Bruises on the fruit: weather changes moods

What do you feel like listening to right now? That's a relatively easy question, despite how often we find ourselves gazing endlessly at a shelf or wearing out our thumb trying to find something just right.

Take a step back and a more interesting question presents itself: why do you feel like listening to that right now?

Obviously there's a lot at play: what did your parents play for you as a child; what do your friends like (although I've made friends through music as much I have come to like music through friends); what sort of a day are you having; are you tired or buzzing? Even days of the week seem relevant. Friday for me is always the Stooges or somesuch; yesterday I heartily enjoyed Pussy Galore's Dial "M" For Motherfucker as I gulped down a morning coffee.

But what I've been thinking about lately is the weather. Whichever side you choose or are destined to take in the free will vs determinism debate, there's no denying two things: we're slaves to our bodies and our bodies are slaves to the world. All your thoughts, tastes, desires and moods ping electrically around your brain, which is carried around and kept alive by your person. And your person lives in the world where it sweats, gets sunburnt and shivers.

It's around this time of year that I always notice it most. It's as if we're brought closer to the world as our flesh warms up and our blood flows back to our extremities. At the very start of Spring, when it first becomes possible to enjoy a mandarin on the verandah in shorts, I put on Pavement. "So drunk in the August sun" indeed, although it's mostly earlier stuff of theirs that fits the bill. Lately I'm enjoying psychedelic music (both guitar-based and electronic) and I can't help wondering if the animated chaos of green grass, fluttering insects, swooping birds, rotting fruit and horny people all around me has something to do with it, as well as the equivalence of bathing oneself in sound with enjoying the first couple of months of heat before it becomes unbearable.
Most strongly, in Summer when I'm swimming through Brisbane's 80% humidity in 40 degree heat under black clouds with the smell of rain about to fall in fat drops, I understand the vast yet claustrophobic reverb of The Go-Betweens' Before Hollywood, the deep-voiced melodrama of The Triffids' In the Pines and the stickiness of Talking Heads' Remain In Light. On a sunny day I put on The Triffids' Born Sandy Devotional and think of blinding sand. From albums such as these and the sweaty, tanned arms in music videos an alien or eighteen-year-old might gather that the '80s must have been a hot and humid decade.

Gold Coast Summers were different. I still put my longstanding devotion to Sonic Youth and anyone that sounds like them down to my adolescence swimming in a creek surrounded by dry bush and screaming insects, wondering what sort of music the trees would make if they could.

The music of a place must have something to do with its weather. Think of Ibiza and Seattle. At the opposite end of the humidity scale to Brisbane I find that when my skin's drying out and the insides of my nostrils are turning black in Sydney I get into the harsh scrapings of, say, Kiosk and Bird Blobs. Sometimes the weather seems to change music. When I rode a bus through fields of ice last year The Field's droning repetition was calming and crystalline. Listening to The Field now in a hot wooden house is more like surrendering to the lethargy and insanity of heatstroke.

I can't remember what the other half of the year sounds like, it seems so far away.

I'd be interested to hear anyone else's seasonal favourites.