Tuxedomoon
Half Mute

It seems strange to tackle a topic like the one I'm about to address, in a place like this... Yet I abandon myself to the pulsations of the moment, too strong... Intense...

Listening to "Half mute" by Tuxedomoon imposes on a sensitive mind, inclined to stray from the logical structures of thought, a narrative that escapes both the writer and the reader as it flows. This masterpiece, impossible to define it otherwise, does not lend itself to any review... the sound in fact surpasses its syntactic structure, returning to its hieroglyphic, uterine state.

Upon first listening, one is left numb by a succession of moans, now deep and almost irate, now refined and aimed at the sublimation of the inorganic, in a game lost in the hallucinatory contemplation of what has never been. The crystallization of vertigo demands an analysis of the concrete relationship between art and life. Every moment, every single note is not expressed in terms of codes of signification, but in movements intended as a dispersion of time and energy. Every beat of this open heart consists in a gathering that coagulates between stillness and convulsion, the plane and the abyss. The game underlying this series of perceptions gets lost in what man really is; it blends with life, it is life itself as a game. Writing about a work of art of such genre induces pain... this work is pain!

The songs are, all of them, a sort of return to the limbo from which we originate, which visits us, but we have never visited. The fourteen pieces composing this mosaic, a golden anagram of artistic and sonic research, unravel along a velvet spiral... guiding us to the Land of a Klee-like otherworld from which there is no return. The sounds are the re-propositions of a never entirely consumed nervous tension, penetrating the most remote mystical and ritual instances of life. The mysticism I refer to, mind you, does not have any Christian meaning... it is rather the distant echo of a mythic, obscene, and cruel rituality. The neurosis that gushes blood-like from these granite monoliths, which cannot be considered "SONGS", is chilling. Derrida, in the preface to "The Theater and Its Double" by Artaud, considers the theater of cruelty as impossible "to come." Well, if no Artaudian theater is given, there can be surpassing and sunset of it.

This is thus the sensation one receives attending the STAGING of this raw and CRUEL work, of this glacial drama... a crucial staging of the dimming into the light of our day, initial... final.

Impossible to categorize, to love or hate... to live, to fly... in the silence of a void; in the lack of sense of a life... ours