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 God 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.