random noises."

She smiled. "That's the point. That way, you'll represent language, which can take on a different meaning each time."

I thought to myself, "You lot don't really understand the essence of language." Language isn't just random noises. There's always meaning in language. The same goes for music. In my opinion, if you can't sing something, then it isn't music. Even a fast song should be something you can sing, even if you have to slow it down. I've always believed that learning music is based on being able to sing something clearly.

All the singers I've worked with have joked that they didn't enjoy recording sessions with me because, to me, the song needs to be clear and melodic. Singing is the dance of the voice, and it should complement the other instruments rather than just accompany them. Maybe that's why I translated my stories into music. Perhaps I was translating the story into a melodic line. Whenever I composed music, I would first sing what I had in mind and then write it down.

In the end, I simply replied, "I don't know how to work that way, so I'd rather stick to a melodic line, as I've always done. What do you all think? Agree?"

They didn't have much choice since these were songs I'd written myself. So, once we got to the studio, I worked feverishly, trying to create music that was melodically pleasing to my ears, though not necessarily sonically. In the end, I composed a piece and recorded a demo of it on the synthesizer. But when I played it back, I realised it was AWFUL! I had never written a more pretentious song. I tried to mix too many sounds together, and it ended up sounding like a pretentious mishmash of mismatched sounds, but melodically, it didn't make any sense. No, this wasn't the kind of music I write.

When I told Brian what had happened, he laughed and said, "Why don't you make changes to the sounds we play?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"For example, instead of Vivian playing the guitar solo, Nancy could play the uilleann pipes."

"I hadn't thought of that." Yes, we could change the instruments, but that wouldn't be too different from what we usually did.

In the end, I used my imagination, and we recorded with sounds we'd never used in any of our previous albums. The result was quite beautiful. However, this work had completely exhausted us, and I'm not sure if it's because we'd all grown quite old, but I already felt completely drained. Perhaps it was because I'd been a cancer patient, and my strength had significantly diminished over the years. Regardless, it meant that we didn't work every day. Some mornings, we'd go out into the studio yard and just jam by ourselves. One morning, we went out with our coffees and played and danced to a Turkish song because Nancy had brought a traditional instrument called a ney.

The recordings were finished, and in November 2030, we released our album Colourless Ideas. We didn't go on a big tour, as I didn't have the energy anymore. However, after the tour, I went on a trip. Completely alone.