Meira Asher - Dissected (1997)
I remember reading somewhere, at the time this came out, that Robert Wyatt wrote to Asher congratulating her for it, and if that happens to check out (which I can't be bothered to confirm, perhaps by willingness to print a harmlessly pleasant legend), that should obviously be all the recommendation you need. All I can add is that that highest of accolades is, or would be, a well deserved one indeed.
If, thematically, Asher was already fully committed in this, her debut, to discussing beyond partisan bias (but in no uncertain terms) the practicalities of the problem of evil in the world, in its manifold manifestations (war, incestuous pedophilia, AIDS, take your pick) - something which the confrontational title and cover clearly announced -, her aural strategy to call on us to listen to her was still somewhat based on seduction, not the all-out aggression that would ravage most of the following Spears Into Hooks - and apparently the rest of her work up to the present; logically, as history has yet to deliver the human condition from being shaped at best by an ebb and of flow of cruelty, suffering, and indignities.
In fact, while always fraught with some tension, and relatively stark in its resources, the music here can still be reasonably described as quite engaging, with its highly effective rhythmic pulls and instrumental mood setters, like a didgeridoo here, or a harp there. It's only if and when you start to realize what's going on underneath (which means you either understand Hebrew or have the booklet at hand) that its musical appeal begins to reveal itself more clearly as something of a deceptive device, a way to slowly confront you with hidden or distant horrors, instead of making you immediately turn your ears away - like we turn off with our fingers, or not even that anymore, just tune out in our desensitived minds, all the massacres, tragedies and bombings that have long become a visual side dish to the daily bread of those privileged to be exclusively on the receiving end of those images.
Perhaps there is then a theodicy inherent to Asher's aesthetic trajectory: to begin by presenting us a thing of apparent beauty, to then scratch and forever forsake it, as if saying this is what humans do. I suppose that could make this the Paradise Lost of her oeuvre. That the remainder of it seems to have become a more literal and endless iteration of Une Saison en Enfer (though it's Artaud's Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu that she's turned to more recently), can't help but feel both regrettable and inevitable. We may not 'like' that - as we are not supposed to -, but maybe the foremost question - before any purely aesthetic considerations -, when by design, denial, or omission, humankind continues to afford art so much pained material to work with, is whether we deserve any better in the first place.
