Bill Laswell & Tetsu Inoue
Cymatic Scan

THE REVIEW

Yes, yes, so much music tries, strives, it's not bad, but... All these notes, neatly arranged... too many notes. All these timbres, these different voices... too many instruments. It's not true that silence is the perfect music: in silence, I start to hear all the underbrush of parasitic noises... too many distractions.

Perfect music doesn't exist. Perfect music has only one note, but that note smells of all the notes, like sunlight refracts into all colors. Perfect music has no rhythm, and yet it moves. It has no melody, yet it has a development. It neither spreads nor disperses because it comes from everything. It is not heard with the ears but sensed with the brain, because it manifests in the realm of the senses as much as it belongs to thought. It is neither organic like a guitar arpeggio nor synthetic like a blip from a printed circuit: perfect music is a murmur, a suggestion, it is the voice of the wind, it is the gurgle of life taking shape.

Perfect music requires no listening because it seems to come from within, from a soul that we all share, yet it takes hold, like a paranormal phenomenon and irresistibly draws those immersed in it into another state, into a sort of hyper-reality where sensations sharpen and the logic that governs the universe finally appears acceptable. Perfect music has no beginning or end: one can join in at any moment without risking misunderstanding. Like with family, one can stop for a personal contact or take it for granted like a friendly presence nearby but inconsequential. It is present and it is distant and, if I stop to listen, it speaks to me both of myself and of the vast universe. It is known and new at the same time.

Perfect music arranges feelings at the listener's pleasure, not like these symphonies which are nothing but tantrums of quirky composers with an attack of bile or an erection. Perfect music reflects my present, reminds me of a distant past, and outlines my future; it is as precise as it is elusive, evocative as abstract, and is animal, mineral, and vegetal together. Perfect music is of the earth but of the cosmos too, of this world and beyond. It is the sound of river, furnace, flower, it is the echo of feet, fins, and pedals and is heard at home, in the casbah, and in the barracks. It is the color of the world's fiber under the microscope and the telescope. It is the movement of the fibers of matter breathing in the great darkness. It is the attraction of electrons that bind and thus change the color of elements.

Perfect music is the universal cipher. Perfect music is what the orchestra played while the Titanic sank all the way twenty thousand leagues to the bottom of the sea.

Perfect music did not exist. Someone had to make it. Here it is. Incredible. Perfect.