Category: Music

Shostakovich lived it all before us, long before. He lived it all – the bureaucratic madness, the Blairite double-speak madness, the nothing-means-anything-anymore officialdom madness. A life stripped of every semblance of meaning where you too are one of the meaning-reducers and meaning-smashers, where you have been made to speak exactly like them, and doesn't that mean, too, that they're exactly like you, that there's an interior life there somewhere, in some hidden part of their lives?

Exactly like them: only – and this is the other part – that wild, free side has been captured, eaten up, it's become wholly domestic and nothing but that. The private and then the public; the public face and the private face: it fits together, it's harmonised, it all works, it forms part of a whole, a horrible topsy-turvy whole …

Only with Shostakovich, there is something left over – no, not the mythical anti-communist side, not the man of his 'memoirs', not Macdonald's freedom-lover and freedom-fighter. The wild, free side of his music – no, not that either, unless it could be understood to be twisted within the other strands of his music – with irony, say, but an irony so bitter, so contorted, so flattened it can hardly be called irony.

Smashed irony, a desert landscape, a post nuclear landscape of ash and blackness. That with freedom – that with wildness, a wildness that has to grow into the most twisted and gnarled of plants. Ancient from the first, never born, aging its way into existence, already broken, yet whole.

Whole – and broken in its wholeness, nothing but broken even though it is whole. Shostakovich – the fifteenth symphony, the fifteenth quartet – who prised apart the public, the private, who let it live again, that wild, free side that speaks with the same words as the Blairite, that speaks of the same meanings, but by already having baked them to charcoal, reduced them down as bones reduced down in the funeral fires of India. Stubs of bones among ash, indigestible, unsmashable. All that's left in the bureaucracy, in the madness of this new 'accountable' public world …

Wednesday morning, I stop work, look about, am I still an idiot? Yes, still an idiot, listening over and over to Lift to Experience's apocalyptic Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads. Still an idiot, googling to see what happened to Josh T. Pearson, the singer, guitarist and main songwriter of said band, I find out he's living in Berlin and has grown a great beard, and is not recording anything, and has no intention of recording anything, despite the record company Bella Union, for which Lift to Experience recorded Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, being very interested in issuing a new album by him, and the fact that he's performed on many occasions, and even released a live album, of his most recent songs, many of which can be viewed on Youtube.

There seems to be less distance now between the Josh T. Pearson of this interview with Lift to Experience, just after Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads came out, and his apocalyptic musings, and between the bearded, Berlin-dwelling Josh T. Pearson of this one, who barely gets by through his day job, who can only afford to eat one meal a day and is still an illegal immigrant in a city foreign to him, and his apocalyptic musings. Which is to say, the bearded Josh T. Pearson has disappeared into his music, just as the Chinese painter was said to have stepped into one of his own paintings.

This unrecorded Josh T. Pearson is one with what he sings about; there's no persona anymore, no bandmates to hold him back; he's a one man band, Josh T. Pearson, with his guitar and his effect pedals; he doesn't need a percussion, he can stomp his feet; he doesn't need to record songs about the apocalypse because he is the apocalypse, he's nothing other than the apocalypse, he lives inside the whirlwind, he's God's voice from inside the burning bush which must be achingly, agonisingly perilous. He's a prophet of the disaster and the disaster; he's our judge and our saviour, he's all the angels and all the devils, he's a battleground, a disputed territory, great hordes pass across him …

How difficult it must be to disappear into what you made, to no longer have the distance, nothing to hold you back. He's on his own, Josh T. Pearson, illegal immigrant, with hardly enough money to eat or fix his teeth, yet he can't record either, he feels he's not ready to record, he wants to make an album as great as the apocalyptic Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, yet he's unable to make an album that great.

What's he going to do? Wander, lost, in the world he opened. Wander in that world he was able to push away from him before, saying, that's what I've made and it's separate from me. Only now it's consumed him. Only now there's no distance between Josh T. Pearson and what he's made. Terrible fate! To be too weak to withstand what you put into the world! To be weaker than the actions that seemed to have accomplished themselves without you! Terrible, enviable fate to burn up in the fire you set to burning …

'Comin' Back To Me', Rickie Lee Jones' cover of the Jefferson Airplane original on repeat. 'Comin' Back': how many times have I heard this song over last two decades (it is nearly two decades)? Her low contralto (is it a contralto?) warm, close. It's intimate, very close to you, the listener. She's telling you a secret. You have to stoop to listen. Bend down, lie down. The song asks for you to listen at its level.

Comin' Back … 'I saw you, I – saw you …': held back, restrained. A song that doesn't say itself, the capacity to sing, to play. That seems to issue from an incapacity, a kind of interruption. Singing wasn't possible. There was no one to play. And in infinite weariness, in a kind of wearing away, infinite. Singing bound to its own impossibility, playing to what it cannot do.

I'm sitting up by the window. Sitting up, the monitor before me, the wall behind me with Blue Note jazz albums reproduced: The Incredible Jimmy Smith, Our Man in Paris … she's a jazz singer, too, Rickie Lee Jones. Pop Pop, from which 'Comin' Back to Me' is a jazz album, and with the usual jazz vices: too much confidence, proficiency, too much complacency as it remains within an idiom, bathing in it. Pure indulgence, pure smugness (there's not enough asceticism in jazz).

And yet 'Comin' Back to Me' … yet a performance, like those of Tomas Stanko that opens jazz right out again, right open. That opens it to the afternoon and the wearing of the afternoon, to the great erosion that robs us of ourselves. That doubles it up, that wearing away, hardening it into a form – impossible! That gives it a body, a kind of consistency – impossible! That thickens the afternoon in the afternoon.

It is what I want in artworks, I think. As though art was by definition a denial of the afternoon. As though it could let the blankness of days harden into glass. As though it could slow light down, could set the passing of the day on pause. You caught it: the day. You caught it out, interrupted it, as it would interrupt you.

'Comin' Back to Me': sung below psychology, below expressiveness. Played down where the lake reflects the sky. It's a horizontal music. It is music lying down … a lake, an expanse. A lying down that expands the space around it, lets in breathe. That draws the days to itself, letting it turn around itself. That turns your attention elsewhere, losing it across a shimmering surface.

'But I saw you, I saw – you, coming back to me …' A song sung after song. Music after music, after everything's been played, everything sung. And now it's coming back, it's returning. Now you're coming back, the song, the centre of the song, as you set out from the far corner of the day to find me …

Track of the year? Easy. Rickie Lee Jones’ ‘I was There’, from The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard.

I am admirer of devotional music, music that seems to meditate on an events in religious narratives – not, though Taverner’s ‘musical icons’ which seem kitschy to me (but perhaps I am put off my the image of the solitary composer that he presents; the creator-aristocrat), nor Arvo Part’s petrified choral pieces, ice cold, out on the planet Mars.

It’s a voice close to speech that I want to hear – a speech-song, close to popular idioms, vernacular, and the devotion revealed in a happy deformation of song, the stretching of some part of its elements – it’s becoming jazz-like, improvisational. And a sense of that voice trying to find something, discovering, and not only the heart of the narrative (in Rickie Lee Jones’ case, the Passion). A voice that also discovers something of itself – that looks for itself in the singing. That sings to dwell in itself, looking for itself, losing itself, and this even in the case of RLJ, who after all has had a long career.

You can hear it on the whole album – The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard, a long meditation on the life of Jesus that cluminates in its last, long track, 8 minutes long (I’m listening to it now): something has been lost – the assurance of an RLJ idiom (not simply the jazz-boho shtick of the early albums. More than that), and found because of the narrative and its musing, its recreation (but the last album, The Evening of My Best Day was also a renewal – out of political rage, was that it?). Jesus on the Saint Monica Boulevard. Jerusalem become Los Angeles, but keeping too the old Biblical signifiers (Jerusalem, Israel, and Babylon (‘what happened was Babylon …’)) – keeping them, renewing them as those names are mixed with new ones.

A devotional music – guitar-work Astral Weeks-like: generous, opening the song out into a song-world. Chords that open out the song, that right away you know will let it encompass everything. And the voice – intimate, searching, virtuosic in its dynamic changes, its softnesses and risings. And the lyrics – extemporised, made up all at once, you can hear that, I think.

