A Nest of Ninnies

"Doom just welds the floatation tank shut"--Drew Daniel on Morton Feldman, bongwater and blood

2012-01-28T22:08:00.000-08:00

Drew's 2003 manifesto places Doom Metal firmly and unselfconsciously in the 20th century avant-garde. It defines the canon of Satanic Minimalism via 80's synth-pop band the Human League's "The Black Hit of Space." It's about an imaginary single in a completely black sleeve that becomes so popular that it actually charts into the negative numbers, sucks in all other music and stops time itself.

Originally printed in Bridge 2003.

Old Writing III: "we all want to feel like that woman: protected and reassured"

2012-01-28T21:59:00.000-08:00

Or, Why All 9/11 Art is Bad. For some reason nobody seemed to have been willing to say this at the time.

"Because it's so obviously well-intentioned, it's hard to say this (but because I'm so disgusted at having to prove my antiterrorist credentials to even have the right to an opinion I'm going to): this song just sucks."

Originally ran in the Chicago Reader Jan 24, 2002

Old Writing II: "anyway, screw Keats"

2012-01-28T21:45:00.000-08:00

Ostensibly a review of two old feminist art punk bands, one celebrated and one forgotten, both amazing, this contains the line

'Their most famous lyrics are something to the effect of "Hotch-potch hugger-mugger bow-wow hara-kiri hoo-poo huzza hiccup hum-drum hexa-pod hell-cat helter-skelter hop-scotch," and they sound tough enough to kick Pantera's ass in a dark alley.'

In this review I also come out against racism and colonialism, compare the Urinals to sweet and sour mangoes in summer because their songs "burst with grainy juiciness," and describe the most incompetent panhandling Rock Santa ever. The near-pathological obsession with Sleep and the horrors of music writing continue.

Worth it for the observation that "in the heyday of no wave, while people were trying to blow each other's legs off with sheer edgy hate, they did a very calm song about washing a sweater."

Originally ran in the Chicago Reader Mar 8, 2001

Old Writing I: "Two things early metal bands did not have in common with James Taylor"

2012-01-28T21:36:00.001-08:00

Probably the most scabrous thing I ever published in a family newspaper. Ostensibly a review of the second High on Fire album, I use it as a pretext to "drop science" on famous old white dudes (Robert Christgau "made fun itself into a strenuous type of upper-middle-class self-actualization," for Lester Bangs "Smelling bad was an aspect of his literary style"), explain what James Brown, Sleep, and Arnold Dreyblatt have in common, and reveal "the verifiably heaviest fucking thing in the universe" (what?)

Read it to find out. Originally ran in the Chicago Reader July 25 2002.

How Multiculturalism is Destroying Our Society

2011-02-21T15:35:00.000-08:00

Reached into the freezer and grabbed something that looked like potstickers. Microwaved them, got out the Sriracha and put some sesame oil and soy sauce on top. Bit in and realized they were spinach and potato pierogies. Ate them anyway.

The Big Dig (Smithsonian Institution Blues)

2011-02-20T14:38:00.000-08:00

Listening to Captain Beefheart's Lick My Decals Off, wondering if music has been battening down its hatches since 1970. The delicious blend of focus and play here is hard to imagine in the 2011 U.S.A. Did music lose its nerve, give up in frustration? We've had some pretty hot tantrums, soothing lullabyes and quick fixes of fun since then. But what aims or feels this high? What traces such an utterly wild arc?

This may be premature but if I'm wrong you can just say it's the first time I was happy to be confused, singin the Smithsonian Institute Blues/All you new dinosaurs now it's up to you to choose/'fore your feet hit the tar you better kick off them old shoes.
-- "The Smithsonian Institute Blues (Or The Big Dig)"

Hell, man, what kind of weeds does God grow?

