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Another little gem from 1980s California. After X, this week we move from Los Angeles to San Francisco. We are in 1981, but the first thing that comes to mind when re-listening to "Desire" is the "Time out of joint" (quoting Dick) of this work. Which, by the way, and forgive me if I digress, is a bit of the feeling that all the best new wave instills in us. Like a fracture of the space-time canons we are accustomed to. Even after so many years, the best records of that era seem always untimely, as if projected from another world, original and yet with less influence in the years to come than many '60s and '70s bands had. Have you ever read a review where someone said: "These guys sound like Tuxedomoon" or someone cited them as their influence? Yet, I believe that everyone who has had the fortune to listen to them still carries them in their heart.
So what exactly do Tuxedomoon sound like? Oblique music. Elusive. Fascinating.
The electronic drums set the pace along with a deep bass, circular patterns rarely heard before (perhaps in Can). Onto this base, sometimes a cello, very often a sax, is added. Winstong Tong's disquieting voice recites litanies more than sings: in "Victims Of The Dance" it sounds like that of a drunkard, in other tracks like a David Bowie on acid. The keyboards wrap everything, but if at times they are liquid and "non-New Yorkish", other times they seem relentless and inhuman (I would use the neologism "disnumanizzate"), other times still they dive into reiteration to such an extent that the mind cannot help but run to Philip Glass.
Summing it all up, what does it result in? It might certainly be a gamble, but try to imagine Maurice Ravel captured by a spaceship, taken to some distant planet and released a few months later with a Casio keyboard as a souvenir. Tuxedomoon's music in "Desire", which is a transition from the geometric electronics of the first album "Half Mute" to the acoustic of certain later works like "Suite En Sous-Soul", manages to blend electronic and acoustic elements, avant-garde and classical, American Fordist industrial scenarios and early 20th-century European decadence, as I believe few others have managed to do in the last thirty years.
The album's title, particularly fitting, since Tuxedomoon's music appears to be suspended at a point and in a moment that is nothing but waiting and desire, invites me to formulate one: will it ever be possible to see a movie based on a work by Dick with Tuxedomoon's soundtrack? It would be fantastic.
Just to bore you, but I promise I won't review them all, this is also in the hundred albums I would save from the universal flood.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
06 Incubus (Blue Suit) ()
Thin man in a powder blue suit with eyes that slice you through
The cut of his clothes was strange indeed (a hundred years too soon).
A passing stranger with no business here, a rest stop on a voyage through time a rest stop.
A passing stranger in a dream we had the man with the patented face the one with the telescope eyes the man who walked away.
Someone handed me a gun, hit the switch and ran.
I laughed and shot at the ceiling I laughed and shot at the walls.
The smell of fusing metal permeates the scene music plays in empty halls music plays in empty halls.
Underneath the street light the stranger calls your name
He flickers to a halt and slowly fades away.
07 Desire ()
DESIRE
You're the buyer or the seller,
makes you want what you can't have,
I'm glad I made you cry,
Makes you go where you can't go,
Makes you want what you can't have,
Desire
Don't think, x4
Don't buy,
Don't think, x3
Buying the moment,
Sometimes I want to die in my bed,
All I can think about is "When are we leaving?",
Everytime I think of you I want a cigarette,
Man chooses himself,
Hero with a thousand faces,
It's the third night and the walls are shaking,
Boys buying boys,
Pleasure bringing pain, it's all the same,
I put my hand near my mouth so I know I'm still breathing,
So we joke about the TV set,
Calling it the "eye of Hell",
I would love to have people see what I see,
I would love to be a pillar of strength in my community,
A little order, a little grace,
Something new to fill up this place,
Live a thousand lives by picture,
Mark, this song is for you,
I'm a lousy lover - I give but never take,
Makes you go where you can't go, makes you want what you can't have,
(repeats)
Live a thousand lives by picture
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