Who is the RLJ who sings this? I haven’t heard her before (previous highlights: her cover of ‘Comin’ Back to Me’ from Pop Pop; the many sweet songs of Traffic in Paradise; ‘Last Chance Texaco’ that Morrissey played very loud to the muscians who would play on ‘Late Night, Maudlin Street’, another miracle of extemporisation …) A devotional music – because it really is the Passion story that allows it. That story, retold, that permits of an entirely new mood in her singing. I’ve never heard her like this before … she’s never been heard like this before …

I admit that I love Messianic lyrics – as on Nina Simone’s album ‘There’s a New World Coming, as it resonates strongly with the contemporaneous civil rights movement – RLJ sings at the same end of times, but in a different way, more tenderly, intimately. ‘There you were in your white dress shirt/ Most of all I loved your hands/ I loved them so much that it hurt …’ Witnessing for whom? The one the bartenders knew. And the pimps.

A devotional music. A song-prayer, but to whom? A passion – but for whom? For the voice, in part. For the singer’s own voice that has become strange to her, and strange for us, her listeners. A rapt voice. A voice that moves – with dips and rallying points. Drowsy sometimes, but suddenly attentive. Almost asleep – sensually drowsy, I would want to say that. But waking – tenderly, and in a new kind of tenderness.

‘I was there’, she sings. And ‘you were there’, sung many times. ‘Where Jesus walked’. She addresses the others who were there sometimes. There – with Jesus, or drinking wine and eating bread with him? or in communion? – and sometimes sings to Jesus himself: ‘We thought you were going to set Israel straight …’, but Israel, now, is only the Biblical Israel, the chosen ones who are also the benighted ones.

Verses? A chorus? None of that. The song pulses. Not quite revolves. But returns to itself, regathering. Musing, meditating. Returning to an event, to the significance of the event. A récit of the event. A Bhagavad Gita of the event – a divine song that sings of the divine song. The song lodged in the greater song. ‘You’ve been travelling in so many universes …’ Pulsing – the song rediscovers the song. And the singer her own singing, reaching deeper into her voice than she can. Devotional.

Don’t mistake me. The song is not great because it undertakes a journey of faith. The Passion is the Passion of the song first of all. And the faith is given entirely by the voice, of the voice (just as Bob Dylan says: I don’t believe in anything but those old songs). A voice rediscovers itself in the Passion. Rediscovers tenderness, sensuality. Rediscovers Babylon and Israel (the Biblical Israel). And the Nazarene? A name for what calls the voice, what draws it from itself. A name for that singing called forward in its maximal tenderness, in its stretched-out sensuality. Generosity – is that the word? Giving – is that it?

Who is RLJ’s Jesus? Who is he, sung of in tenderness? Who that awakens this devotional song? A name for the sufferer of all suffering. A name for Jerusalem at the heart of Babylon, where suffering changes its direction, where it rears itself up into a life – where it lives concentrated in one agonised form. The Passion names nothing other than this. To suffer – and for whom? For everyone, and with the suffering of everyone. It is not that the meaning of suffering is changed. It is not. ‘The Son of Man’ is a name for all suffering. For suffering in the kingdom of Babylon, which is to say this world, the only world.

But there is the promise of a kind of redemption, too. The promise that is Messianism. Not of the transmutation of suffering. Not the end of pain. But the fact that it can be spoken – sung. That it is given issue and can be heard. That the wrongs can be heard, and perhaps right can be done. Babylon speaks and sings of itself. Babylon discovers Jerusalem and sings of it (the Biblical Jerusalem). That is devotion. That is what it had meant to be there. That’s what it means to sing from there.

Sunday and I drag behind myself like a ball and chain. Why does Gillian Welch’s ‘I Dream a Highway’ and the album it comes from become essential? Patience – that word. Songs hanging like sheets on the line to have the wind pass through them. To give evidence of the wind, its passing, but to be more than wind, or what is left by its imprint (desert features carved out by blown sand).

What passes through the music? What is the music languorous enough, patient enough to allow there to be found? A kind of necessity, I tell myself; fate, as it let itself be caught by the waterwheel that this song is, and this album. Is it her voice (and David Rawling’s, as they lean into one each other)? Is it the steadiness of the playing?

To be caught? No: to catch the song, even as it allows itself to be caught. Time offers itself as an ally of the song, of the singing, of the playing. Time and what is dragged behind time. But as it does so, caught, letting itself be caught, it is lifted by the hope that is singing, by the fact of song. Lifted, lightened, not by overcoming time, but by sending it in another direction, and by way of my listening.

Am I lower than the song, or is it lower than me? Either way, I imagine it to reach me as through a change in level, the river that travels the long way to the sea. That’s where the ashes are scattered in India – into rivers, and therefore into the sea, the former always searching for the latter.

So does the level of the song seem to want to come lower, to look for something and by way of my listening. Or that it is fate that wants to search in that way, and let itself be reborn in the song like an avatar. In the song as I hear it, as it runs down my listening.

1. With some novelists, it seems their characters substitute for them in some way – and that they may ever be sacrificed to a fate the writer might wish upon himself. I have never written a line of fiction – I dare not – and I wonder if this is because language seems an impassable barrier between what I would write and what it is given to me to write.

I am strongly drawn to programmatic notes, to prefaces and statements of methods in works of philosophy, or, especially, those moment in which a text draws attention to itself, and meditates upon the conditions of its own appearance. What status has a written text of philosophy that would condemn writing? Derrida, of course, has explored this question with great brilliance.

For my part, I ask the question more stupidly, but still as insistently. Or should I say the question returns in me, or that I am sometimes very little other than the place in which it returns? And I admit, too, that I am drawn to those moments when texts that are otherwise theoretical become autobiographical – that refer, in an example, to the room in which they are writing, or to the circumstances of composition.

And better still, when the text is allowed to reflect on its own gratuitousness, on that peculiar bootstrapping that allowed it to be born, lifting from the life of the writer, allowing it to make claims  about what is true, and right, and just: yes, this is very beautiful, when the philosopher falls from her own text to confess that what she has written rides above her. When she asks, and who am I, husk of the work that has given birth to itself through me, and by pushing me aside?

I love to bring a reading of a text as close as possible to psychologism. Isn’t there that it becomes most striking how a text can leap from a life, out of it, transcending it? Isn’t it at that moment the text becomes most blazingly magnificent? As though the philosopher, too, had to sacrifice herself in order to write. That there has to be sacrifice, the dying of a life that, henceforward, is only the husk of the work.

And then I think I hear it again, that rumbling, that murmuring that precedes everything that might be said, and in any of our names. It is language that rises up – medium, vehicle of sense, that speaks itself and against the claim that is made through language. At this moment, I move from a fascination with what passes periously close to psychologism to something else: what is the name of that reading that would press a text back into the thickness of language, to the way in which it congeals even before any message can be delivered?

Nevertheless, of course, despite that thickening, there is still sense; words must mean. But I think language loses itself in every text; I dream of an ‘itself’ of language that wanders in its own labyrinth, that speaks of itself and sings of itself in everything written.

2. But what kind of song is this? Perhaps the one sung, in Blah-Feme‘s post, by anon who comes out of the forest, and that is remarked again and again. A possessing song, a dispossessing one, inhabiting language and turning it aside. Is it outside language, or does it, by contrast, turn language outside, tearing it from anyone who would speak in their name? The first person becomes the third, the ‘I speak’, ‘it speaks’;  language is as though snagged by itself, being drawn repeatedly to that event in which it loses the capacity to make sense.

Before song, before music, only noise without form and without rhythm. Isn’t the musical exactly this? For Kafka, as Blah-Feme says, the moment of writing was about pain, about discomfort. Certainly; but wasn’t it also about the transmutation of suffering – that strange crossover wherein to write of one’s pain and to ring changes upon it brought with it a remarkable shift.

By that ‘merciful surplus of strength’ is the pleasure of writing given; Kafka lies beneath his characters, dying as they die, but enjoying their death and pain. But his unfinished work shows, perhaps, that such enjoyment itself has its limit, there where dying cannot claim them, and where K. wanders without consolation and without death.

Kafka, too cannot die – is that why he broke away from the text and from what is unmasterable about language as it wanders in its own labyrinth, in language ‘itself’ as it no longers refers, no longer makes sense, even as it seems to speak by way of reference and by way of sense. It is here I find the musical – or perhaps only the noisy. Not a song, but a cry.

