Tim Smith died a year ago yesterday. I wrote this about him then.

I was a Headphones Kid when I was young. How could I not be? Books were my favorite form of escape, but books couldn't literally drown out the world. Music could. The banal horrors of being young could be kept at bay for a little while longer, at those times when the world was too cluttered and chaotic to focus on lines on a page.

Funny things, because I always look for funny. Bouncy things, because I'm a compulsive mover. Angry, sad things, because the world made me feel angry and invisible and lonely, and I wanted something to at least tug at something deep within me. Well-written things, well-composed things, because more than anything it felt like a sign that there was something else out there.

A year before I discovered Cardiacs, I was enamored with Mike Oldfield and Joanna Newsom, two songwriters who dabbled in the strange space between immediacy and complexity. I discovered Frank Zappa, whose smarter-than-thou approach thrilled me. Lots of jazz, lots of classical music, fair amount of oddball things geared to slip through the cracks.

But music, for me, is still divided into "before Cardiacs" and "after Cardiacs". Because Cardiacs was the only music I'd ever heard that seemed like it moved at my wavelength. Constantly spasming, constantly in flux, but every piece of it striking and compelling in a different way. Some bits were brutal, others were delicate; some felt modern, others ancient. There was joy and fury, mischief and fear, sorrow and faith. Their words felt like a vast, unwieldy riddle, hinting at an explanation to the question of why bad things happen, admitting to desperate paranoia and terror, yet always with a hidden smile, as if all this was a show masquerading some wonderful truth, and we were all in on the joke, even those of us too dim to admit we'd gotten it yet.

I wrestled with each and every one of their songs, struggling my way through their catalogue one song at a time, for years. They were my favorite band long before I could make my way through an entire album of theirs without burning out on overexcitement. Some art is a solace; other art is an inspiration. Cardiacs was more than that: they were my companion.

I've been thinking this week about how, more than anything, I am drawn to things which constantly subvert their own limits: philosophers, artists, personalities, what-have-you. The moment something or somebody gets trapped inside a pattern, they start to flatten, reduced to little more than a current which you either let submerge you or watch dispassionately from afar. I'm not getting lost in things—the moment something turns itself into wallpaper, I'm done. I don't care how intelligently a work of music reduces itself to the purpose of evoking a single emotion: save that shit for movie soundtracks. What I want is the stuff that lives, the stuff that only lasts for as long as it can thrash and twist and push past its own restraints, towards places ripe for exploration, visible from the starting coastline but mysteries in their own right, impossible to understand without that willingness to immediately and profoundly immerse yourself in something terrifying and wondrous and new.

No artist captures that feeling more viscerally than Cardiacs do. In a sense, their every song is about being a living, growing, conscious thing, eternally pushing into something new, eternally fragile and tender with that newborn bud, eternally anxious about the awareness that the outside world doesn't understand, didn't ask for, and will not welcome this brand-new thing—and eternally giddy with the rush of possibility, almost militantly with delight at this ongoing birth. Their music is not overtly religious, and often dabbles in the profane, but theirs is the most divine music I know, in the sense that all divinity stems from an awareness of a vast and profound Presence, and the realization that no mortal fear can hold a candle to it. Hence the hidden smile: we are the strange, crooked flowers whose skyward yearnings are nothing less than the outstretched fingers of God. So to speak.

Each of their songs is repulsive when you try to judge it on terms you learned elsewhere; approach them with gentle curiosity, and they reveal more melody, more lushness, than you ever thought was possible in such a confined space. They hide universes in miniature. Not all music feels drab by comparison, but much of it does—particularly the easy pleasures. In a way, you start to see how many songs abandon their own souls in an attempt to pluck them out and hand them to you on platters, and how much more there is to be gained when those songs instead plunge deep into themselves, hoping you'll follow along. It's not that they expect you to make that journey—it's that they need you to. Lean back, arms crossed, demanding that they instead give you a sales pitch, and you'll get nothing, and convince yourselves that you were right to be demanding; approach them with something approximating empathy, and you'll find more there than you knew could ever be found.

Which isn't to say they're a laborious band by any means. On the contrary, they're fun like a friend, weird like a friend, prone to get you to weird corners of the world at odd hours of the morning. Most meaningful memories don't make sense outside of the moments that birthed them: their alchemy is too specific, too strange, for you to quite remember why it meant so much to you at the time. These recipes are tricky. So it's a miracle to have an artist who can take you to that oddness time and time again, each moment inimitable. You can say that Cardiacs songs all sound the same, but only in the sense that each one takes you to twenty more places than you thought possible, none of which you quite expected when you were first invited out to dinner.

They have spawned, unsurprisingly, a good half of my favorite bands—because anyone remotely involved with them got the idea, and shared in that sentiment with an essentially spiritual fervor. They all dip into the same well, and what comes out is richer and more passionate and more human than what you'd usually expect out of that sound. At this point, when I come across a modern band with any kind of heart, any sense that they're trying to make a connection with me in any real sense, it's almost a running gag that I go digging through interviews with members until I find the name "Cardiacs" come up. And it always does. Theirs is the kind of beauty that haunts you.

I've been to two concerts thrown by the Alphabet Business Collective, their homegrown record label. I'd be lying if I called them the best concerts I've ever been to, but at each of them, something magical happened: the attendees, who were too diverse in nature to easily be categorized as a certain Type of music-listener—there were families, there were metalheads, there were several people in elaborate dress, and the range of people covered a broad spectrum not just of culture but of class—danced and sang along to a spectrum of music so broad that you'd have to imagine most people would reach a breaking point for. Some of the music was astonishingly twisty and spiky and frenetic; some of it was wispy and fey; some of it was acoustic and personal; some of it was ornate and mildly pompous. The crowd didn't care. All of it was loved, and none of it was rejected.

It was there that I realized how inured I am to the idea that it's normal for people to reject the unexpected, for them to write off what's unusual for being dull, for them to enter a space with a set of unspoken demands and to storm off if they don't get precisely what they want. And it's not that this group wasn't opinionated: I suspect there were fierier stances on music in that room than there are in most. But there was a willingness, there, to embrace new things, to give them a chance, to accept the joy of things on their own terms. 

Maybe that's what this music births: people who know that wonders are, well, wondrous. Atypical. Out-of-the-ordinary. People who know a thing or two about miracles—namely, that they take unexpected forms—and who remember the terrifying forms of the original angels.