Miles Davis
Get Up With It

The July heat disrupts my sleep.

I don't turn on the light. To move in the most familiar of places, the light filtering through the shutters is enough. Everything I need is on the lacquered table. Opposite it, even if I can't see it, the worn-out roll of paper spread out reads something like this: the moon fades, the crows caw in the frost-laden air.

Silence removes all defenses.

My remedy against the heat is not cold water, but hot tea. Fermented black tea, which arrived a few weeks ago, after various perils, from the Yunnan region; which, according to the name, is located south of the clouds. Fourteen euros of customs well spent. Fragrant tea pressed into cakes, to be broken with care. The infusion is dense, dark. The scent, between moss and cassia.

My remedy against insomnia is not sleep-inducing music, but sleepless music. What is more sleepless than Miles Davis? I don't even need to turn on the light to play this record on the turntable: with a few gestures, always the same, silence wedges in and vanishes. In its place, a dense, dark sound. The twilight helps to make every detail vivid.

It floods everything, the viscous and electrified “He Loved Him Madly,” taking away all rigidity with it. Burying every hope.

Syncopated, the warmth of the night finally finds itself in the lament of a long farewell: the sleepless Miles has always known how to give the right weight to silence. After decades of sound, five years of silence is an adequate counterbalance.

As a temporary farewell, however, this enormous work is anything but reconciliatory: more than closing the circle, it opens several paths. Not least, the path of despair. This enchanting amalgam of recordings is foreign territory, whose mapping would require a lifetime: too many directions branch off from the eight boundless tracks of this double LP, their development too vast and amorphous, too futile to truly grasp them fully: a labyrinth, several labyrinths. The only guiding sign: the rhythm. Now crystalline, now grim, now hidden, now tangible. Following it, surrendering to it, the listener eventually finds himself at home within this labyrinth.

By now, I no longer care about sleeping.