• Rating:
The fragmenting tendency, the lo-fi attitude, the chaotic phrasing, the subtly nullified sense, the decoction of everything into everything of Bill Callahan's "Julius Caesar" transliterated into the electronic alphabet.
That speaks, or rather, expresses itself through sounds. And a Rosetta Stone forged by human reason to translate a language that is not and cannot be human can only be arbitrary, approximate. Fallacious ultimately.
Dancing architecture? And does playing feelings have perhaps more reason to be?
Musique concrète anti-evocative because a sound does not refer to anything but itself. Indeed, a sound does not refer. A sound simply is.
The primordial One that incessantly creates and destroys but without that Dionysian intoxication so dear to Nietzsche. The aseptic composition of daily little facts in a collage of micro-loops decked with noise.
A hic et nunc sound rippled with glitch grammatical inaccuracies that hover over low-voltage drones.
A crude, dissonant, chipped ambient. The hic sunt leones of every electroacoustic geographical map.
The epigrams that the wind writes on the sand. The "Finnegans Wake" of abstract electronics.
The fixed gaze of my cat on the prey it is about to seize. Vivid, material. Forever untranslatable.
But "Songs About Nothing" by Jason Lescalleet consists of two discs, and the Esperanto-like stutter of the first contrasts with a long and sinuous soundscape tuned to dark frequencies, threatening pulses, and minimal-noise frills.
Decidedly more conventional.
Were it not that in its becoming, pure electronics is almost literally swallowed by the field recordings, only to veer and fade pataphysically on a slow-motion fragment of "It's No Good" by Depeche Mode.
"It's No Good" = "non funziona".
It's here that my sick mind understood (or believed it understood): by disavowing the second disc, Lescalleet provides the key to the first.
The programmatically ordered music of the second is the human attempt to harness and translate what was free and original in the first. And, simply, "does not work".
Is there also man's mediation in the first disc? Obviously, but every concept (as such) cannot be independent of it, and certain limits are not transgressible.
Nietzsche:
"The ancient legend tells that King Midas hunted long in the forest for wise Silenus, Dionysius' follower, without catching him. When he finally fell into his hands, the King asked what was the best and most desirable thing for man. Rigid and motionless, the demon remained silent; until, forced by the King, he at last broke into strident laughter with these words: 'Wretched and ephemeral race, born of chance and pain, why do you force me to tell you what is best for you not to hear? The best is utterly unattainable for you: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best thing for you is to die soon'."
But since and as long as we are alive, perhaps we would do better to behave like sound... We exist. We simply exist.
Let's leave to others the idle task of translating us.
Loading comments slowly