3. ‘This book ought to have sung’, Nietzsche writes in a preface to The Birth of Tragedy. Sung – and of its own pain, of the pain from which tragedy and music both issue. Then pain must be marked in song, and in the becoming-song of writing; music must sing in the text, with it, even if, for Nietzsche, music precedes what can be said and escapes it.

The sense of this escape, I think, makes him the last thinker of music as music – of music as it is unsubordinated to the fixity of language. But isn’t it curious that Nietzsche, the composer, gave way to the writer who thought language should be made to sing? And who seems to glimpse, in the preface to his earliest book, the chance of a writing of pain, perhaps of a musical language, that would re-enact, in our time, the birth of tragedy?

Are we too early for music as music, or too late? (The right response to these kinds of questions: incredulous laughter – is this how high philosophy has lifted itself? Higher than everything? – Too high; it rides above me, and who am I that has fallen beneath?)

Naively, impatiently, and nagged by the meditations of Deleuze and Klossowski, I have always supposed a barrier exists between ‘us’ and Nietzsche: that there were disclosed in the twentieth century, suffering so base, so basic that it fell below any redeeming performance of pain?

Wasn’t it with mass death that tragedy – the philosophy of tragedy, revived by Schelling, pursued by Hegel and Nietzsche and then completed in Heidegger – came to an end? I think the dream of a Dionysian music also ended there, in murmuring and noise, in a diffuse and general cry.

4. But there are other musics. What would it mean to claim that pain cannot be made to sing, not anymore? Only that the philosophy of tragedy is laughable, and that the idea of a great tradition of art music, that has come to hollow itself out is also laughable. Isn’t it necessary to violently juxtapose say, Heidegger, with, say, Madonna?

Music as a gleeful practice, with no lofty ambition, no link to what posits itself as the great tradition of European music – pop, innocent and new born, the eternal cheeriness of a song that spreads like gossip or rumour through the world. Escapism? Rather a lightness without nostalgia for the discourses of authenticity – to those gloomy callers to order for whom each person is to return to himself.

The lightness of forgetting – not of what happened and continues to happen, the great misery of the world – a kind of optimism of language. Late at night among the bookshelves of an eminent philosopher, it was for a CD of Dionne Warwick we searched to accompany our drinking. But to group the popular under the category of lightness is ridiculous: isn’t this another academic temptation: to take refuge in the forms that seem farthest away from academia?

Is this a call to acknowledge the debt of popular musics to that of slaves and the sons and daughters of slaves? A music that, one might think links itself to the plight of Israel, conjuring for itself a hopeful mythology out of abasement? But this, too, is naive: as if a music hasn’t already deterritorialised itself from what might be discovered by way of political economy. As if the idols of authenticity had not already shattered. Doesn’t Eric Clapton play the blues? Doesn’t the blues become simply a style among others, in the Imaginary Concerthall?

But perhaps there is a way of tracing this and other musics back, up the stream of deterritorialisation. If blues or jazz have taken on aspects of art music – the latter, in particular, entering the academy at the point at which it seemed to become most radical – what would an investigation of country, the Low Other of popular music, reveal?

Reading Richard Middleton’s Voicing the Popular, I read of the Gramscian notion of articulation as developed by Laclau and Mouffe and by Stuart Hall. But who are the people who might be reached thus? Are they the lumpenproletariat, raiding the dressing up box of older historical styles, who repeat history simply as farce, or the proletariat, the universal exception, who would reveal the tragedy of the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century and then come to themselves? From tragedy to hope. Songs which sound that tragedy – ‘We’re low, we’re low, we’re very, very low’ – but in which there flashes the coming revolt, the last repetition.

But I always wonder about those who have fallen from the proletariat and from any proletariat – the nameless, the indefinite. The fallen ones. Not even a proletariat; not even a people.

5. I dream of a song that is born out of suffering just as Kafka describes his writing to be begin in that ‘merciful surplus of strength’ that carries him into writing, and transmutes the suffering from which he begins. A singing that allows a particular suffering to pass into the greater suffering that rumbles and murmurs in language. Is it the blues that sings? The blue note of jazz?

Or perhaps pain cannot be made to sing. Or it is the unlimiting of the song, the passage from music to anonymous rumbling. Today I tell myself – foolishly, stupidly – that it is only in falling that you will let sound the language blues. ‘Who am I?’ – ‘Anon.’ – ‘Who am I?’ – ‘The one in whom language lets sing what cannot be sung.’

His voice wanders in itself. For me – I’m not thinking of anyone else. Just for me does it exert this fascination. And this ‘for me’ is the cause of my own wandering in myself. I follow him; I search for a discography, I look out for his CDs: he has been everywhere, travelled everywhere, and so must I.

Does he know what his voice becomes? Is he, too, fascinated by the ‘itself’ of his voice, his voice itself? Perhaps there are singers fascinated by their own voices. Who seek only to follow it, to find songs that best suit its wandering. Who from their own labels to record their own songs, who travel everywhere, to the four corners of the world so that it can wander yet further. I owe this to my voice. I owe everything to my voice, for who am I apart from my singing?

Then the singer, like the listener, is set back from his voice. It is not his. He belongs to his voice; it is his ventriloquist. Puppet, how will you ever be capable of the voice you were given? But to whom is it given, this gift? Only to itself, and to its wandering. The voice is already lost, the gift given to itself somewhere far away from you. Now you, like me, are only a listener. You like, me, are the dummy of the voice.

Three dummies of this kind: Will Oldham, who falls short of his voice in serious joy, seeking out collaborative friendships; Chan Marshall, who falls short of it in hazy bewilderment, who can scarcely let herself sing one song in an hour’s performance; Bill Callahan, who wants to be alone to fall short of his voice, letting it echo back to him in empty rooms.

Voice of stone, voice of the earth: to sing is to lose the capacity to sing; to listen to lose the ability to hear.

My voice? Yours? Not even that. A keening raised to the sky, like the shepherdess’ cries in The Sacrifice, indiscernible at first from bird song. I tell myself that bird song is innocent, it does not suffer. Like water in water, immanent, it is unbroken joy. Generation succeeds generation in the fields, in the forests – but what happens when a voice is torn from the natural immediacy? A new voice keens, but a voice destined to suffer – a voice fitted to grief, ready for it.

But whose grief? Whose malaise? It is not that it is impossible to sing joyfully, but that joy always bears grief at its back. It suffers itself, the song, in the singer. Suffers and is thereby detached from everything but itself. Detached – but for all that, it does not come to itself.

Suffering lost in itself, the song lost in the song: keening sounds over the plain.

Faith: she would like to sing with no particular voice, the voice of everyone, the voice of no one. Would like to sing, not for everyone, but in place of everyone. To sing, and to sing of grief and what is lost, not to assuage it, but to accompany it. Not to wipe tears away but to weep with them. To weep for their weeping, for the fact of their tears: how is it she divides loss from itself? How is it she lets pain suffer itself in her singing?

Give grief to itself. Lift suffering from any particular sufferer. Let it become the destiny of no one, let it lift itself to the sky like the aurora borealis. Pain is absolute. Suffering is in the ice and in sky.

You Are Free: but from what does she free us? She abandons pain to itself; she gives grief to grief. Freedom: lift pain to become the whole sky. Lift it, let it flash to itself above the sufferer.

Abandon singing to itself, let it sing. Abandon the voice to itself. Why is it only in the act of abandonment that singing is given? Why only then, after abandonment, does it sing and sing of itself?

‘Itself’: in what corridors is it lost? In what dream? Because it seems to dream of itself. Seems to be lost in itself, with a reverb, now, that is internal to voice – it is not a treatment, but belongs to it already, as though it were always far away, even from he who has been given it. Far away: and with what does it echo? Where has it travelled, this voice that is as old as time?

Reverb before reverb, abandonment: Jason Molina’s voice. How can he entrust his voice to itself? How to give it to itself so that it can give singing in turn?

1. Beasts fear them, and the gods shun them. Is this why the Sirens sing out to passing ships from their island? By their song, they would reach the others, like them, who are feared and shunned. Why then do they seek to kill them – why do they try to wreck their ships on the rocky shore of their island?

I think Odysseus learned their secret, he who refused, like the others, to plug his ears with wax. Lashed to the mast of his ship, he endured what his sailors could not, and heard the Sirens sing of the pain of their immortality, and knew why they cried out to the only ones, like them, who were exiled from both nature and Olympus.

