Spurious

Drone

I often daydream about writing a 60 page book on Will Oldham (Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy), and then one on Bill Callahan (Smog) and another on Chan Marshall (Cat Power). 60 pages, a little book which offers itself in a kind of discretion to its readers. As though it drew its reader into the space of a secret.

But then I ask myself: what would you write? What could you construct on the basis of an experience of the streaming into which, say, the songs of Cat Power hold themselves? I listen to The Covers Album – take the first song, ‘Satisfaction’: what do I hear? Repeated, reaching me over and again: the pulsing of a moment which falls outside what I can hold or grasp. Pulsing? – It is not a heartbeat, with its regular rhythm, but the scattering of rhythm.

And then if I listen to The Doctor Came at Dawn … well, who listens (who listens within me)? One might think because of the slowness of the album, the way it takes time, the way, sometimes, a drone can be heard behind the songs, that I am soothed or lulled. But it does not send me to sleep so much as awaken me from my wakefulness, drawing me into a strange kind of insomnia. The night opens in the day; the sun is put out and then, in the darkness, there is a scattering or dispersal: instead of points of light, stars, there are points of deeper darkness within darkness, swarming.

And Will Oldham? Days in the Wake is the album in which this singer turns himself into a beast, a creature so small that he can crawl through the interstices of the world. Following him from song to song, it is as though from these interstices, another kind of music resounds. I remember Pythagoras’s claim that the spheres of the planets turn in such a way that they generate a great, roaring music. This is what I fancy I hear from Days in the Wake, an album of mice and children: not the sublime order of the planets turning, but the darkness in which nothing turns, a music without form, without melody. Listen to his voice strain and break. He is bringing something to us from faraway. From before and after time. From the void of the future, the void of the past.

Parentheses

Why did Smog become (Smog) with Rain on Lens? Why put parentheses around a name? Out of discretion. The word, for Bill Callahan, is a word too many. The name is too imposing, too forceful. Isn’t this suspension – withholding, through parenthesis, the movement that would see this word take its place among other words – only a sleight of hand? Perhaps Bill Callahan is signalling to us that the name risks getting in the way – that Smog have become too imposing, that they are linked to a style. It is necessary to become minor again, to deviate, to rediscover a movement which has no coherence or identity in itself. And then to begin anew, as if from nothing. Remember the Japanese poets who, upon achieving fame in a particular place, would change their name and go elsewhere.

The Drone

The words, the wisp of melody are born out of the drone as out of a primordial reverberation, the birth and rebirth of the world. The drone calls them back, too, even as it attunes them in the song – even as these words resonate with a deeper resonance. And this is the glory of Smog: the ‘content’ of the song answers to the profundity of its birth; the simplicity of the music – a few notes, repeated – lets be the unfolding and refolding, the pulse, of its source. Where does the song come from? Bill Callahan? The words issue out of the reverberation that is there before everything. They repeat the cosmogony by which everything becomes present. The tenacity of Smog (the greatness of an album like The Doctor Came at Dawn): drawing music again and again to the source.

Artifice

What did I mean yesterday when I tried drunkenly and incompetently to write of the rarefaction of style that occurs in the later work of some artists? I suppose I am thinking of those who are criticised because the worlds they construct become hermetic and self-enclosed. The books seem only issue from an understanding of the world that has already formed, rather than one which is to be fought for anew. Here I think of the later books of Duras, or the last films by Tarkovsky. But I suppose it would be plausible to claim that this self-enclosure was present in the films, say, of Hal Hartley from the start. What I love - and this is what I wanted to say - is the artifice as it presents itself in its very artificiality, when it no longer hides the fact that it is a sham. At this moment, it is as though the mask knows that it is a mask, and that art, in some sense, is only a play of masks over the void.

What does it mean to invoke the void here? I have tried to write of this before, but failed miserably. I suppose it is the affirmation of a kind of matter or materiality: the heaviness of the word, the timbre of the tone, the nuance of colour. The artwork affirms its own heaviness or bulk - its unwieldiness. It does so by allowing it to be present in the very lightness and deftness of the artist's touch. Just as the old calligrapher learns to create his work in a single stroke, a few elements are sufficient for the Durasian universe to be brought into creation, a few notes are all Smog needs to make a song. But the extraordinary grace through which a book as tiny as 'The Slut of the North Atlantic Coast', or 'The Man Sitting in the Corridor', or a song as self-effacing as 'Rain on Lens' or 'Floating', also brings us into contact with what I like to call fate, which is to say, the way things are and will be. I even like to think of this as 'truth', remembering the role Nietzsche assigns to art when he claims that its dignity lies in beautifying the ugly, in making truth endurable.

Truth

Bergman complains more than once that Tarkovsky makes only Tarkovsky films – this is true, of course, but what’s the problem? None for those of us who rather like the idea of the exacerbation of a particular style – of a stream of artworks allowing an artist to construct a self-contained world. Take the gorgeous rewrite of Duras’s The Lover. The Lover from North China, published six or seven years later, is more fragmented, bitty, and the characters act in a manner which is – let us say – implausible. Particularly moving is the introduction of the servant boy, Thanh, who, if memory serves, is the dedicatee of the book. Everyone is always weeping. And everyone is in love with the younger brother – this is marvellous I think. And there are more silences than ever.

