How I learned to hear Tool
On the Eve of Speaking with Ève Poudrier
Some time ago, my family and I were driving home on the Sea to Sky Highway late at night. Our son was coming back from university for fall break. He wanted me to listen to a song from a band he had discovered. He handed me one of his earbuds and explained that their music was unique; it was built on mathematical ratios of time, odd time signatures, and long unfolding song structures.
My first exposure to Tool was through that single earbud, but I wasn’t initially drawn in. Music isn’t as much a part of my life as words are, and so I often associate music more with memory than with the listening experience.
My son's playing of Tool on subsequent drives also didn’t change much. In fact, the band, to me, seemed elusive, far from the music genre of progressive rock that I would like, and many songs later, the same feeling remained.
But then one day, something switched. We were visiting my father and about to turn off Highway 1, and this song, Invincible, felt as though it had finally pulled me in and under.
I remember saying to my son, “This is so cinematic.” It felt like an experience more than a song.
There was something unique about this later listening, and now I know that its uniqueness might have had something to do with a musical phenomenon called polyrhythm and the intense rhythmic layering that often accompanies it.
A polyrhythm, in its plainest terms, can be seen in musical notation, but heard simply as two or more contrasting rhythmic patterns happening at the same time, each dividing time in a different way. So at first, one may not feel entirely comfortable with them, because there’s a sort of off-kilter, almost off-putting sound.
And yet, as time passed, as I experienced with Tool, one hears rhythms that seem almost to amalgamate and fuse as one.
The rhythmic nature of their music allows one's mind to drift inwards, and the effect is not dwelling within words, as many songs can be to a writer. There is almost a feeling of something transcendental happening inside oneself.
But it was certainly a curious thing for me to have disliked a band, only to realize that with the passage of time and repetition of listening to these complex rhythms, I would be so fond of them.
This small chapter in my life certainly raised many questions, and one of them was trying to understand why. Were polyrhythms part of this effect on me?
I have experimented with listening to Tool while riding my bike. Normally I am accustomed to the sound of my heartbeat and steady pulse while climbing steep mountain roads. But with Tool, the sound of my heart is exchanged with contrasting rhythmic patterns.
And that effect is interesting because, I've noticed, that if I am fatigued, the music often carries me forward.
Yesterday while on my bike, I experienced such a thing, because a ride in the midday sun is fatiguing on a mountain climb, and Tool gave me exactly what I needed.
But perhaps the most interesting effect was on the downhill, when one of their songs, Wings for Marie, had ended in a whispering-like sound — or maybe was it thunder. Because I was biking down at fast speed, the mountain wind was now audible, the rhythms and beats had paused, and the wind sound, at least to my ears, felt as if it was part of the music.
Another layer of complexity that only nature could bring in to a song.