I’m not sure I can make it through this album all the way. It sounds like spiders are eating into the back of my brain. I need to hear some Missy Elliott or something else similar that I like, to make sure I’m not coming down with mind-shingles.
The problem is that the mixing/mastering of this music is designed to force us to hear it. It’s distorted, and as loud as is physically possible. Just as Mencius asks if there is anything you value more than your life, and just as businesses should recognize that profit is only a desirable second effect of accomplishing a good purpose, musicians should ask if attracting attention at all costs is wise.
It’s a spider web of extruded aluminum. Minnows and geese are caught up, bubbling and squawking while the Mrs. winds them up, and the goose tries to eat the fish.
Listen to this stuff loud, if possible. The amount of attention you give to good free jazz is directly proportional to the enjoyment you can reap from it. It sounds like shit if you don’t pay attention. This is only true up to a point - the good associations developed from listening to it eventually overwhelm the disorienting squall and you can do the dishes or cook while it plays.
The texture changes clearly from track to track in this music, which signals that they are not just hacking away at “free jazz” but actually doing something specific in each piece.
There’s some odd dated liner notes in this CD (from 1998) about cyberspace. Check it out in the next post.
Well, this album induces melancholy in me in so many ways.
I have to admit that I envy Will Oldham, travelling to Iceland and recording deep records with Bjork’s sound engineer. Having good friends who go to fairly great lengths to help him realize such an individual, peculiar album. Making so many records in his career that frankly I never knew where to start - this is the first of his albums that I’ve really listened to. I don’t understand why I envy him and not Bill Callahan, say, or Tom Ze, people whose music I have a longstanding connection to.
Then there’s the lyrics. Putting aside his subject matter for a bit, just reading the lyric sheet makes my head hurt. It’s like reading Hegel - each word relates to its immediate neighbors in a clear way, but as you move to the phrase, sentence, and verse the sense gradually dissipates until you have to start all over again at a different phrase. It actually makes more sense when just listening, because it almost turns into a list of related words, which create meaning without clearly representing it, a sort of Cubism. I suppose it’s poetic, but at bottom the poet has to guarantee his readers that he has discovered the most simple way to express an idea so insightful that simplicity is redefined.
The content expressed by the lyrics is just heartbreaking. Will Oldham seems to see love and mutual destruction as coextensive. Even “Lay and Love”, which mostly works as a straightforward but very careful and complete love song, has the line
From what I know you’re terrified, you have mistrust running through you, your smile is hiding something hurtful, it makes me lay here and love you
I often think about Leo Strauss’s “Persecution and the Art of Writing” when considering obscure song lyrics, that contradiction and nonsense are ways of encoding heterodox ideas. I may as well also think of R.D.Laing suggesting that the insane are making their best effort at a compromise of contradictory necessities. Here the opacity of the surface just seems to reinforce the darkness inside. If you watch the video for Cold & Wet, you can see a layer of distressed gauze impregnated with christmas lights laid over the top of the opaque darkness of the song - very creepy.
Oldham’s voice, too, is heavy. It sounds as if he’s asleep and begging the rest of the music to stop making noise and come to bed.
I have often enjoyed listening to beautiful music in ugly circumstances, like making the CD player skip during Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here, or stacking different musics on top of each other in the computer or on different stereos.
My Bloody Valentine make it easy: Tremolo sounds like the Sundays or Mazzy Star or the Cocteau Twins played through a broken guitar amplifier.
