It's also become a dominant trope in movie previews. You get Clint Mansell or Hans Zimmer or someone like that to make a low, pseudo-orchestral soundscape, paste a disembodied voice over it, and you've got goosebump gold. It works so well that, though I now actively and vocally dislike it, I, despite myself, still got giddy when they pulled that exact shit for the Avengers 2 trailer. (It didn't work on me for Batman V Superman, though. Suckers.)
One of the best aspects of post-rock, at least for me, is its suitability as a reading soundtrack. Of course, it doesn't work when some loon is rambling all over the B-side of Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada. Or when you've got a composer's catalogue pulled up on Spotify and all of a sudden you're gone from a symphony to an opera, and you have to break from your reading to click to a new track. I can't read to music with vocals or just voices. It's not that I pay attention to what's being sung/said, it's just that I stop paying attention what I'm reading. My mind drifts into this unproductive, arrested liminal space in between listening and reading wherein I kind of just freeze.
Something different happened, though, when I first got to "True Stories" on Crimewave's Collection I. I still froze, but instead, all of my attention went immediately to the sample of a wild Southern preacher telling a story of a woman in a spiritual crisis. The preacher, at times unintelligble, due to his accent, the rough recording, and his occasional screaming, spews brimstone from his pulpit in the no-longer-there over a mystical, gleaming, foreboding, weedy, baleful dronescape. Andy Gibbs' composition is pitch perfect. The keys of a synth brighten slightly towards their death in a loop over a groaning roll of bass reverberation with a night's symphony of crickets and cicadas pulsing incessantly, too. All of this fades to the background beautifully underneath the weight of the preacher's sermon.
Even though I know I'll have to stop my reading for eight minutes - or twenty four minutes if I listen to it three times in a row -, I still put on Collection I first when I'm listening to Crimewave while reading. I need to get to "True Stories," so I can experience it. It feels novel while trafficking in a well-worn mechanism. It's a pleasure folded in on itself and then multiplied back out because it's a convention that has been renewed and produced in such a way that both recalls all of the previous ways you've enjoyed it while forcing you to imagine yourself sitting in the pews of that church. You're multidimensional, multitemporal, when it's playing. The preacher's story ends:
"When she looked me in the face and said, 'For Christ's sake leave me alone," ladies and gentleman, she wasn't just talkin' to me. She was talkin' to the Lord. And on the first day of January, he just left her alone. That's all God have to do to send you to Hell 'fore you even have an invitation: just take his hand off ya - that's all! - and drop you into Hell..."
I like to imagine this preacher looks like a tin-type of a horrible Howard Finster. He has a gold tooth, and his smile doesn't pull towards his eyes but rather sets his teeth on edge and cracks his lips. He's mostly made up of grease and Revelations. He has the shiniest shoes in church and drinks whiskey cheaper than his poor parishioners drink. He also reaches out from the no-longer-there and drags me down into the never-is-here. Maybe he allows me to convert for eight minutes, only to backslide when the track changes.
But maybe none of it would affect me without Andy Gibbs' composition undergirding it all. Maybe all I've done is allowed my thoughts to find the drone gods for those eight minutes and baptize myself in their low end sibilation. Praise be.
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