2011-02-19T07:00:00.001-08:00

What kind of music is it? Hell, man, what kind of weeds does God grow? Let's just shut up, you and me both; let's just shut up and listen and go to where Michael Hurley is. After all, we can always turn around and come back. He can't.
--Nick Tosches

Indecent (Book) Proposals

2011-02-17T19:53:00.000-08:00

Moondog: The White Sun Ra
Rahsaan Roland Kirk: The Black Moondog on Cocaine
Black Randy: The White Black Randy
Locally Sourced MSG: The Mast Brothers Cookbook
Freak-Folk, Neo-Whiteness, and the Rise of Comfort-Rock
Pilgrim State, Effective Spiritual Warfare (Continuum 33 1/3 series)
Pilgrim State, Effective Spiritual Warfare: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford Very Short Introductions)
Lycanthropy in Popular Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford Very Short Introductions)
Breaking Shit: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford Very Short Introductions)
Very Short Introductions: A Very Short Introduction (Continuum 33 1/3 series)

--good titles courtesy Kevin Barker

2010-07-17T21:42:00.001-07:00

Nearly yelling, the person said, “Slayer has built this franchise and Slayer intends to protect it’s franchise in the same manor in which Coca-cola or Disney would protect theirs”. I thought, “That is pretty metal!”

"Imitate the Immutable Decrees of the Divinity"

2009-04-27T20:03:00.000-07:00

By what inconceivable art has a means been found of making men free by making them subject; of using in the service of the State the properties, the persons and even the lives of all its members, without constraining and without consulting them; of confining their will by their own admission; of overcoming their refusal by that consent, and forcing them to punish themselves, when they act against their own will? How can it be that all should obey, yet nobody take upon him to command, and that all should serve, and yet have no masters, but be the more free, as, in apparent subjection, each loses no part of his liberty but what might be hurtful to that of another? These wonders are the work of law. It is to law alone that men owe justice and liberty. It is this salutary organ of the will of all which establishes, in civil right, the natural equality between men. It is this celestial voice which dictates to each citizen the precepts of public reason, and teaches him to act according to the rules of his own judgment, and not to behave inconsistently with himself. It is with this voice alone that political rulers should speak when they command; for no sooner does one man, setting aside the law, claim to subject another to his private will, than he departs from the state of civil society, and confronts him face to face in the pure state of nature, in which obedience is prescribed solely by necessity.
-Rousseau, Political Economy.

So what about the laws of war?

I want to smash your house, I want to scratch your car, I want to fuck your wife, I want to break your life, I want to feel you snap, I want to HEAR YOU FUCKING CRACK.
I don't like the world today; I'm going to rebuild it my own way. I'm a man, I am society, I don't like you so I'll turn you into me so you'll just have to learn it's for the best. I've heard it only hurts for a moment THE BAITING OF THE PUBLIC.
You can't stand the sight of me and all the troubles I bring. I showed you what it's like to fucking hate your life now you see things like me and you will never be the same. We cancelled all your plans, you want to give up man. You ruined life for us; we'll ruin life for you. Shout, cry asking why you feel like shit. You want to die.
--Fucked Up, Baiting the Public

Idea #3 coming up: Fanatical Doubt

2009-02-27T08:54:00.000-08:00

Music scholarship tends to share a style with its favorite pop performance: a delight in ambiguity and hints, a winking joy in multiple meanings adopted or cast off like clothes, personae or lovers. It also looks a lot like a lack of belief: if identity or truth is a performance, it's all side effect. This is how MIA albums with pictures of tanks on them are political.

Over against this style of belief is a style of unblinking certainty embodied in US politics: the satisfying conviction born of baseless knowledge that Kant called Fanaticism. Its hard mystical appeal wends back through beefy 19th-century muscular Christianity to Puritan fasting. These shows of force and unyielding conviction tend to make professional doubters feel both superior and impotent.

But the sunny years of Reaganite conviction gave birth to at least one kind of doubt that walks and talks like fanaticism: Hardcore. As an alternative to fundamentalisms of both ambiguity and certainty, this talk will trace what you could call violent agnosticism or fanatical doubt. Looking at the performance, belief, and, hell, band names of The Middle Class, Minor Threat, Poison Idea, Born Against and Fucked Up you get a style of embodied conviction that starts with Puritanism, then goes somewhere else.

to be presented at the 2009 EMP Pop Conference--hope to see you there , it should be a blast .