There’s a good blog in here somewhere, if only I was sober enough to write it. Here is my point in rough, unsubstantiated outline: the exacerbation and rarefaction of a style foregrounds, in the work, both the artificiality and self-sufficiency of the artist’s world and the kind of substrate of that world. A substrate? That word is not right – I am thinking of the materiality, of an absolute density that makes itself present when the work presses itself towards an experience which dissolves its protagonists, its verisimilitude, its attempt to present a real or convincing world. How clumsily I am expressing myself! I will have come to back to this another day.

Few works can endure the attraction to this black star. Let me say, very simply, but also in a way that is entirely unsubstantiated, that Smog’s The Doctor Came at Dawn is the great artwork which comes closest to dissolution. Do not tell me it is mannered or monotonous. The greatness of this album is the way it endures absolute breakdown and sustains itself by enduring the terrible gravitational force which threatens to tear it apart. It is an argument which few would agree with, but I think Rain on Lens bears witness to the same threat. This is a tenacious album - some find it monochrome - but that is what allows it to draw close to breakdown and survive.

What is great, utterly great, about Bill Callahan, is the way in which he imposes a tone upon silence, the way he allows it to resound in his work, in particular, in the strange drone you can discern on some of the tracks on The Doctor Came at Dawn. His music, because it is simple – and what a great struggle it must be to maintain and endure this great simplicity –, forms a kind of echo chamber. What resounds there? Somewhat pompously, I hear truth. Yes, truth is always the world I associate with The Doctor Came at Dawn. Not because it accurately represents the world, or corresponds to it; not even because it holds together as a self-enclosed suite, with perfect coherence, but because it lets breathe – but is it a breath or a death-rattle? – a murmuring outside words and a sonority outside music. As if it is attuned to the origin of the world, when nothing had yet emerged from darkness. As if songs themselves were a seismograph attuned to the great but distant movement of the earth.

The High and the Low

You must excuse me - this is no more than a note to myself, or a plan for blogs I should write one day. Still, if I don't write now, what will I have done today?

I have often accused myself of a kind of snobbery: why write about 'high' art when it's 'low' art that fills my life? And the answer, following on from my previous blog: 'high' art inherits the legacy of les belles artes, the fine arts of the eighteenth century. They belong to the same tradition, even as that tradition runs itself into the ground. And what I should substantiate is the argument that the fine arts themselves emerged only with the withering of the didactic order of the church and state, such that it began in the ruin of some older order. Yet a certain notion of taste, a kind of 'classicism' remained - even if this, also, were the residue of something already lost. And so it went on until the emergence of a 'modern' art - an art tied to the idea of transgression, of a shattering of old, 'classical' forms. And then? The work becomes divided in itself, turning against the power and prestige of the work. There is nothing to write, nothing to say, no means to communicate. Art remains - but what remains? A vestige, a trace. A loquacity (is that a word? there are no dictionaries here ...) without determinable origin. A voice that speaks, writes on and on and on. The unnameable. Automatic writing. Blanchot's recits (can't be bothered to do the accent on the 'e'). Bataille's broken texts. Duras's 'hole word'.

'High' art, 'low' art - why even use these words? I listen to Lucinda Williams's World without Tears. It is magnificent, but it is not Will Oldham, it is not Smog or Cat Power. Why not? Because it displays a classicism, it is comfortable with the rules of songcraft and the persona of the singer. It is a suite of songs, immaculately rendered. I listen to it again and again, but does not permit itself to be claimed by what I have called, no doubt too crudely, the 'what remains' of art. It is not divided against itself, divided in itself, it does not, somehow, doubt itself. It speaks with an assured voice. It confesses - and what a confession, it is wonderful. But it is too 'personal'. And Will Oldham? On the early albums at least, where his voice strains and breaks - because, by the way, he purposely tunes his guitar so that his voice will have to strain - there is an 'impersonality' (I wish I could express this more clearly) in his work which I find only in Kafka. Likewise Smog's Knock Knock. A suite of songs, some jaunty, some hushed - listen to 'River Guard'. It is as fine as the very short stories in Kafka's notebooks. Fine because it is not 'confessional' - and nor is the album it belongs to. What is it about? 'I could drive forever'. Erancy and drift. A movement without repose (I think of 'I was a Stranger' from Red Apple Falls). Will and Bill are our Beckett, our Kafka. And Cat Power? One day I understood that the Covers album had stripped these famous, too famous songs, of one kind of narrative force. And drawn them into that space in which one can hear something else resound. The place where the work breaks against itself.

This must be developed at greater length. Notes for blogs, plans for future writings. This is a frustrating time of the year. You wait for a holiday, and it is no damn holiday.