For the Sirens, death was a homecoming, the return to what could not live. How to discover the path home? In their loneliness, their exile, they sought to destroy the ones whose pain could come to term.

Agony. Odysseus cried out, and joined his cry to theirs. They fell silent. What had they heard: that the ones who could die also endured the inability to die, that this mortal, was, like them, immortal. For doesn’t pain bear with it the impossibility of pain’s cessation? Isn’t the agony of dying what does not cease to die?

2. His cry is also their song, and their song what cries out in all human pain.

3. There is pain, there is singing: how to speak of a pain that will not end, and a singing that does not cease?

It is not by our relation to death that we retrieve our humanity, but by our relation to pain. Relation? The shattering of relation. Death turned outside itself and wandering without cease. What is song but the Sirens’ song, that seeks a term for the indeterminable, to exchange immortality for death?

Orpheus hardly hears himself singing; he sings and that is all. The forest falls silent when he sings; the gods pause, the beasts listen. And of what does he sing? Of gods, I imagine, of beasts, of the forest in which he wanders. Strange doubling – a song of the forest in the forest. Song that passes through words. Isn’t that what makes the gods pause, and the beasts? Here is a human being – here, and perhaps for the first time, is music.

Music that must pass through words, music that is never yet itself, that is given only as it lets language tremble. Orpheus is the first singer, the first musician. But of what does he bring to song, even as he sings of gods, of beasts? What is it that doubles itself by his song?

For Nietzsche, notes Schmidt, music has a precedence over language; only the language of tragedy approximates the song that surges before speech. In music, ‘pain is pronounced holy’; music is the ‘language of the will in its immediacy’. And in the preface he appends to The Birth of Tragedy many years after its publication, doesn’t he regret that his book did not sing?

How to make Dionysian art intelligible? ‘Through the wonderful significance of music dissonance‘. Dissonance, pain: is music, for Nietzsche, the language of the birds and beasts? Is it a language of the gods? Perhaps it is only to tragedy that it answers, in a dissonance that returns to tear harmony apart.

Orpheus sings. There is pain in the forests; birds die, beasts die, but do they sing of their pain? And the gods – what do they know of shattered harmony? Orpheus sings of gods and beasts, but he sings as one who is neither, who knows for the first time, the pain of existence. But a pain, now, of the tearing apart of natural harmony.

The beasts stir, the gods at the edge of heaven listen with awe: who is this new being whose existence is pain? From whence comes the song that tears apart all joy?

Orpheus, after Eurydice was sent back to Hades a second time, lost himself in loss. He went back to the forests with his harp, singing as he wept, weeping as he sang. But why then did the Naiads who should have pitied him tear him apart? Why did he not move them to tears of their own, he who had lost his beloved twice over?

But who can bear the limitlessness of suffering? Who but wants to put an end to grief? They fell upon him and tear him apart, throwing his remains into the river. It is said that his head continued to sing as it disappeared into the waves, and that it sings yet.

Each singer is Orpheus, each the one the Maenads tear apart. To sing, to suffer: equivalents, one and the same. That is the tautology of song. But singing breaks itself from singing; it searches for its term. Singing is not always the infinite; the ‘to sing’ delimits itself in the ‘I sing’. But why is it I imagine that Orpheus’s head sings regardless, and that the limit always quivers with the limitless?

1. Alone, but not to be alone. Alone, separate, like a god or a beast, but only to welcome the becoming-god, the becoming-beast. To become other, and not like yourself. Then solitude is not solipsism. Solitude is the waiting to alter. Waiting, forgetting: who will I become? What names will pass across me? What are the words with which I might sing?

Some singers know this waiting, this solitude, and write of it in their lyrics. Some seek to stage the solitude of singing as it is not possessed. Unpossessed, dispossessing, how to mark in words what voids words? How to sing in solitude of what destroys solitude?

Sing of departure. Sing of the exit across land and sea. Let the words take leave. This is what Will Oldham sings on Days in the Wake. The name of the album came late to him. It was issued as The Palace Brothers, and with a blurry photo on the cover. But then Will Oldham understood: it was by this album that he had announced his leavetaking.

He was going. He had gone. No: there was going as there was singing. Sometimes, on these songs which Will Oldham sang in his kitchen and recorded onto tape, you can hear the thunder rolling outside. But in truth, the thunder is in the music also: a thundering silence that says nothing, means nothing, and simply rolls in itself.

Listen with your other ears and you too might become a beast, or a god. The solitude of singing unlocks your listener’s solitude. Listen – be alone, and not with yourself. Become beast, become god. Depart, across the land and sea.

2. It is not that the song waits to be sung. Singing is nowhere than in his singing, the singer. And as it reaches you, as it comes to you. Become god, become beast: how is it that it never stops arriving, that singing is never completed? And how is it that it never seems to begin, but was always there, set back in the song and the singer, and set back in you as listener, as though the song had only rejoined itself as there was singing and there was listening?

A relation accomplished as it undoes its terms. Not the singer, nor the listener, but both undone by way of singing, of listening. The singer is nothing but singing, the listener listening, and isn’t it the case that a kind of substitution occurs. The singer sings for everyone, like Kafka’s Josephine. Sings and substitutes for the each member of an eternal people. Each, pausing in their work, becomes the singer who sings in the song, and by means of substitution. Each, substituted by singing, pauses in that substitution.

And what of the singer? Josephine becomes vainglorious; she wants fame, to be exalted. Why doesn’t she understand that she can sing only because she is exactly like the others, and that she is only a listener, and to the singing she is allowed to sing? A listener, because the song is never hers, because it always surprises her, as it comes without allowing her to stand at its origin.

Substitution, then – the one becomes the other. Or, each time, listener become singer and singer listener – a crossover, a becoming-other in each case.

3. What elects the singer? How has he been separated from the others? Because he waits, because he is prepared to wait. He is no different from anyone. Perhaps he is more similar to anyone than anyone. Shakespeare was unlike everyone because he was like everyone (Borges). More similar, closer to no-one at all, that is to say, to anyone, to everyone, the indifferent man of the streets. But he waits. He endures on the streets, walking among others. He is everyone, as he passes between everyone. And he waits, forgetting everything but everything.

What elects the listener? Who comes forward in him to listen? Who takes his place? He waits for one who has likewise waited. Has waited all his life to hear – this song. His song. But why this song? Why does it become a destiny? Why does it set back waiting in himself, waiting become the listener for which he always waited. I have heard it at last, this is the song of songs – but why this song, and why his election?

1. Nonchalance of the song: it is only when it does not matter that it comes to matter. Only when it is Josephine’s song, the piping of one mouse among others that it attains itself. I could have sung that. Anyone could have sung it. No: anyone sings it in her place, the singer’s. It is anyone singing. Anyone – no one: ignored song, song without importance, that as though sings to itself.

Josephine, for her part, wants special treatment, to be relieved from her tasks. She confuses herself with the source of the song. And indeed, as Kafka’s narrator tells us, Josephine will soon be forgotten in the life of the mousefolk. She is no one at all; she is everyone; her piping is not distinct from that of anyone else.

Obscurity: the singer sings to herself. And not even that. The singer sings – not even that. There is singing, and the surprise that there is singing, and that is all. No singer beneath singer. And no song. Singing, and out over 70,000 fathoms. Out without support, like Kierkegaard’s faithful. On its own, unaccompanied: singing.

2. Bill Callahan in a darkened room writing songs and practicing guitar, and everywhere silence. Bill Callahan alone, but only to be alone with the solitude of a voice that is not his. 

Solitude of the voice. The man content to live alone, says Aristotle, must be a god or a beast. Then the voice is that of a god, a beast. Ventriloquise it, wait that it comes to you to be spoken. A god, a beast – but one without a voice, that needs and borrows yours. And this is why the voice, for all its nonchalance calls on you, Bill Callahan, to live itself. To coincide with itself. It needs you, which is why you wait all day in the darkness.

How to live the fate of such a voice? For what does it ask you? That you become all voice, that the voice is only you. Occupied, who is it that sings in your place? It is not that Bill Callahan wants solitude, not all the time. He needs it. Needs it to welcome the solitude of singing. To let singing attain its solitude, to limit itself by taking his voice, to unlimit it by dispersing it.