Idea #2, from 2006: Tomorrow's Outsider Art--Today!

2009-02-27T08:52:00.000-08:00

Subtite: If You Want Blood, You've Got It

The MC5 once talked about kids being locked up "for living the words we sing." If (contrary to what critics tell us) there's an essential core to rock fantasy then this is it: actually doing what the song talks about. This talk will explore a group of songs and acts that got kids (deservedly) locked up, and how they turned into a successful Whitney Biennale show. Is Banks Violette, whose visual art slyly references the church-burnings and stabbings of metal subcultures, just continuing an exploitative tradition of PR violence—Nerf terrorism for cool kids? Framing publicity-seeking murders for gallery audiences makes for some pretty guilty pleasure. So what does it mean for him, and us, to be "a tourist in someone else's tragedy?" (like those 9/11 soundtracks in the Village Voice, as if the most important thing for writers like Eddy and Christgau was to hit on just the right thing to *listen to* to accompany a moment like that?) Violette claims to be doing something more, and here he connects with the bands themselves, and an old tradition of stoking grief into something sublime. I will suggest that you can't understand music without those things. But if so, what the f**k is the deal with Matthew Barney and Slayer? I'll try to open up the spectrum (really, Pandora's Box) of moral and aesthetic possibilities that the use of Metal as "outsider art" invokes.

core concept stolen from a random conversation I had on a library payphone with Weasel Walter, presented at the 2006 EMP pop conference.

Idea #1, from 2004: The Dream of Totaling the Sun, Moon, and Mountains by May 1968

2009-02-27T08:49:00.000-08:00

Does heavy metal, and rock in general, have anything concretely to do with evil? Are we even allowed to talk about the sweepingly, and embarrassingly, theological themes that the music repeatedly imagines? Fans and bands certainly take such liberties, but the conceptual resources of rock criticism-usually a mix of sociology and progressive politics--don't seem adequate to the task: we all know about the false accusations of Satanism and the typical solution has been to just censor it out. There is a peculiar sort of rationalism at work in this, which has tended to restrict the admissible range of thought and feeling about music to certain safe themes. What lies beyond these barriers, or is it just too horrible, or stupid, to contemplate?
From Black Sabbath's durable, symptomatic, and utterly narcissistic visions of the Apocalypse (secularized in other music of the time as the Revolution) to Earth's unpleasantly literal account of flirtation with fascist imagery ("spent the night with Joseph Goebbels/think I'm coming down"), there is a major strain in rock music, clearest in Metal, which fantasizes about the destruction of the present order. This paper will look at the apocalypse in Doom Metal and asks if this might tell us anything about rock's political romanticism in general.

-Given at the EMP Pop Music conference in March 2004

Can Anything Make Up for Being Named after a Morrissey Song?

2009-02-23T16:22:00.000-08:00

The light alone does it for Let the Right One In ( Låt den rätte komma in). But first the words: The title itself is delightfully misbegotten, the result of a translation into Swedish and back again; in English, this phrase feels slightly, ominously wrong, and is wronger in the original song title, "Let the Right One Slip In;" my dim Germanist instinct is the Swedish smoothed it down, where "right one" is just a noun, not a phrase, and you can't shove the verb under the carpet.

The lighting is really bright, really dull, and works like an overwhelming moral force. Without anyone telling you, it mirrors, extends, and maybe transforms the plot. The hero is a pale, translucent picked-on boy; the first shot shows him, with his limp blonde hair and stunned expression, looking through his bedroom window at the the washed-out, insipid Swedish public housing landscape he's confined to. The love interest is, apparently, a girl he meets in the next scene. She's haggard, has dark spots under her eyes and black curly hair, and appears without much explanation out of the night behind him on the playground. The relationship builds with a series of increasingly open gazes, where they look at each other across a transparent pane or mirror, or communicate in Morse Code by tapping through a wall.

