Article Response: Tim F's FT piece on Jan Jelinik et al

The disc that loop-finding-jazz-records mostly obviously recalls to my mind is Seefeel's "Quique" LP (and not just because these LPs have similar CD jackets!)- the loops of sampled guitar on "Quique" (a "dance" version of the interludes on Loveless?) having their counterpart in Jelinik's constructions. The connection here can also be described another way. Jelinik is putting the background noise into the foreground, and vice-versa, which how I would also describe the main achievement of MBV and their ilk.

(BTW, I would never have used the word 'glitch' in relation to Vespertine either, but that's a whole other story. ;-))

i have been listening to this bjork record all night. and it's brilliant. much more brilliant than i ever gave it credit for. (confession: i had set it up to be a failure from the start, dooming it to live in the shadow of the unreachable [?] peaks of "batchelorette." of "joga" and "hunter." of the stars-heart security and blissed out drift of "all is full of love.") it's quieter. less Majestic, although the sweeping strings are still present. (iceland = strings? it sure seems that way. but sigur ros are so clumsy and coarse, deploying them as part of the snatch-grab bag of Tools Of Profundity. bjork's are...Classy. but in the best way possible, like an android cabaret singer adrift in an abandoned space station, alone with her songs and her synthetic backing, the heartbreak of hymning yr own endless cycles around the sun.) those precise, tron-grid beats and tics that mark bell grafted from his lfo days onto the Classic Songform are gone, replaced with a series of subtle, almost imperceptibly shifting, niggling glitch-scapes (produced by matmos, matt herbert, and bjork herself.) the sweep and climax of "batchelorette" and it's fellow travellers is gone, perhaps exorcised by the detourned broadway of the "selmasongs" mini-album from last year. it's a bit like casting an ear on a flurry of cellular activity: invisible to the naked e(ar)ye, yet focus and a world of microscopic wonder is revealed. an immersion where homogenic was a journey.

mostly, however, i've been listening to one song, "cocoon." i listen to it despite myself, despite the fact that it stings in it's joy, stings in it's rawness. it's the flipside of the other compulsively listenable unlistenable song of 2001, radiohead's "morning bell." i first heard (the amnesiac version of) "morning bell," sitting in an airport at 3 a.m., unable to sleep for more than 15 mins. at a time on the moulded plastic benches. it's a song about divorce - obstensibly - whether told from the view of the husband, wife, or child i do not know. (the tell tale lines: "you can keep the furniture," "cut the kids in half," and a "release me" that almost = jesus wept.) a black hole of a song, sucking all joy and verve into itself, the heart of a human so resigned to the fact that something Bad isn't going to happen...it's happened. delivered with an almost unconscious child-like melody, what tom reffered to in his freaky trigger review as "easy-listening primitivism."

i listened to it, riding the moving walkway back and forth, back and forth. going nowehere. returning to the my origin point like clockwork. almost to the duration of the song itself, in fact. i listened to it. and i listened to it again. and again. and again. and i cringed. and i winced. somewhere just past my stomach. as the quitely agonizing, just-oblique-enough narrative played itself out. again and again. reduced, everytime i heard it, to an eight year old peering through a banister railing, straining to the muffled voices of parents talking-louder-than-they-should downstairs: that unnamed dread that comes with the tension of two adults arguing out of earshot, their intentions beyond the scope of yr understanding, the threat of eruption into violence learned at the hands or belt over a knee of the one who leaned in and kissed yr head and said goodnight.

"cocoon," like "morning bell," is a whirlpool. but it's comprised of that cast off joy. it's one of the most nakedly unfettered vocal performances i've ever heard. she sounds on the brink of some miraculous epiphany, her entire mouth alive with each coo and sigh varilooping around the room, filling the empty spaces in the song itself. she sounds on the brink of orgasm, frankly. trembling. anticipatory. lost in finding someone. early morning light on sunday. white walls. warm sheets. haze and happiness. it's a performance which - like "morning bell" - is so stark that it would take a far better writer than i do it any justice with the written word.

the song would be done an immense disservice by a "traditional" arrangement, although it's hard to imagine a "traditional" singer writing or reciting those lines. there's a glacial organ tone (sounding a bit - although i know it's not - like a sample of the opening of unrest's "the hill"), a tinking of bells, and a crackling "rhythm" section, little digital skips and pops which would be perfectly at home by themselves on a lithops or mego record, like fireflies batting themselves to death against a halogen lamp. it's a "glitch" record, for all intents and purposes, if burt bacharach sampled stockhausens's "kontakte" for a dionne warwick vehicle? (if dionne warwick was from mars. oh, wait...)

there's an organic unity to this song which i don't know if i've ever heard in a piece of music before. the glitches are NOT future-shock window dressing. they're too understated for that anyway. (the - i think - oval sample in "hidden place" could be taken as such, but again it's used so well that it does verge on some new form of songsmithery.) not all of the album works this weel. but, as cliched as it may be (since us "believers" have known about the beauty in glitch for some time now), on "cocoon" bjork really does go a long way towards "humanizing" the clicks and cuts crew in a very traditional, very effective way.

(the piece was excellent, btw tim. didn't mean to seem like i was trying to steal yr thunder with my own babble.)

side question: why don't more people rate super_collider? i just listened to "darn cold way o' lovin" again today and it's glitch- iriffic!

http://failblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/fail-owned-cigarette-smoking-fail.jpg?w=500&h=210 is that you, tim?

I didn't see the avatar in the corner at first, and for a while thought this was some highly cryptic, probably negative comment on an 8 year old piece of mine.