All day, waiting in a darkened room. It’s autumn now. Summer passed in darkness. In a couple of weeks, he’s out on the road again. And until then? Bill Callahan waits. Waits until waiting flattens itself out and lies stretched beneath the sky. When will it come? When will its solitude unravel his?

3. Singer, you might tell yourself you are doing God’s work; that it’s God who sings, who lifts your voice. Faith is your refuge – but but what shelter can it offer when the voice is also the dissolution of God, when faith fails in its leap, when it is only falling? No one sings, not God. Faith – but in nothing, and held by no one.

Fear of your own voice, fear of singing: to what fate have you been elected? How to live the song?

Sometimes I imagine the performer to stand in the same relationship to the song as the listener, that they were joined in amazement that there is a song at all, that there can be singing. In one way, this is ridiculous: the singer was capable of singing; it lay in his powers; his prowess is witness to years of practice, his song to his patient songwriting: and isn’t this why we go to hear him play?

But there is also a way in which the performance sets itself back from that prowess, that to sing is also to enter a state of grace. The singer leans back into the song; the song bears him, this is the surprise. As though it were necessary to be weak to perform. As though one had to fall into the arms of the song, to receive what one cannot achieve by oneself.

Further still: who sings? Is it me – is it the ‘I’, or does the first person, singing, dissolve into the third, does ‘I sing’ become ‘he sings’, and the ‘he’ become the impersonal ‘it’, the dummy subject of phrases like ‘it is raining’. It is raining: but what rains? There is raining, there is singing: it is the infinitive that comes forward when the singer falls into the arms of the song. The infinitive that unlimits itself for there to be song. That gives itself so that there might be the singing of a song.

I also tell myself this can be heard only very early in a singer’s career, or very late. Early, like the first albums by the Palace Brothers, or late, as I thought I heard it listening to Nina Simone’s final albums and Sinatra’s Watertown with friends the other night. Late style: the song worn away. Late: Simone’s voice is gentle, it begins resignedly: to sing again? Must I sing again?

Frail strength – strength held out into frailty: how can we not compare this last of voices to her earlier stridency, to the strength of a voice that lifts itself from the records cut for RCA or for Colpix? But now, I think to myself – vaguely, impressionistically – the voice is as though frayed, not because it lacks any technical means (notes are held, sustained …), but because it has given up a kind of confidence.

Perhaps this is also because she covers songs from Sinatra’s A Man Alone, and even adopts something of his style. Sinatra’s is almost always a performance, and those performances are marvellous, but hearing his strained voice on Watertown – or is it that his straining lets itself be heard there – the persona he adopts there is frayed.

Who is he supposed to be? A man whose wife has left him to go to New York. A man alone in the sticks, in Watertown, with two sons to bring up: a song cycle written especially for Sinatra. But the voice is frayed; it is not what it was, even on Cycles, a couple of years earlier, or September of My Years. Sensing this, Sinatra was reluctant to promote the album.

But isn’t the miracle that he could sing at all? That he could sing, or that there was singing, and he could fall back into the arms of the song, that it carried him, as it had done many times before. But with the elasticity of his voice failing him, that support was needed now more than before. Sinatra knew what he needed.

Frailty: he was ‘not in good voice’. Or better: his voice, strained, was not his own. Didn’t he heard what he could not sing in his own singing? Isn’t that what he knew, that the name Sinatra was stretched across the void? The same, I think, for late Simone. Who was she now? Who sang? The first person sank back into the third: the song as though sang by no one. By the no one in her, occupying her, taking her place. Who sang? Who sings?

Perhaps, I think to myself, it is only in frailty that singing reveals its condition. Late style – or early. In late song, singing knows its frailty, mourns it or is resigned to it. There is much of which I am not capable; much that I cannot do. Simone’s strength was everpresent, even in the tenderest of songs in the 60s and early 70s. And now? Sinatra’s voice loses itself from the late 60s onward.

But in early style? The surprise of being able to sing at all. To find oneself singing: thus the earliest albums recorded under the name Palace Brothers, or Palace Music by Will Oldham and others. That I can sing: this is marvellous. That there is singing: this is the impersonal strength that bears the wavering of the voice.

Ungenerous comparison: Joanna Newsom is so much the product of a creative writing school and the Conservatory. She rests in her proficiency. Early Will Oldham comes from nowhere in particular; he sings with his brothers and his friends, with only informal training. But there is singing, and that’s the surprise. There is singing – no proficiency, but risk.

Each time as for the first time: the strained voice, a voice sincere not because its bearer can be trusted, or because he sings from his heart. The voice out over 70,000 fathoms; the ‘I cannot’ in the ‘can’, where it is the song that sings itself, where it it finds itself only in falling back and being sung from that falling. Impersonal sincerity, sincerity that is those 70,000 fathoms aquiver in the song.

My strength is failing me; I have not achieved my strength: in each case, strength is at stake, and weakness sings, weakness is the unlimiting of the song.

The Fall before they became The Fall; Warsaw before Joy Division, the Devoto-fronted Buzzcocks: why is it I’m interested in those transitional moments before a band is able to harden itself into the style for which they would become famous? Because they are part of a collective ferment, the trembling of a whole city? Manchester 1976, 1977. Manchester of the first and second Sex Pistols gigs, reviewed at the time as receiving an ecstatic welcome.

Why? The crowd were ‘sussed’, said a contemporary reviewer, yet they were wild. The band were an out of tune heavy metal band doing an Alice Cooper imitation. But the singer! Johnny Rotten was everything. And Buzzcocks, supporting? Mark E. Smith, 16 years old, thought he could do better. And wasn’t that what saw The Fall make their way to the first gig, at the musicians collective? And didn’t Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner recruit Ian Curtis and then, later, the metronomic Stephen Morris after seeing Johnny Rotten sing?

Hadn’t punk already reached Manchester? But it reached it again; it happened again. Event that happens the second time – Lenin after Marx, Paul after Jesus: postpunk was punk – punk was out of synch with itself; North Mancunions, said Mark E. Smith, thought The Velvet Underground already passe. Was it truckers’ songs he was listening to instead? Can and Krautrock? Stockhausen? Devoto would revert, with Magazine, to his Eno-like ambitions, said Mark E. Smith. Pete Shelley took Buzzcocks towards the charts. And The Fall? Masterpieces, one after another – just like Joy Division.

But more interesting to me was the simmering over of the pot of Manchester that happened just as punk broke. Manchester – and Leeds – and Sheffield. Simon Reynolds covers each ‘scene’ admirably. Scenes – no, these were assemblages. Marvellous comings-together, crystallising along lines of flight. Marvellous flashings of bands for whom the city withdrew itself just enough to – what? To make, to create – what? Psychogeographic city. Phantasmagoric Manchester. Ballard’s crystal world along Deansgate.

Time: the Revelator, but what does it reveal? The oldest folk ballad, born with the world and enduring with it, which knows the destiny of all things, the long fall into oblivion. Wisdom: Gillian Welch’s voice is sung against oblivion, but not in the manner of the young Oedipus, who is headstrong and defiant. She sings, but hers is a voice like the blinded Oedipus, who, led by Antigone, looks only for a place to die.

To die, to rest: this, in the oldest ballads, is enough of a task. To find peace among things. And her voice as though comes from that afterplace – resigned, knowing death has come for her as it will come for all of us. But a voice, nevertheless, that is sung against death, which sets death back, if for a moment. It is coming; night will fall, and everything will be forgotten – that is the work of time, but meanwhile, revealed, is time’s work unworked.

Time attenuated, voided time: how is that these songs seem to drift without moving forward, which well, half-numbed from their own posthumousness? Songs not of death but of surviving death. Survival songs, but sung from death, out of it, in a voice stripped of personhood. Who are you, singer? No one at all. Who are you? No one in particular. Numbed: because they have already been stunned by death.

Does it matter that you appear or disappear? Does it matter who you are? But it is because it does not matter that it matters: revelator, what you show is one indifferent to showing. This indifference is everything. No desire to please. No ingratiation. Time says: I am the sky that opens indifferently above the world. Eye that sees without judgement, eye that has seen all, which has run up to the end of time and back. Blind eye for whom every day is the apocalypse, every day the end.

