Hagiographically speaking, the fount of unblocking is 1% my own mock turtle genius; 13% from other written sources that threaten to hack sanity out, envy cruelly stuffed in its place; 44% outright theft from said sources; 28% a pretty picture; 37% pretty tuneage; & fully half from the synaptic vagaries of a drunken stupor. The spirits need not be literal, en fait, usually aren't, usually worse 'cause buzz, thy name is transience.
As with all numbers, all are lies whose beauty is judged by flawed eyes, save the only truth, that zero is now one. Innards, let us celebrate our new arrangement with, not the adding of chocolate to milk, but the above, 'cause you are an Arab ship hit by Greek fire, & fire deceives by being pretty with a palette of new colors. Settle down, melodrama is bacon & eggs, with a stack slathered in maple syrup, much more tasty than your nutritiously bland gruel.
Dammit, I'm starving. Stupid writer's unblock.
Verily, the Duchess suggested that our morbid pal get some, um, cloud --
Either a troo kvlt black metal record or, more certainly, a boring-as-fuck (a stupid phrase because, well, no, fucking can be boring, anything can be boring especially Serious Things but not aw yiss = vintage Motörhead & assorted other aw yisses like exciting fucking [wot?], Harry Clarke Blue, & 2d4 of the last twenty-two offline lines I wrote) ivory tower monograph, but I'd drop the Marxism you know you want it Mr. & Mrs. Elbow Patch (Giles always excepted) I don't because really who fucking cares about Byzantine counterpoint that has nothing to do with the Byzantines I don't, A Marxist Poetics of Don't, then add charcoal drawings of dead Ed Wood characters, first edition Monster Manual dawn of Megiddo shit, Turkey Jones dropping Bradshaw on his gourd, some gourds, still life with clementines not oranges because being a nail biter I can peel the former, a jack-o-lantern, about a girl, Ar(t)s amatoria subtilior nouveau brut & Donovan, meadows steeped in pretty flowers, beware zombie pretzeldents in a speech bubble above zombie Vincent Price, the funk of 40,000 years no way civilization will last that long pshaw, & you, smiling, because wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee a bunch of madeleines in the madness betcha can't guess just one oh I'm kidding or not now diagram this sentence I'm late I'm late for a very important fugue state, Nod, I never remember my dreams.
If I'm being honest with myself, a rarity among rarities, few things (no thing, really, since I self-censor like the charlesdickens & versifying requires you the reader to hold a decoder ring unless there are spoilers) here are more nerve-wracking than reviewing music. It's not the falling back on too-worn tropes, words, phrases. That, I can deal with, as I do each time I jot down new lines in the black notebook, almost full. 99 cents at Marc's. Saying the same thing over & again just is, like the ascension & decline of the sun, people being assholes to one another, the miserable collective failure of Clevelandia sports. The difficulty? Describing sound?
Music equaling memory. No, not as simple as people & places & happenstance grafting themselves onto the notes, tendrils worming their way through the measures from the outside to nestle in a chord, to rupture without premonition Sigourney knows, remember when X said to Y, oh Z, I like root beer floats, too. Never that soundtrack shallow. If only. Nor always that quantifiable. To the mind's ear, sound is roaring ocean, so scream & plead & kick the cold sand all you want, there is only ocean, roaring. Details made imprecise by an emotional imprint. Think a ghost, a painfully bright nebula, a cloud beguiling & poisonous.
New albums mean new ones (or old, not reborn but reshaped, for no one lies to ourselves as much as we) receive their permanence, rooted to a place in the cranial landscape, free will an illusion, & that means both a blessing & a curse, forgive the triteness but naught else applies as the visceral roams the wanderer, possessing, & who can predict the aftermath?
Sounds incredibly dorky, I know, but my innards are neither postmodern nor pragmatic. Sometimes an album-adjacent gut spill is okay since all names have been changed to protect the innocent, statute of limitations, & so forth. This is fresh, thus, whew. Anyway, going song by song on Ariettes Oubliées... which I've listened to nearly nonstop since yester morn save a shade over three for sleep, feels fruitless. Les Discrets is an album band in the finest tradition & given that mastermind Fursy Teyssier is also a skilled artist responsible for band's visual presentation, why waste time with blatherings beyond the album's kernel being the Paul Verlaine poem of the title, the tiny aria re-imagined as a woman, hazy stories of a couple, transmitted mostly through the texts of vocalist/lyricist Audrey Hadorn, spooling away from that conceit.
Yes, there's nothing as immediate as Song for Mountains, & the palette is less busy on the surface, the textures layered more like one of those old topographic globes, richer browns & longer blues spinning sepia slow. It's hard enough unlocking the swirling processes of my own flailing in the dark, let alone those of someone else, so pardon the fluorescent-ruined photography, but observe,
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