Represent the past: it began with this, with X; it all started there. But where did it begin? Retake the past: it began now, today. Today - as the past gave itself again. As the old music becomes weird. As the new music is enweirded by the past. Retake it - receive what has never been received before as the past. Not the past received anew, but the new as the past, as the retaking that gives first of all what happened.
That's what I hear on Time: the Revelator and the early Palace albums: the past, yes, but also the future - do not reduce either to their influences, for that is only to represent what happened as though it sprang from a set of causes, and ultimately a singular and determinable Origin. There is a music which scatters the Origin and scatters representation - by awakening, from the past, those series of singularities that were never before thus assembled.
But what are they, those singularities, those micro-events and part-happenings? The open-throated Pentecostalist, the leaning-together of bluegrass voices; the ballad-voice which confirms blank fate and blind destiny; the non-regular rhythms of Blind Willie Johnson; fragments of Anglo-Celtic folk: all this; and doesn't Will Oldham protest that he was as much a listener to Dinosaur Jr. as to Jimmie Rogers?
In truth, it is not a question of Dinosaur Jr. nor Jimmie Rogers, if both would name a body of work, or even the musicking that work would ossify. Not Dinosaur Jr., but a sound that reached the ears of Will Oldham. And not Will Oldham, either - he is not even himself, but the one reinvented by the past. Reinvented - no, because there was no first time; this past did not exist.
Invention, and that from the first; retaking, and that at the beginning: what returns at the past had never arrived. What comes are those singularities arranged in new singularities, and according to new rules of grouping. Rules? Not even that - locally, provisionally, once and then not again, the past arrived from the future. For the first time - for the last time, the past claimed you from the future. I listened - what did I hear? 'The Ohio River Boat Song', taped from the radio in 1993. My past come again.
And with Gillian Welch? I had Revival, it is true; I already knew Hell Among the Yearlings. But Time: the Revelator? From the very beginning, I knew - but with what kind of knowledge? - that what had come by way of the first song, its opening, was the langour of the no-time, that was before and after life. After it - wise with a wisdom that sees all from death, that stares back and sings like the narrator of Sunset Blvd., but from before life, too - before the world came together.
There was no God, then; the skies and waters were undivided, and the stars had not been set in the sky. Nothing - and not even that; a rustling, a murmuring: the unbeginning without determination. From that past - scarcely the past; from the future - scarcely the future. From - and the present was turned aside from itself. From - and the flood came; I was not where I was; the river was where I could not step once.
Streaming - that in place of me, and revealing place to have been the usurpation - not, now, of anyone in particular, but of the no one who -sists when there is no one to be there. Wound, recording surface, what wrote itself in you was the past. That's who I was - but who was I?
Absolute music! Or music that dissolved the terms of all relation! Can I call it immediate? Only if it names an event that reached me in the unknown past. Only if that past was the way the future arrived - or that the future arrived from the past. No Origin - and there is not even Gillian Welch, and not even Will Oldham. Non-Origin: by what courage was Time recorded with just guitars and vocals? By what immense courage was it set down in RCA's Studio B?
And by what courage was Palace Brothers recorded in a kitchen on a cassette recorder? Days in the Wake - that's what the latter album came to be called. In the wake - of the future that moves through the past. Of the past which comes from the future, just as surely, as lightly, as the wind which passes through the barley in the field when the Doctor turns from the dacha at the beginning of Mirror.