Revelator: It’s finished; it’s already finished. We will not find purchase on time. Where Gillian Welch’s voice leans, we lean too, drawn by its indifference. Fate says with her voice, you are dead. Fate says in her calm voice: you are already dead.

We listened to music, music passed between us; it was a kind of economy: a mixtape from you, a mixtape for you, and one which circulated according to the general equivalent of the new (have you heard this? you’re not going to believe it!). Yes, music circulated – it was a gift from one to the other, but what kind of gift? What was given?

Was a mixtape a sign of my generosity to you – or of my musical perspicacity – my musical hard work, going from this record shop to that having heard this or that song on this or that obscure radio programme, or having read this or that article? Less a gift, then, than a kind of display – a show of peacock feathers: ‘this is a sign of the breadth and boldness of my taste’. But what gave itself to you, to whom my mix tape passed? My taste, yes – a sign of my prowess – but also a kind of address, for wasn’t the tape always an address, a declaration to the recipient, to the friend, a way of saying ‘here I am’?

This is unavoidable; the mixtape had a direction, it was a tape for you – even if there were more than one of you. ‘You have to hear this’: the mixtape was addressed to you. It wasn’t that I’d play you records then and there, but that I sought to reach you when I was not present. A mixtape in the post, a mixtape given just before you went (‘I made this for you’); this was a deferred sharing (‘you might like this’). Addressed to find you when I was not there.

Addressed to you? – But rather, wasn’t it to call forward a listener in you – to test you by the tape I’d made for you? Wasn’t it to draw from you one of a new people, of listeners to come? Wasn’t it to summon from you the listener who you were not yet, the one who would join me on the new shore and at the brink of a new country? I made this tape for you, yes, but only to call forward one who was waiting in you.

Who would you be, listener? One beside me, listening alongside me. We were the first listeners in the new world of which the mixtape dreamt. Listen, said the future, as it reached you in the mixtape. ‘I am coming’ said the future with the music of the mixtape. And didn’t I give you the future to receive the future in turn? Wasn’t it in expectation of another mixtape, a mixtape to come, in which the net was cast out yet further?

Celestial currency, whose coins are made of fire. Currency of fire, and the destruction of exchange value! I gave you a tape; I wanted another in return. You gave me a tape, and what did you expect from me? It was already an economy. But what happened by way of this exchange?

The future came; each time, with each tape, the future came towards us. And wasn’t this because the tape was an address, that it reached you from me just as I received a tape from you? Wasn’t this was because what was shared was received from the one who did not occupy the same level as me, who was higher, closer to the future and to the coming of the future? Just as I, for you, was likewise closer to the future and to its coming?

A double dissymmetry; a relation doubly dissymmetrical. Each time the gift came from where I could not be. Each time was given what was not in my power to give. It reached you by way of the remix of ‘Bang Zoom Let’s Go Go’. It reached you by way of that long track by Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn; it came by way of Terry Allen and The Uts. But how did it come? Via the signification of a music new to me (it was the explosion of ‘world music’ – the mid 80s) – via wild new significations? Or was it via what withheld itself from signification like the enigmatic navel of the dream?

It arrived by way of what did not signify, but waited nevertheless, watching out for me, looking for me, and then arriving, having dreamt of me, and by its dream, created me. It was the time of the great broadening – the time of WOMAD tapes and Folk Roots compilations. The music of the world waited for us; it had dreamt of us and created us; we were the people of a new world, a world that had not quite arrived, we stood at the head of the waters. Or was it that what reached us was more bare and more simple; that what came had nothing to do with breadth or range, of a music that was as yet unfamiliar (the instruments of Sardinia, the throat song from Tuva …), but what passed by way of that music and its unfamiliar signs?

Dreadful times: corporate buyouts, Linndrums, the triumph of the mediocre. Not yet the niche marketing that would allow performers with smaller audiences to survive. Not yet the ’boutique artist’; only big sellers and negligible sellers. Wasn’t it against this backdrop that we listened – and the backdrop of industrial strife and unemployment, of the completion of a new, vile order? Wasn’t it in terms of this backdrop that the future was intelligible? Non-signification: withdrawal, refusal. What mattered was that music said, ‘I would prefer not to’.The sixth-formers were listening to Level 42, the record player in the common room spun No Jacket Required. Evil times; but there were mixtapes –

Waiting for us, ahead of us, there was other music. Our friendship was only the circuit of this music, its network and we were the disobedient cells through which it spread like cancer. Yes, that was how the future arrived. First music, then friendship. First music, and then the double dissymmetry of friendship. That was how it came, the future: as refusal, and as the proliferation of refusal.

What was music without friendship? Friendship was its life; it required it, summoning a people around its newness. We didn’t know what it meant. What was this music? First of all, withdrawal. First of all it affirmed refusal. In the signs by which it circulated, there was the non-signifying, the ‘there is’ of music; its push, its novelty. The ‘there is’, the navel of the dream by which it dreamt us into existence, its audience. We were the preservers and sustainers of the work. Our friendship was its sustenance; it was the ark in which the future was carried.

First music, then friendship. First refusal, and then the friendship sustained by refusal. Music dreamt and gave birth to us. Music dreamt and laid out our world. And didn’t it, too, lay out the earth beneath the world? Didn’t it lay out the soil of the new country from which each of us rose like Adams and Eves? We knew ourselves by the music of refusal and by the mixtapes of refusal. We knew and confirmed our knowledge by way of mixtapes, currency of the new Eden. And each, for the other, was closer to the future than we were. And each friend was higher than the other, as we, for the others, were higher than them. By the tapes that reached us did we know the future. By those tapes was the future coming.

The old philosophical dream: to purge language of song to allow language to stand upright. But then what of pure music? Pure seduction, one might suppose, pure seductiveness: the song of being and not that which interrupts being. But this is interesting: the song of being – the song is linked not to the cosmos (the order of the world, kosmos), but what, for Levinas, destroys that order and to which the cosmic is always exposed. The stars are blown out; a blank dark sky: this is the sky above music, pure music (Levinas mentions Xenakis – irony that the composer lost half his face to war) as also above disaster.

Ultimately, music, for him, gives way to the arhhythmical chaos of what he calls the il y a: the ‘there is’ of being, without reason, without fate, which permits the human being no tragic grandeur. Irrecuperable experiences – those which deprive the one who endures them of herself, her grasp upon herself, that minimal reflexivity which would permit her to remember what has happened. Blank-eyed, wandering, she would be like the Muselmanner (racist epiphet) of whom Levi writes (and Agamben after him): the living dead, those alive, barely alive, and not at all for themselves, in their death.

Those Blanchot, reading Antelme, will call the Other, who have fallen below the level of need. Levinas is horrified by song, by music, by the singing of language because it seems to him to be linked to the cosmic order which periodically returns each to the horror of living death. And for Blanchot? ‘Perhaps we know the disaster by other, joyful names’. It is in joy we can know that night in which the stars are blown out. That same night of which he writes in the famous ‘primal scene’ at the heart of The Writing of the Disaster (The Disaster Writes – another translation of the title).

Is there what could be called the night of song? That night to which the song attunes itself and lets sing? For Heidegger, there might be a song around whose singing a people might form. A people attuned by this singing and the sacred precinct in which it is sung – by this singing and the temple that is its locus, that temple with the statue of a god at its heart. What, though, of a song which would scatter a  people? The song of their undoing and scattering by the four winds? Song of the obscure and of the movement of obscurity. Such are the songs, perhaps, of The Palace Brothers’ Days in the Wake (perhaps; perhaps not).

Adorno’s famous dictum, that it will have been impossible to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz can perhaps be understood in a different sense. If it is implicit to the cosmic, to the order of the cosmos, that Auschwitz could return (the return of all horrors), then we are never after Auschwitz – never, that is, the inheritors of an event that would be absolute singular and removed from all other events. This is perhaps what Levinas would write; and he would also write of the relation to the Other as that which would break the dominion of being. What if that claim is unconvincing? What if it is, rather, the relation to the unknown as it interrupts the reflexivity inherent in being as it might be revealed, for example, in song, in music, or more broadly in art?

