Sounding the “Spirit of My Silence”

Abstract

Sufjan Stevens’s 2015 album Carrie and Lowell threw indie rock fans into collective mourning with its sonic depiction of feeling so much to the point of experiencing an overwhelming affective nothingness. Written as an elegy for Stevens’s mother, the album performs Stevens’s loss by creating a static soundscape punctuated by moments of stark sonic absence. Some moments evoke the emotionally ineffable (rhythmic stutters between phrases), some occupy a sonically liminal space with white noise negating silence, and others are calls to physical action (flipping over the LP) that literally give the listen pause. This paper places an autoethnographic encounter with a Carrie and Lowell pre-release “silent listening party” in conversation with Roland Barthes’s theory of affect and grief as originally developed in Camera Lucida: A Note on Photography. This paper explores the possibility that Barthes’s theory offers an infrastructure for approaching affect and musical listening by highlighting the ways in which the individual functions as an affective archive, navigating culturally-coded and pre-cognitive physiological responses to aesthetic objects. Drawing upon Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis’s work on structured silences, this paper argues that moments of foregrounded silence in Carrie and Lowell provide musical analogies for Barthes’s punctum of time and death.