The mirrors and barriers turn out to be between this world and the next. The boy's climactic near-death and rescue brings this pattern to a head by violently shattering a mirrored surface. The movie's very bleached-out beauty ends up making the argument: breaking into or out of this pale world takes something that the world itself can never quite tolerate.

What do you call it when cinematography does something markedly different from, but intimately related to, the characters' words and actions? An almost inarticulable harmony across media? A completely valid excuse for being named after a Morrissey song?

Happy music from sinew strung on bone in the winter night (Total Holocaust of All Poseurs)

2009-01-25T16:52:00.000-08:00

The dog and I run on trails through the woods at dusk . The trail is packed snow; it gets soft and deep the second you step off. The firmness underfoot is a signal that we're still on it; the sensation tells us enough to navigate in complete darkness. The trail is a dim white, the trees black scratches, the sky a colorless glow. We're running together through a winter forest at night.

After a couple of miles the regular swinging and pounding in my legs is like scratching an itch. I constantly renegotiate my tempo with the topography: with a little thought I fit my moves to the terrain. I gallop down a smooth slope, bounce around a curve or slowly push up a steep hill. The dog amuses herself investigating something I'll never see through a hole in the snow. then scampers back to catch up. Her tongue and tail are flapping like crazy flags of dog nation.

Running through the winter night, I realized the analogy between making sound and moving: a string is held taut between two points on the neck and body of a wooden instrument; its pitch is set by the tension, its volume by the force that plucks it. Each muscle is held taut between two points on my bones; their tension, the resistance they encounter, and the force with which I meet it make me move. The sensation I feel is the echo of the action.

It's a repetitive thrum punctuated by reflective slowdowns, soaring bombast and agonizing surges of merciless blastbeats. Running plays soundless music inside my body. And you know what?

It sounds exactly like the middle of the second Emperor album, Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk. Yes: I must explain to the dog that she and I represent the only authentic Black Metal in a vast forestful of posers.

Best Rock Criticism Ever IV

2009-01-07T18:38:00.000-08:00

a) It is counterrevolutionary not to like Led Zeppelin.

b) But it is ultimately the case that "The bigger the problems in society, the more crashing the guitar chords have to be to make up for the perceived lack of power or satisfactory achievement in real life."

Hence, while we learn the lesson of the extremes to which electricity can be applied in music from Led Zeppelin--or face being counterrevolutionary in our attitude to music-- in the end, heavy metal fantasy like Led Zeppelin is a competitor to the revolution, not a friend.

The Long March through the Hot 100

2009-01-07T18:33:00.001-08:00

The best rock criticism ever, but with Stalin and Mao instead of Meltzer and Tosches.

As is fitting for someone with a Disney contract, "Metamorphosis" is low on the pornography quotient relative to Amerikkkan standards; although even so, it will be too much for many Third World parents thinking about their teens.
...
Overall, there is not much to say about this album positively or negatively. While Iraqi teenagers are figuring out how to kill wealthier and technologically superior U.$. troops occupying their country, most Amerikkkan teenagers are like Hilary Duff singing, "Sweet sixteen/Gonna spread my wings. . .Drivin' down to the club where we go to dance. . . Bright stars shine above me/My blonde hair is everywhere." Although change is the subject of the album, it is the contented sort distracting youth from real challenges that require their energy.

Why 80s bands were loud

2009-01-07T18:28:00.001-08:00

When a band was lunging for credibility or running out of things to say, they turned up the volume.

-Mike O'Flaherty

Sacred Attunement

2008-12-29T16:49:00.000-08:00

The first Jewish theology in decades is the best rock criticism of the year:

Responsiveness is all, and it is cultivated through sound and its sequences. Speaking in this vein, about music as an aspect of the human spirit, Copeland commented: "Music is designed . . . to absorb entirely our mental attention. Its emotional charge is embedded in a challenging texture so that one must be ready at an instant's notice to lend attention to what is most required so that one is not lost in a sea of notes." Music is thus a training in attentive hearing, a cultivation of a certain mindfulness. ...

