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Things can be consumed both hot and cold. For example, if you slap tea in the fridge, it becomes delicious. Funk is no joke either, in fact, in its cold and white version, I actually prefer it. I must have turned out wrong. A poor little duck enchanted by a wave imprinting.
…
"Play faster, but slower," Martin used to say. Beauty has no explanations, except nonsensical ones.
Meanwhile, the gray/white of the clouds in the sky looks like that of a skeleton on the black of an X-ray. Nothing unusual, the first A Certain Ratio didn't make songs but X-rays.
Everything is stripped to the bone. Actually, no, perhaps not even the bones are there anymore. There are only appearances and ghosts.
"To Each" at certain moments is pure Francis Bacon, the sublime understood as the unspeakable, the unspeakable understood as horror. After all, Francis Bacon also made X-rays.
The only difference is that music allows a space for escape, while the image, unbreathable and claustrophobic, is instead fixed forever.
...
The chromatic scale of "To Each" fluctuates between gray and white. Cold tones that traverse gloomy transparencies.
What does white hide?
"There is in the intimate idea of this color something elusive that instills more panic in the soul than the red that terrifies in blood," thus Herman Melville.
What does gray tell?
Gray is the sky of Manchester, gray is stasis. But hit by a moonbeam, it transforms into silver, the color of melancholy and intuition.
A very sad intuition, mind you.
...
"To Each" reminds me of "The Eye of Purgatory," an old novel by Jacques Spitz where some guy sees things as they will be in the future.
At first, it happens that the chicken thigh served to him at the restaurant is a disgusting leftover gnawed a few days before, then, in a ruthless crescendo, the world rots in front of his eyes until he finds himself walking among skeletons.
The final track of "To Each," "Winter Hill," is a kind of rumba for exhausted souls. "Alien ethnic music," Caspasian would say.
Inspired by a very hippie record they usually listened to under acid, A Certain Ratio jam like ragtag bongo players in the park, a situation not exactly for icy wavers, you will agree.
However, everything gets cooled by a thick layer of ice. And so what comes out is a tribal and futuristic nightmare, a trance for pale faces with the soul at minus twenty degrees.
Here, I imagine "Winter Hill" danced by Jacques Spitz's skeletons. Not only that, I even see the creaky bones slowly turning into dust.
More than whirling dervishes turning...
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Take a post-punk clique, add a producer with his head in the clouds, and the funkiest drummer in Manchester, that is, Joy Division meet Talking Heads. But imagine the Talking Heads gray.
Ian Curtis, on the other hand, finds himself inside a synthetic nightmare, a half geometric and nervous spasm broken by sharp jazz breaks.
Are you sad, friend? This groove is at least as much as you are. So why aren't you dancing?
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And what about those female choruses that appear every now and then? "Dots of ellipsis between visions of horror," someone I know used to say. So girls, for Christ's sake, stand there and whisper; you have to sing the mystery as if you don't give a damn, as beautiful as you are, you'll also be capable of being the bored goddesses, right?
...
"To Each" is a masterpiece.
The sound has a strange immaterial quality, some say it's decantation, others say it's quintessence.
Like other heroes of the era, I think of the Contortions, I think of the Pop Group, the first A Certain Ratio mixed punk, funk, and jazz. But, while the former were mostly shrill and exciting, here everything is suspended in air.
It's because there's a magician behind, and that magician is producer Martin Hannett, one who would first "suck the marrow" from the sound and then "tear the balls." In the end, he put everything in a bubble.
"Play faster, but slower," he used to say. Beauty has no explanations, except nonsensical ones.
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