This may seem mysterious. What form what this interruption take? That which would permit the listener, the participant at the performance to return to herself. Then would the Dionysian, the orgiastic, the ecstatic be the model for the interruption of being? Perhaps. Now think of Klossowski, and of his account of the Eternal Return. To will the Eternal Return is to be altered at the moment of willing. You change even as you affirm the Eternal Return. A threshold is crossed; you are no longer the one you were. Now think of Bataille’s atheistic mysticism – subject and object collapse each into the other; the arms of the subject are wrapped around the object not so they fuse, but that in this embrace each plunges into a kind of nothingness. I’ve put it vaguely …

But what if such ecstasies are impossible for us? What if too much has happened and there are too many horrors around us? What if ecstasy is distrusted? I have always loved that Levinas includes places unemployment among the disasters of the twentieth century at the beginning of Proper Names. What if there’s a kind of unemployment, the omnipresence of the everyday which crushes the soul once capable of ecstasy?

Once, young, I liked a lyrical music. Now, old – but I am not using these words chronologically, that is, to do with calender years – I like that music which registers a kind of crushing or contorsion. Innocence: the cosmos is open, infinitely open. Experience: confirmed over and again is the horror of the cosmos. Confirmed is war and desperation; tyranny and the impossibility of peace; suffering and corruption. Experience: open to you is only the chance of finding that niche into which you might hide yourself and hope to go unnoticed. Horror of  a world always about to fly apart. Music of age: Shostakovich, crushed Shostakovich of the 15th Symphony or the 15th String Quartet. Across that music, falling like black rain, the steadiness of horror like steady rain. Falling without respite – horror after horror. Until all there is of music is the dark body which bears the horror. Until music is only that surface across which horror falls, calm rain.

There is a music which knows of the limits of the cosmic. Which endures the horrors that have happened and the horrors that are to come. That spreads itself beneath a sky without stars, in which the stars have been blown out. What, then, of Klossowski? What of that ecstasy that is not the ecstasy of the Same? Bataille cycled past the bloated corpses of horses in the ravaged countryside. Blanchot writes of the same ravagement which was due not to the forces of natural destruction, but of a retreating army. He was put up against the wall to be shot; he was not shot, but he learnt that others, the sons of local farmers had been killed that day. He was saved, he wondered to himself, because he was taken to be a Seigneur, an aristocrat. Thereafter it was the death of those farmer’s sons which stayed with him as though he were living his life in their place.

Marvellous that Shostakovich wrote of the death of those around him, of the murder of Jews, of the murder of Russians, of those disappeared. Their death was commemorated in vast, lugubrious symphonies which were not always devoid of joy, but in which joy was a hollow laughing, madness laughing at itself and above all the night that was the disappearance of the world. Stalin was not a natural force, a natural catastrophe but a man like any other and one who gathered around him an army of those who were likewise touched with a banal megalomania. But the possibility of Stalin is inscribed into the cosmic. Messiaen will sing of the cosmos, of the all; Shostakovich will not. It becomes impossible in him. Song laughs in him. Rossini is made to laugh in his music, laughing at itself and at the imposture that music is. Music laughs at itself, but it is weary laughter, a laughter of one crushed and one contorted.

So is Shostakovich close to the law of the cosmos. Close to it and not carried away by it. Close, crushed, even as a kind of singing lifts itself from what is crushed.

Youssou N’Dour duets with Dido. This is the ecumenicalism of the G8 concerts which marks inclusivity without implication; the Other remains Other; the ‘and’ of N’Dour  and Dido links those whose identities are supposed to remain as they are. Of course, it is N’Dour ‘s identity which is thus lost, since he is included only as he is made to reduplicate rock (or pop) positions. Not a simple tokenism, this ‘and’ is not yet the ‘and’ of becoming, where the being of the terms of the relation are themselves wagered. Nothing is played for and nothing won; everything remains the same and on the plane of the same. This only confirms the idea of the G8 which still exclude the fearsome (to the West) multitudes of China and India, countries whose GDP is, I think, already higher than some of those within the G8. Always the ‘and’ in which nothing is wagered. Always the fear of hybridisation and the multiple. ‘They’ are to be kept safely ‘over there’ – so too is Africa presented as an undifferentiated morass, the great basket-case.

In the film Rock School, Jack Black’s character says to the children he is teaching to assume ‘rock positions’. And so they assume them, having learnt rock is not a matter of aptitude but of  attitude. For the dinosaur rock stars of the G8 concerts, it is also a question of rock positions, of those topoi which reassure the stars and their audience that rock is being done. Rock stars keep their part of the bargain; for their part, the audience lift lit lighters into the air.

Against the blandness of corporate rock, there is the counter-temptation to affirm some poor otherness – to require, say, of Cuban music that it purge itself from hip hop, to require the Other to parade before us in her Otherness. Simple exoticism and a refusal of the relations which exist between the Others and ourselves gives us an ‘and’ which links pre-defined terms. But an ‘and’ which implicates each term, a Cuban hip hop born such that Cuba and hip hop are each remade …

I listen to Yat-Kha’s Re-Covers, which contains covers of songs from the rock canon performed by a Russian throat-singer. H., who lent it to me, tells me the singer considers this technique as analogous to a kind of vocoder – part of a repetoire of techniques used not to transform this music into the pure Other, entertaining exotica (entertaining in its exoticness; the tribe dancing before the Queen), nor even to return to us (the ‘West’) in a new form. Performed, rather, out of the love of a canon which repeats what was in those songs revolutionary (the singer of Yat-Kha speaks, apparently, of albums difficult to find in Soviet Russia, of mounting cardboard LP sleeves on his mantlepiece) in the first place not for us but for anyone.

Does the same happen with Cat Power’s Covers? She is an American exotic, rare plant indulged enough to demand that lights be turned on over the audience and that the stage become dark, that she can whoop and holler for an hour rather than play any songs. The audience forgive her. Their secret pleasure: here is Madness paraded before them. Just as Gide and others went to see Artaud. Fortunately, like Artaud, Chan Marshall (Cat Power) is more than that.

Will Oldham was first understood as a kind of savant – the backwoods idiot who, like the banjo-player of Deliverance, was yet able to play a stirring music. When he was revealed not to be, some said he was only an actor (the same was said of Gillian Welch); Will Oldham had been exposed. Only the mask he wore then, at the time of ‘The Ohio River Boat Song’ was dropped almost straightaway; the tinny Days in the Wake was followed by Viva Last Blues, an album of exuberant joy.

Will Oldham wears many masks because he knows there are only masks. No secret is hidden beneath them. Just as The Ramones only wanted a hit (according to H.), there was no calculation behind any of Will Oldham’s transformations. So too with Greatest Palace Hits, recorded under the name of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. Listening to it again now, an album in which Will Oldham covers songs by his earlier incarnations, Palace Music, Palace Brothers etc., I hear not betrayal but its opposite: he refuses to play the Other for us. Refuses, then, the consolation of that distance which would allow him to assume either rock positions or the anti-rock of the pure exotic (Cat Power at All Tomorrow’s Parties last year).

In interviews, Will Oldham will reminisce about those concerts where audience would sleep alongside performers, and where bands would play in the context of a whole day where they would mingle, not as performers, with those who came to listen to them. Big Black, Black Flag: these were Will Oldham’s forebears. One cannot use the word punk for these bands directly, perhaps. But punk was reborn with them just as it was reborn with Will Oldham. But what is born? What is named by punk that must be linked to that name and not to another? Or is the punk a non-synonymous substitution for other words for what can be called new in music and elsewhere?

Banal reflection: music is often presented as the exotic Other of philosophy. It can appear as despised formlessness or as inspired formlessness; one position is the opposite of the other. It can be deployed as a metaphor of the all, the harmonia of a hidden order, or as the chaos of the all, the breaking apart of things and their words. No surprise that for Heidegger, it is poetry which still holds the position of highest art. That, I think, because it is in words that being (earth) presses forward; that what comes to us does so as to reveal the weight, the materiality of words which are otherwise too quickly volatilised in the circuits of what are taken too quickly to be the circuits of communication.

The poet’s cliche: words are the worn-out coins that call for the new gold standard, the poem, which will return words to their worth, drawing them back into that relation with things which might give us the world or a new worlding of the world. But what of music – ‘pure’ wordless music, music without programme notes? Too formless. Unless it is deployed – the philosopher’s temptation – as a word for the sonorous qualities of language itself, of the rhythm or the weight of words. Music is thus made to overflow itself, irrigating the fields of the philosopher, appearing as it is withheld, a name for the ever-fertile earth from which everything might grow.

