If onanism made
music, or if music could go down on itself, I’m thinking it would sound like
this. These tantric, relentless organ runs just endlessly wrap themselves over
and over like a musical Ouroboros. I mean, good for Terry, I guess; what you do
with yourself is your own business; but, to pursue the metaphor, I don’t think you should be doing it
in public, and I, for one, would rather not be present for it.
Time to check what new versions of In C are in town...
Sometimes one forgets to check up on Robert Plant, but, from the evidence, I believe we can assume he’s keeping well fed and continues to be a very nice lad, minding his business, doing his psychedelic-country-folk-rock thing. Still, on the distinctive strength of the title track, feeding off Plant’s long running, highly promising, but never fully realized dalliance with North African music (the reunion with Jimmy Page, in No Quarter, probably came closest), I am truly still hoping for the likes of a full-on "Robert Plant presents the Master Musicians of Jajouka".
Sunday 14 February 2021
Tri Yann - Dix ans, dix filles (1973)
Take your mind off that cover: no acid for you here. For me, this is actually (up to the misleading cover art) the low point of Tri Yann's early years; only by the third album do I find they truly came into their own, usually decent, slightly macho, Breton folk self
(for a while, anyway; at least until Urba). Here, however, amidst Scottish and Irish numbers, they overplay the cultural pretense of setting
their Breton heritage in the wider frame of the celtic diaspora - which
programmatically plagued some of their other records, but not to this misguided extent
(that damn banjo) - and a bewildering lot of this kind of comes off like the French answer to the country-western clog dance. Thankfully, things would get better next time around. Who said genre-hopping is an inherently good thing?
Although they
really have little or nothing in common in terms of conception and execution, the repetitious
phrase that, halfway through, permeates Let’s Start, the track, always reminds me of Steve
Reich’s Come Out. This one’s (aesthetic and political) gesture was conceptually pregnant with new
understandings of what constitutes music - and of where and how to bring it
about to the world - although, for the casual listener, Wakhévitch’s track is probably more enjoyable aurally, as Reich was still to develop and integrate phasing as a compositional tool in
a wider (and more malleable) musical idiom, for which Come Out can feel a bit like a proof of concept - albeit a fascinating one.
Again, unlike
Come Out, in Let’s Start, the track, the looped sentence does not work as the
medium itself for musical development; it is rather a leitmotif around which
synthesizer waves crash and ebb; a cyclical motion that ends up evoking a
sense of stasis, against the very title of the track (like a dialectic achieving
no synthesis). The rest of Let’s Start, the album, prolongs that impasse, but
more unwittingly, as an afterthought, devoid of the same sense of (no) purpose.
This could very well be what hangs in the air
after Vladimir and Estragon urge each other to go and remain motionless.
