Darkness on the Edge of Town

Immersion, Music, and the Movies

I live in a picturesque coastal village in the northwest of Ireland, thirty seconds’ walk from a curving sandy beach, where I walk most days, even in the dead of winter, regardless of lashing rain or surging tides. It is an exquisitely beautiful place to live—and looking out over the roiling Atlantic, knowing that only Iceland lies between myself and Greenland, creates a vertiginous sense of liminality that always makes me more aware of the vastness that surrounds us.

In late January, Storm Isha battered the UK and Ireland with strong winds and torrential rain, felling trees and cables and causing widespread power outages. Northwest Ireland was especially badly affected. My lights began flickering early on a Sunday evening as the gale gathered force; by 8 p.m., my village was cloaked in an eerie darkness through which the winds howled. Some locals ventured out in the storm with flashlights, checking in on the elderly, distributing candles to those who had none. A lone dog barked angrily at the chaos whirling around it.

Power crews worked around the clock to repair the storm damage, although a remote coastal village with a few hundred people understandably wasn’t top of their priority list, and we had to wait for over 48 hours—in a part of the world that gets around seven hours of gloomy daylight in wintertime—for them to reach us. As someone who works from home, I spent the morning after the storm feeling irritated, disrupted, and disorganized. Most of my professional life—from my calendar to my project management software, files, and email—exists in the cloud, my access to it contingent on an internet connection that no longer worked. Cellular data services, swamped by a surge in traffic, had slowed to a crawl. I worked offline until my laptop battery gave out. Then I rummaged through drawers to locate power banks that I’d purchased the previous summer when taking my teenager and her friend to a Harry Styles concert. Thankfully, I’d remembered to recharge them again afterwards, so that I could at least top up my phone battery.

That night, I lit candles and built an open fire in the grate. I boiled water in a saucepan and made tea. I grew more adventurous, and cooked dinner. I imagined strolling down to a generator-powered coffee cart at the beach the following morning for a latte. I may have been cut off and inconvenienced, but—looking on the bright side—I was still a far cry from Yellowjackets, that disturbingly fascinating show about a 1990s high-school girls’ soccer team that crash-lands in the Canadian wilderness and gradually descends into Lord of the Flies savagery. No, thank you.

That evening, unable to stream music or access Netflix, I browsed through my phone for any music or movies buried in its digital detritus. I retraced electronic footsteps from months previously, when I’d been researching the psychology of burnout—which had led me to Thom Yorke’s retreat to Cornwall following Radiohead’s 1997–98 world tour to promote OK Computer. Describing himself as exhausted, depressed, burned out, and creatively blocked after playing over a hundred concerts across multiple continents, Yorke took up landscape painting and shunned guitar rock, instead listening exclusively to music from the British independent electronic music label Warp—notably Autechre and Aphex Twin. Those influences in turn shaped the radically different direction of the band’s fourth album, Kid A.

Influenced by electronic music, jazz, and contemporary classical, Kid A was jarringly different from OK Computer; fans were nonplussed, and many critics dismissed Kid A as pretentious, obscure, and inaccessible. British music magazine Melody Maker gave it a scathing 1.5 stars out of 5. But, over the decades, Kid A has acquired the stature of a masterwork; in 2020, Rolling Stone ranked it at number 20 on its list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time,” 22 places ahead of OK Computer and, surprisingly, four places above Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Chiastic Slide: Autechre in Shadow

Lurking among Kid A’s primary influences was Autechre. I knew of Autechre, the enigmatic electronic music duo of Rob Brown and Sean Booth from Rochdale, Manchester, who had been making electronic music together since they were teenagers in the 1980s, but I’d never truly listened to them. Now, I couldn’t listen to anything else. Borrowing my teenager’s headphones, I settled into the dark quiet warmth of my living room, illuminated only by the glowing embers of a fire, closed my eyes, and became immersed in sound. Rapidly, I came to feel that there was nothing but sound—that this absence of electricity, Internet, and television, and the presence of so much enveloping darkness, had created a heightened aesthetic awareness.

Autechre’s complex and ever-evolving sonic landscape defies easy categorization. Drawing on influences from techno and ambient to musique concrète and experimental noise, they craft increasingly dense and intricate sonic tapestries that can be dissonant and eerie, and yet become heartbreakingly beautiful. Each of their albums shows meticulous attention to detail and micro-level manipulation of sound, although their later recordings have increasingly abandoned traditional song structures and melodic conventions to embrace an open-ended and exploratory approach. By embracing complex algorithms, an ever-expanding collection of hardware, and the move away from physical media, Autechre’s music—and their way of making music—that has become increasingly expansive; recent albums such as elseq 1–5 and NTS Sessions 1–4 have runtimes of four and eight hours respectively. (The latter is now available as a box set of twelve vinyl LPs, if one so desires.) Regardless of the length, I kept listening. I had plenty of time, after all.

My power was finally restored—my microwave alerted me with an exuberantly loud beep, as it and other appliances and devices hummed back into life, returning me to the 21st century. Later that day, Internet connection restored, I spent some time researching Autechre online. To my surprise, I learned that Booth and Brown had also been thinking about what it means to listen to music in the dark; for years, they had been performing their concerts in entirely dark auditoriums. “I think something happens when you listen to music either with your eyes closed or in the dark,” Booth told the Irish Times ahead of a Dublin concert in 2018. “The music reaches further into you.”

Not only does Autechre perform in darkness, but darkness assists their compositional process as well. “We often find ourselves listening to tracks back on headphones with our eyes closed, and every event and moment might be more or less poignant than you imagined,” noted Brown. “I think everyone feels similar when their computer is turned off. Your eyes are no longer distracted.” Booth added: “I’m not a neuroscientist, but all I know is something happens in the dark that I’m desperately trying to explain.”