For the human subject, so often caught in the blur of noise, the majesty of music can therefore also serve to restore one's hearing to the hearable, and attune our sensibilities to its unfolding processes. How we heaer overtones and silences is fundamental for our human being; and it is music that may restore these qualities to us in all their timbre and significance.

We should therefore not ignore the moral or value dimensions here either. No less a person than Beethoven remarked, in a conversation reported to Goethe, "It takes spiritual rhythm to grasp music in its essence. . . All genuine [musical] invention is moral progress. To submit to its inscrutable laws, and by virtue of these laws to overcome and control one's own mind, so it shall set forth the revelation: that is the isolating principle of art." In this way, music may instruct the self in a patient attunement to the hearable. This is an artistic retrieval of the most formative elements, in their very elementariness."

--Michael Fishbane

Fanatical Doubt, part I

2008-10-19T21:00:00.000-07:00

"When everything worth believing is so mysterious, what is there to do?"
--Fucked Up, from Hidden World.

You won't believe it because you've never heard of it, but then why on earth should you? Probably the most influential religious group in Washington is a private (not "secret") Evangelical organization known as the Family. Bipartisan (involved with everyone from Ronald Reagan to Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin) they got their start in the 30s as a spiritual alternative to unionism. In the 40s they recruited former Nazis, and in the 70s they encouraged American politicians to support dictators. The unifying idea is the pursuit of power in the interest of divinely controlled politics: "Let go, let God." They endorse what they called "the totalitarianism of God:" if you could recruit just one dictator to heed Him, you'd bring a whole country under His rule in one stroke.

It would be cool if they were right. If God is God, of course we should listen to Him, of course we'd prosper under Him. Exactly what's so horrible about trying to obey our benevolent creator?

What is so fucking horrible about it is that it can never, ever work, and we will always, always want for it to, so it will never stop being available as an incredibly powerful coverup for something else. Because of the way our minds work, we cannot possibly know that we are doing God's will. This limit is rooted in a fundamental problem of human nature: we cannot truly know things outside of our own experience. All we can do with a text (forgery?) or a vision (hallucination?) or a voice in our head ("sacrifice your son--the special one, the one you love most") is believe or doubt. Thomas Hobbes argued this devastatingly over 300 years ago, in 1651. And if every Western Civilization blowhard who touted "the classics" actually read this one, or Machiavelli's similarly classic Discourses on Livy (the classic exposé of revelation as crowd control) they'd want to burn them in one big pile.

We have no reason to believe that even once did anyone listen to these people because of God; they were just attracted to their certainty. This kind of satisfying conviction born of baseless knowledge is what Kant called Fanaticism. And in a country where sheer conviction doubles as moral force, this style of muscular Christianity has a balls-out mystical appeal. Jesus Himself was anything but muscular (or, Hell, Christian) but something sounds totally righteous about the idea of Todd Palin winning a 2000 mile snowmobile race with a broken arm.

We do have reason to believe that people like this succeed because of their unyielding conviction, pragmatically channelled into ruthless action. And this tends to make doubters feel both superior and impotent. Nothing's as boring as one of these cautious, right-thinking people, with their endlessly qualified wishy-washy hesitations.

But the sunny years of Reaganite conviction gave birth to at least one kind of doubt that walks and talks like fanaticism: Hardcore, the sound of twisting Todd Palin's arm the rest of the way off...

for the next step, see here

Broken Landscapes

2008-06-22T21:13:00.001-07:00

People who get information overload from cities should spend more time in forests, not as a cure but to intensify the disease til they pass through to the other side and gain the potential to read everything around them.

Urban areas present you with things you can't assimilate: messages to and from people that aren't there or don't speak your language. So do woods. They're called trees fallen across the path, marsh areas with no visible watersource, holes dug by God himself (apparently, because who else could have ripped a 50 foot tree out by the roots), quiet cries, rustling, snakes.

