bleeding heart narrative: tongue tangled hair (tartaruga) «
part noise, part classical, part post-whatever. perhaps perhaps perhaps. like the astronaut/sky diver adorning the booklet inside there’s a real sense of space, of being alone, of floating or falling about the music. more semi-recently david foster wallace’s infinite jest did the same thing. but there’s hints of things breaking down, of loss and collapse (the first track is at the end of it). see the climactic descent into free noise on a dialogue. cover art that offers up a dreamland of pandas, bridges, warriors on seahorses, zeppelins, war children in gas masks, flying fish and dinosaurs. ) david foster wallace (that’s him sketched on the inside of the sleeve). There are some things in life you have to work at. gravity’s rainbow took me the best part of a decade to tame. one composed of seemingly disparate stories, where henry brown the slave who posted himself to freedom (that’s him on the cover) sits easily next to gaston bachelard and his philosophy of space and time and imagination. it has that massive multilayered epicness of the last two talk talk albums, but less hushed and reverential. or the unexpected apocalyptic volume at the end of david foster wallace, which serves as a fitting metaphor for the fella’s suicide. it’s all things falling or floating, all trees branching and smoke spiraling. the reason i bring this up (yes there is a reason…) is two-fold:. *actually i lied here since arvo part crops up below…. as much arvo part as it is christian fennesz. like i said, it is its own world. it seems strange at first to highlight the linguistic, particularly in reference to a writer who was so very writerly, so utterly bound to words when yr music is/was generally wordless. secondly in a similar rambling (self)referential way, tongue tangled hair exists in its own world. but frankly this is a thing of bruised grace, of genuine beauty. i can draw a line from wallace to bachelard using foucault.