Smartphones: Immersion No More?

That transformative impact of darkness noted by Sean Booth, and the lack of distraction mentioned by Brown, might explain why leaps of imagination, including for storytelling and religious ceremonies, have often benefited from minimal or no light. Another such activity, of course, has been moviegoing—which traditionally has taken place in darkened theatres, creating an immersive environment that enhances our sense of transport, making us at one with the imaginative world on screen. At its best, going to the movies can resemble a sacrosanct and mystical ritual that works on us—just like music in darkness—without us fully understanding why (although neuroscientists have recently made significant progress in understanding the phenomenon of transportation).

Such immersive experiences in moviegoing have lately been challenged by so-called “second-screening,” or the act of paying attention to another device while watching a movie. Last summer’s “Barbenheimer” phenomenon brought a welcome bonanza to the movie industry, but it also heralded new levels of disregard for traditional movie-going etiquette. Stories abounded about people talking loudly, using phones, taking flash photographs, or even making TikToks during screenings. A fight erupted in a Brazilian theater after a parent permitted her child to watch YouTube at full volume on a tablet throughout Barbie. From my own experience, fewer now heed the admonition to turn off phones inside movie theatres—even though their bright screens jolt others out of the immersive experience they’d hoped to have.

The streaming boom and the interlinked COVID-19 pandemic led to a new set of norms—streaming movies at home implies a more relaxed social contract that allows for talking, scrolling social media, or playing games during movies. Many of those who went to see Barbie or Oppenheimer in the summer of 2023 had not been to a movie theater in four years, and took this new social contract along. But lockdowns are not entirely to blame; even before the pandemic, the head of AMC Entertainment told Variety that he planned to permit phone use in some theaters, saying: “When you tell a 22-year-old to turn off the phone, don’t ruin the movie, they hear please cut off your left arm above the elbow. You can’t tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cellphone. That’s not how they live their life.”

The notion that a 22-year-old should never be expected to turn off their phone is, of course, nonsense—especially when it interferes with a key communal experience. But we now have new evidence of the harm this constant connectivity does, especially to developing adolescent brains. Jonathan Haidt’s newly published book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness shows how replacing a play-based childhood with a phone-based childhood has produced an unprecedented mental health epidemic, especially among adolescent girls. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide have all risen dramatically since the early 2010s—coinciding precisely with the rise of the smartphone as the centerpiece of teenage existence.

Haidt presents compelling evidence that phones interfere with children’s social and neurological development at a key stage in their lives—fragmenting their attention, depriving them of sleep, fostering addiction, and lowering their grades. Scores recorded by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which measures 15-year-olds’ abilities internationally in reading, science, and math, have declined precipitously in recent years—but teens who spend less than an hour on their digital devices a day still score 50 points higher in math than those who spend more than five hours a day on them. And if five hours a day sounds high, the CDC notes that American children aged 11 to 14 now spend nine hours a day in front of various screens.

After pandemic lockdowns and school closures drove children’s screen time to all-time highs, some are beginning to take this threat to adolescent mental health more seriously. From the beginning of next year, a new Florida law will ban children under 14 from social media and will require parental consent for children between 14 and 16. In Britain, a survey last month by a parenting charity found that 58 percent of parents would support banning smartphones for under-16s; 83 percent of the parents surveyed consider smartphones harmful to children. In the Irish town of Greystones, County Wicklow, parents have initiated a voluntary, communal no-smartphone approach until children begin secondary school (7^th grade), with positive initial outcomes. The New Yorker reports that startups supplying “dumbphones” are thriving, driven by demand from people who want to ditch their smartphones and return to the devices common in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Darkness: An Evolutionary Need?

The recent solar eclipse brought our divided nation briefly together around the same captivating celestial dance of sun, moon, and earth that has enraptured—and often terrified—civilizations throughout history. Eclipses are known to have inspired awe and fear in ancient civilizations, who tended to view them as omens from displeased gods, and they continue to inspire wonder today, uniting people in shared experiences of curiosity and cosmic amazement.

An eclipse is an astronomical phenomenon—but it also draws together symbolism, primal spirituality, and our ongoing search for meaning and purpose into a tapestry of wonder and contemplation; as we gaze into the skies, we also gaze into ourselves. And the fascination is contagious: The New York Times reported that towns and cities in the “path of totality” (a roughly 115-mile-wide swath stretching from Mazatlán in Mexico to Montreal in Canada) experienced an economic bonanza as millions of tourists flocked to it. The path of totality even became a wedding destination—hundreds of couples married in mass ceremonies as the eclipse took place overhead.

Australian psychologist Kate Russo, whom the BBC interviewed, has spent her academic career studying people’s emotional response to eclipses. She commented that we typically experience an eclipse with a sense of “wrongness and primal fear,” followed by a feeling of “connectedness and insignificance,” and then “euphoria,” quickly followed by a desire to experience the whole thing all over again. “Moments before, you’re looking at the sun,” she commented. “Now, there’s just a hole in the sky where the sun should be. It’s like everything is turned upside down.” This fascination with inversion, with absence, with darkness, itself taps into primal experience.

Archaeologist Holley Moyes, who works with cognitive scientists to investigate the effects of darkness on human psychology, has argued that the caves of our deep ancestral past played a key role in the emergence of imagination as well as supernatural belief—and, of course, storytelling itself. From the outset of civilization, then, we have sought to find ourselves in darkness as well as in light.

We’ll have more thoughts on these issues in subsequent posts. In the meantime, turn off the lights. Silence your phone. Listen to music. Or watch a movie. Do nothing else—and experience true immersion.