Saturday, February 19, 2011

"All Art Constantly Aspires to the Condition of Music"


Two dope albums worth checking out that came out over the past week and this weekend with videos/songs dropped below: Abstract & ambient noise expressionist Tim Hecker's Ravedeath, 1972 and Radiohead's long-awaited latest The King of Limbs, both of which are just excruciatingly good; one is a blissful dive into warped sonic wreckage and pipe-organ-smeared-by-synths-and-haze airiness, and the other is a surprisingly funky Brazilian dub kind of thing but not surprisingly amazing in the most peerless way (because it's Radiohead and I more or less expect amazing peerlessness from them). Both, however, are deeply transportive records but for very different reasons. The above quote is from Walter Pater, an English art critic, essayist, and fiction writer, and I agree with its assertion without reservation.





Quick note on Radiohead in general: I don't think there's been a single group of musical artists more deft at and willing to change, explore, and evolve without seeming to ever worry one bit about how this alteration will be received, and for that I'm incredibly thankful and excited. This record, for example, is one of the funkiest of their outputs, a word that I don't imagine had been used often in discussing Radiohead.




And to bookend the titular Pater quotation, I'll end with a Thomas Mann from The Magic Mountain, which if you haven't read then shame on you: "Can one tell – that is to say, narrate – time, time itself, as such, for its own sake? That would surely be an absurd undertaking..." He goes on to align storytelling (and I would argue art overall) with the tempo of experience, rather than the representation of some kind of linear, Newtonian time, which is false and misleading. But tempo, musicologically speaking, concerned with the mood and the speed and the pace and the feel and the psychological and physical space of a given piece, seems more appropriate to talk about when talking about the way in which we, as humans, experience time. Storytelling is eventually compared directly to music making, both similarly described in their ability to "only present themselves as flowing, as a succession in time, as one thing after the other."

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