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Who knows what prompted the crows to take flight in Van Gogh's wheat field.
There are faces, works, landscapes, and even houses that raise questions from every pore.
The crows fly, the gaze extends beyond the painting, and the mind wanders: where are they going? What was Vincent feeling while he was painting them?
Sure, the litany of being born-growing-dying is well known. Of course, the spleen occasionally comes back to offer us a drink. But what if this famous (and overrated) malaise of living depended on nostalgia for the Before?
Before the eternal parade of all our ages (past, present, and future), before they are swallowed by the respective loops, by their inexorable succession. Before Basinski celebrates the Requiem of the birth-life and finally the disintegration of our routines chewed by the jaws of the indifferent Moloch.
Ambient? Avantgarde? Musique concrète?
Basinski rather conceives existential poems, he has the talent and the vision. This "Shortwavemusic" (built on the mixing and computer processing of shortwave radio transmissions) is no exception.
The ominous oppression of synthetic drones that carve deep furrows in bruised fields lashed by disease. The screeching and scattered dissonances, the wild tape loops that seem like feathers lost from a flock of crows fleeing from something, feathers swirling in mid-air, oily and gleaming feathers.
Basinski scatters elusive shadows in the long fields, sketches unsettling profiles in the sequence shots, and the fatal waiting with which he blurs the nocturnal landscapes creates the same hidden suspense as a Poe tale.
The brush strokes become heavier and more feverish, the horizon swells with clouds. What was Vincent looking for? What couldn't he see? Basinski's electronic blasts, massive as lead and cadenced like processions, crush the canvas and load the air with omens.
Are we in hell? Perhaps, but still a human hell where an escape route, however desperate, is always possible. This album seems like the earthly variant of "Stalker," a dark ambient masterpiece signed by the duo Robert Rich & Lustmord where the luciferian tension of the sound left no hope for anyone who ventured into that other-worldly whirlpool.
And Basinski shows us the escape route in the noisy bacchanal finale where, in filigree, an ascending synthesizer melody reiterates a phrase. What does that prayer say? What emerges from that smoking cauldron where electronic spasms sizzle and writhe in constant boil?
"Now I would like to return" Van Gogh seemingly said before he died. He who self-inflicted a gunshot to his belly: his liberation, his escape route, his ticket to his Before.
Why do the crows fly in the painting? Frightened, they foresee the roar of that gunshot. Where are they going? Where Vincent would soon have gone: they are going home.
One must imagine those crows happy.
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