Things this year pt. 1

Let’s take turns throwing composition’s rotting head around: it’s getting a bit smelly, a bit squishy in the handling, but it still holds shape nicely in the air. It still can bite once and a while on the landing. Lambkin and Lescalleet. Lambkin and Lescalleet. I might signal my inclinations too often, too readily, but I’m prepared to get obscure here, where no one’s watching but the vultures. Because they speak a language I think I can understand, but only obliquely, as if seeing it from the side, bounced from a mirror and reading backwards– I understand the language, but I can’t understand the syntax. As much as Photographs establishes itself as a dialogue between two musicians, it strikes me more immediately as a dialogue between two friends, two comrades in arms against nothing in particular. They brandish weapons made of their daily lives; obsessions; observations; misunderstandings; dull jokes in the back of a car; music they heard years ago somewhere, someplace. To describe music as personal — and I write personal with a caveat that all music is obviously personal if not as outwardly inward in construction–or direct, while alternately obscure is to sink into a writerly purposelessness. You can hear it all at a click of a button. There is no freedom in description of event. There is no pleasure here for me to write it.

Pisaro’s Closed Categories in Cartesian Worlds succeeds almost in despite of its title. I’m not against meaning, or provocation, or research. I’m just bored with titles. Let’s not digress (I am bored with meaning). There’s nothing boring about this thing he and Greg Stuart have coaxed out…this anfractuous thing, nuanced in slippery collisions, but on closer inspection pocked with innumerable scars. I find myself shuffling in the inside of a jar, alone in a suffocating glare. Let’s not forget: Crotales and sine tones– so dull sounding on paper, as lifeless as a scorpion in a paper weight and just as triumphantly despicable. It kinda makes words sound as silly as they appear, when you hear music that defies them so, and makes mockery of just what, if anything, you can say about sound.

I try to keep in mind my limitations when I listen to music; personal baggage makes things far more interesting. Metal confirms these limitations, and badgers my inner atavism, my dependence on fear and loathing. Nihilism writ large on a canvas of oily skin. This is not reality. It just is what I choose it to be. Grave Upheaval latches on to this program: as listless, hopeless, and revolted as a 13 year mustache in ill-fitting clothes. It trudges along in its murky furrow, borrowing against itself, waiting to collapse into muck and heaps of stones. I find nothing funny about it. It is within itself, and as full of truth as one can find in a culture of sure nothingness. A slow death, hunched against great weight. This does not howl at the moon. It does not scream romantic odes to starry wisdom. It does not bleed under moonlight. It is fucking death metal. Decrepit. Scared. Unbelieving. There is no future. There is no light. There is just this. It’s scabrous. And it’s full of mutiny.