Urban areas present unassimilable elements but also new forms of order. New geological formations, as it were. New York's grid system, with its play of linear buildings marching down the avenue in a legible line. An intersection implies four directions, each of which will lead to a similarly structured intersection. Something like a basin and range, where one form implies the other.

It's the interstitial areas, industrial parks and cul-de-sacs visible from the train coming into the city that I can't read, don't like, can't stand. My first thought is that they're broken landscapes, but my second thought is that maybe they just haven't gone far enough.

Soundtrack: Rhys Chatham, Brooklyn Guitar trio and a very short, easy run at midnight by headlamp down the trail by my house.

Bless the Executioner

2008-03-27T22:03:00.000-07:00

"Bless the executioner for he knows not what he does
Take the hangman into yourself, he is afraid of blood
Take the soldier to the sea, let him sleep upon the sand
And give the axe-man sympathy for he hates his own hands"
--The Kaleidoscope, "Bless the Executioner", Faintly Blowing

"And yet all grandeur, all power, all subordination rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple, and society disappears. God, who is the author of sovereignty, is the author also of chastisement: he has built our world on these two poles"
--De Maistre, St. Petersburg Dialogues, 1

De Maistre was talking about an idea that gave him pleasure, not a practical reality. With no clear effect on crime or social order, the death penalty has never been anything but a mystical exercise.

Deathspell Omega’s Kénôse is about divine violence. The three long tracks move like clouds and sudden hailstorms: they loom and swirl, then burst, grind and fade. Seven minutes into the second track, the series of climaxes feels like continually discovering new muscles: they tense and release, one after the other. The music disrupts to build to yet another another logical and visceral plateau.

The Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, squat and vigorous, delivered a speech on the Death Penalty in 2002 which I heard. Hell, I wrote the press release.

He spoke of how God has given the state the power of life and death. It does not matter whether the state is just in our terms. The implications were absurd, delicious, nauseating if you were foolish enough to entertain this political mastermind as a philosopher of law. As head of a state, Saddam Hussein had the divine right to do what he did. Once we took the mandate of heaven away from him he became a murderer. The magic of the state alchemically transmutes lawless, unnecessary violence into lawful force, one of the poles on which God founded the world.

Scalia evoked St. Paul's claim in Romans 13: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God:... But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil."

A jaunty metaphysical adventure: believing Christians go happily into the night of death, confident that the power that wields the blade is always, ultimately, a firm, warm and familiar hand: “Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian a country is, the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition [of the death penalty] has taken its firmest hold in post-Christian Europe and has least support in the church-going United States. I attribute that to the fact that for the believing Christian, death is no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a big deal, a grave sin which causes one to lose his soul, but losing this physical life in exchange for the next”

The full title of Kénôse track II is “Therefore GOD honours the sword so highly that He calls it His own ordinance, and will not have men say or imagine that they have invented it or instituted it.”

It continues, “For the hand that wield this sword, and slays with it is then no more man’s hand, but GOD’s, and it is not man,but GOD, who hangs, tortures, beheads, slays and fights All these are His work and His judgments…”

"Chastisement" reveals the sovereign God's necessary opposite number, the other pole on which he founded the world. The death penalty proves sovereignty exists. Killing by persnickety, arcane rules, the state shows we are no match for it; it is eternal; it is immortal.

Every person any state has ever put to death was a sacrifice to God and the State to prove their existence.

Why do they have to repeat this sacrifice over and over again?

Because it never works.

Walls in the Woods

2008-03-24T22:58:00.001-07:00

Behind my house, down the hill, across the highway, everywhere there are woods. And if you walk far enough into the woods, you run into walls. None of them are intact, all have crumbled. You could climb over any, or all of them. They are made of rocks so big and mismatched that there's no way to tell on the face of it if they are from 60 years ago or 6,000. Someone was here before us. They modified the landscape, inscribed it with anonymous monuments, then faded into it.

