// Letters to YVYNYL //

Gymnast - Young Blood

 / After reading this piece from Cathy Wilcock and Chris Lyon from Manchester it made me wonder if they are working on a PhD in philosophy or psychology, and music lands in the region of ‘side project’. I don’t know if they are students or professors - it’s just my own wild guess - but their methodology clearly correlates to their song writing craft. Perhaps, like many of us, their professional life is merely a side project of their true passion in music. 

Dear Mark

We came across your blog and have been having a blast reading through the Letters to YVYNYL – great idea for a blog feature. We wanted to write you a little something about our recent single ‘Young Blood’ and the EP that it is from.

The EP has a central thread running through it: the concept of liminality. The ‘limen’ is a boundary or threshold and liminal moments refer to transitions through those boundaries. While the concept has been borrowed into all kinds of contexts, we are taking it in its original anthropological sense. Societies everywhere have been very consistent in developing rituals of transition. These mark (or even bring about) the transition from one category of identity to another. They can happen to selves within societies (for example, the Sinhalese-Buddhist exorcism-of-illness ritual), or to societies themselves (for example, during revolutionary epochs), or can reflect a society’s sense of the world they inhabit itself undergoing substantive change (as in the spring rituals of pagan Russia explored in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring). 

These rituals are chaotic moments because they require disassociation from the ordering principles of the past followed by the establishment of different, new, ordering principles. In between the disassociation from and re-establishment of ordering principles, there is a space where experience is unstructured and unmediated by these principles of order – this is the liminal moment.

One of these rituals of transition is the coming of age ritual which formalises a subject’s transition from childhood to adulthood. This is the particular moment of liminality which informs our single ‘Young Blood’. Coming of age rituals let the subject loose from the authority of their parents, their tribe, their roots, and allow them to / invite them to establish their own principles of ordering. This sense of release can be liberating and enriching but also sorrowful and angst-ridden, as seen, for example, in Goethe’s Young Werther or Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko. This fretfulness and self-doubt often arises because the subject is being asked to prove that they are ready to go it alone. It is the anxiety accompanying liberation during coming of age liminality that our song ‘Young Blood’ explores. 

There are multiple voices in the song which all take place in the subject’s head. This is because of the multiple selves (pre- and post-transition) which co-exist during liminal moments. There is fear about being set free from the authority of the parents and the homeland and perhaps losing contact with those ordering principles altogether. There is self-doubt about whether or not the subject will let down both themselves and those former authoritative voices. This apprehension accompanies the euphoria of liberation from those authorities. Throughout the song, the lyrics reference these pressures / freedoms. At the same time, the music embodies simultaneous apprehension and excitement in its fluid metric shifts between an angular pattern in the verse and bridge and a euphoric four-on-the-floor in the chorus.

Ok, thanks for reading if you got this far!…

Cathy and Chris

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