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.
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