As early spring comes and the brook rises, moss emerges on the rocks in increasingly brilliant and varied colors. It looks insanely verdant, screamingly alive. But it's motionless and quiet. It's not that a place like this induces a state of contemplation in you so much as that entering a place like this, you catch it already in a state of contemplation. The landscape broods, not waiting for you. What's restful about it is that it comes to life so gently, still looking tangled, wrecked.

For months I've fantasized about a horror movie with a couple of rules reversed. Instead of emerging in darkness and silence, the horror manifests itself amid bright daylight, settled areas, crowds and noise. The protagonists are forced to flee to remote, dark areas: places with no lights at night. When they stumble in the dark they need to feel their way. But they're safe there.

The title of an Earth album came into my head as I walked: Hibernaculum. I didn't remember what it meant. It turns out it's someplace to hide. For animals, a hibernaculum is where you burrow in for the winter, to hibernate.

In botany, it's a protective pod the plant makes that can sink to the bottom of the water during the winter, preserving the plant til the spring. Then the hibernaculum enlarges, develops airspaces, and rises to the surface to return to life.

Literally it means little winter.

We see ourselves as fleeing to music or the outdoors as an escape, where nature or sound can weave us a cocoon. But doing this taps an inherent dimension of our physical existence, like sleep.

We forget our capacity to crumble and become green.

Earth, "Ouroborous is Broken" from Hibernaculum, 2007 CD on Southern Lord.

Where are you calling from? How can I hear you?

2008-03-22T17:57:00.000-07:00

"And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said to him, Abraham! and he said, Behold, here I am." Gen 22:1

"Where are the two speakers? We are not told. The reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be found together in one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from some unknown heights or depths...

"Moreover the two speakers are not on the same level: if we conceive of Abraham in the foreground, where it might be possible to picture him as prostrate or kneeling or bowing with outspread arms or gazing upward, God is not there too: Abraham's words and gestures are directed toward the depths of the picture or upward, but in any case the undetermined, dark place from which the voice comes to him is not in the foreground."

--Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature pp. 8-9

Since multitrack recording, we don't know where performers are. Were. Are. This is a shiny treasure of an idea still sheltered in the obfuscation-armor of Richard Meltzer's Aesthetics of Rock (NOBODY TALKS ABOUT IT SO IT DOESN'T GET DUSTY OR SCRATCHED). We can't orient them: not in relation to ourselves, not in relation to the space they recorded in (engineer Steve Albini's goal of capturing the sound of a band in a room is a good nostalgic manifesto). Did Jimmy Hendrix face his amp in "Crosstown Traffic"? Was he 20 feet down the hall? What happened when the song got mixed into left and right channels, so now his guitar's moved all up in the drummer's face? What if you're listening to it with your head in the left speaker? What if you're 20 feet down the hall? Dozens of different actual physical relationships laminated into the 5 minutes when you're making coffee and can't hear the stereo in the other room right.

Critics once touted My Bloody Valentine's Loveless as a radical break with previous sound. One of the simultaneously loudest and faintest things I'd ever heard, it made this weird new musical space, at once lifelessly flat and infinitely open, a theme of its sound. A rocket launching 500 feet beneath your feet. Now I have no desire to listen to it: like a lot of things that thematize their cutting edge it aged like shit.

I like to imagine supernatural sources for sound. The feedback just streams out of Ladytron's "High Rise:" I deny the existence of a guitar player. But since electrical amplification, it's become objectively true that sound doesn't need a direct physical source: you pluck a few thin metal strings on a wooden object's neck. Ten feet behind you a tin symphony sounds or a battleship crashes into an iceberg. Sound freed from its physical source.

God spoke to Abraham from out of the picture. Sound without a physical source once implied divine speech. Now that we can make it ourselves, we have to re-imagine the other world. Maybe it retreated somewhere further away, so it's safer from us and we from it.

Maybe it didn't.

The Girls, "Jeffery I Hear You" 7" (Hearthan 106, 1979), apparently about singer/drummer Daved Hild's brother who died when they were young.