One might fear it is tamed in this way – that music disappears becoming, once again, pure Other, close to the ineffable, to that of which nothing can be said. But surely music must admit of metaphorisation. Surely it must allow itself to be transported so that it can spoken of and written about in a manner which is not completely meaningless. But surely, too, there must be an irreducible content to music, something which resists this transportation and remains resolutely non-discursive. Perhaps it is that music both gives itself to meaning and withdraws from it, that music is both light and anti-light, that it is light and also that darkness which can be seen in light.

Between the rock position and the abandonment of rock positions, between the same and the exotic other, between sensibility and signification music refuses itself to us. It means, but it also preserves meaninglessness within meaning. It is thus that it pushes forward. Aesthetics, the word, has sonorousness as its root (aisthesis – aio, to hear, aemi, aistho, to breathe, exhale; the Latin audio). Could it be that music is common to all the arts (that the Muse of music is present for each of the Muses)? Could this be a way of understanding once again the primacy of music over the other arts? Or is simply to strip music of itself, to stop listening, or to listen only with the soul’s ears (like the soul’s eyes in Plato), hearing only form, only patterns and not the grain of the voice, its timbre and its sonorousness?

How to think music not as a term of a relation (music and us) but as a name for the unknown pole of that relation (the relation to music as the the relation to the unknown, the inexpressible)? And how to do so without letting music itself, the ‘there is music’ to disappear?

Nearly the last termly duties discharged, strange feeling as the campus empties as if this were also an emptying of my own heart. The opening of summer (though it is unsummery today): a day spent with books all around me. But a heart that is empty because I have no strong project to which to bind myself.

I cast about rather aimlessly, filling my notebook: should I write on Homer, song and the Greeks? I wonder, coming across some passages I had forgotten and which I’ll rewrite soon, I think, when I’m in the mood – or should I begin with Nancy’s reflections on music in The Sense of the World? Neither.

I look through my own books, wondering how I can discover a book over to music. Phrases come: the ‘there is’ of music, music as negative absolute, the usual stuff. But this won’t do either. I want a clean break with the past, a new leap. But it has to be a leap to something vast and new. Then the phrase comes: cosmic American music. Of course: I can write on kosmos, world, and on the phenomenological notion of world as well as its Deleuzian sense.

I take a break and go for a walk, half pleased with myself but still anxious because I haven’t really made a beginning. There’s Gram Parsons, of course, I think to myself, but shouldn’t I write about Sun-Ra – and what about Funkadelic? What about Albert Ayler and Alice Coltrane? Within twenty minutes or so the project becomes too vast and encompassing. But still, I want to write about something vast, to give myself a new vista …

Then, walking along Northumbria Avenue, the revelation: write on a fragmentary cosmic American music, the flag, as it were reversed, nor Americana in that broad, expansive sense, but something broken or half formed. It becomes clear and allows me rejoin my older interests: acosmic music, the negative flag, uncelebratory, minor and near voiceless. Now I can argue that an acosmic music (but I won’t call it that!) presses forward to be heard in Will Oldham or Smog, in Cat Power without having to concern myself with the new psychedelia of The Flaming Lips (too much plenitude! Too much simple happiness!) and the difficult-to-write-about Jazz of John Coltrane and his inheritors.

What does it matter? I still feel empty. It’s the 29th of June; weeks open before me. How I will give flesh to the vision of a music without a world? A music that would correspond to a new proletariat, to the great class of those without a formative relation to work? How will it form itself inside me? Little doubt that I will have to write part of it here, if only to mark the passing days with work. To date what I write so I can look back over a week at something done.

I saw Daniel Johnston a couple of nights back, without having heard of him before. Hoss, my musical friend, introduced me to him a few days before. Listening to his recent Mark Linkous produced album gave me only some indication of what to expect. Listening to the album again after Johnston’s short performance (he played only for 30 minutes and we were lucky, for sometimes he exists the stage after 10 minutes), I realised it betrayed the simplicity of Johnston’s singing and playing: that Linkous had lost the joy of great melodies and the happy simplicity of a music which requires no ornamentation. There are albums and albums of the simple, solo Johnston, I hear, which he used to pass out by hand to whomever he thought might like them.

Later, back at H.’s flat, I saw some of Johnston’s art and read something of his biography. What struck me in particular were his pictures of Captain America in whose mouth he would insert speech bubbles. What did he make him say? I’ve forgotten, but there was a sense of apocalypse and of Captain America not as a superhero but as one who would embody all the strength and the weakness of America. Yes, all of it, and all of America’s past, reminding me of the narrator of Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’. Then I wondered whether there were celebrities who might embody all of our world in a similar sense. That night, I dreamt of celebrities who were like gods and wrote the two peculiar posts that precede this one.

In whose voice were they written? I wanted to write simply but also as though swept along by an all-powerful force. That great force which, I imagine, caught Johnston in those moments when he is able to write dozens of songs and paint, and write. I drank two cups of strong coffee and wrote prose I will regret because it will have to be defended. With whose voice was I writing? Conflation: too many voices spoke. All of them, and all at once. Conflation, too, of ideas with which I would want to stand behind and with ideas which I would not (ideas stronger and weaker than I am).

What does it matter? These voices, and this one too, in which I would write of voices, dissolve themselves into a prior swarming from which no voice can issue without assuming the mask that the condition of speech, of writing. Is it that swarming to which Daniel Johnston comes close in moments of illness? The guy from Yo La Tengo recalls visiting him in hospital; he couldn’t get a word out of him, he reports. But this is because there was too much to say rather than not enough. How many voices there are in all of us!

Hoss admired the passion of Johnston’s performance. Johnston is a big man, and performs in grey tracksuit bottoms and a white tee shirt. He props a lyric book on a high stand which makes it difficult to see his face when he sings and plays guitar. A few songs later, going upstage to play the piano with big, simple chords, Johnston retreated, Hoss noted, as if he felt more confortable at a distance from his audience. No doubt. There are stories that when he hears the words ‘more’ or ‘encore’ he climbs out of the window.

I will keep the pleasant memory of Johnston’s entrance on stage. He carried two cans of different flavoured Fanta which he propped on the piano. Later he reversed their order. Then he bent down for some minutes to get his guitar from his case, his arse turned to the audience. ‘We didn’t have to see that’, said Hoss. Johnston played his guitar clumsily, finding the chords with his fingers. But it was tremendous against his voice, his wonderful voice, so sweet and youthful. To whom should I compare it? Brian Wilson’s? Perhaps this is too lazy. And how should I write about the music itself, the songs?

Ah, but I’ve no strength today having given it all up yesterday morning. All I can remember is the elaborate cosmology Johnston has made from himself, where Caspar the friendly ghost plays an important role. Would it be possible to dream up such a cosmology of my own with celebrities in a starring role and the body of capital streaming? Perhaps this hides a desire for regression – to tell myself those fairy tales without pain. But then there is a powerful Christian inspiration in Johnston’s art where Christ would come to the crucifix as a bridegroom to his bride, in Augustine’s words, and his head does not bow but raises itself erect and with eyes open Christ welcomes his crucifixion.

I could write of John Peel, of his lugubrious wit, his modesty, his enthusiasm, of the records he played before anyone else and the artists who owe him almost everything, but I’m not sure my memories would differ from those of others in any but the most unimportant of details. And I would have missed in recording the public details of his life what was most intimate in my relationship to a man I never knew and never met but who was nevertheless a kind of friend.

I listened to him for twenty years; to mark his death is to mark an era in my life – one which, if he had not died at just 65, would have remained open, indefinite, for as long as he continued to play the music that he did.

When did I first hear him? 1984. Twenty years, then – sometimes, it is true, I did not listen for a few weeks or months, but I always came back. And even as I’d turned from listening to his show to something else, I knew he was there, that John Peel maintained himself in the opening to what was new in music. That he was there for me and for all of us, listening for us, playing records for us.

And now? His early death – twenty years too early – closes a door on the future of music. And upon that future which drew me back to those times when as an adolescent I first discovered that world of independent record labels and artists who did not deserve obscurity.

I discovered it through him and with him, John Peel – through him first of all and not through the music papers of the time, which were to susceptible to changing fashions. Now, who will play the music John Peel played? No one. There are other shows, it is true and other DJs, but none whose continuity was part of the continuity of my life and the lives of so many.

To mourn is also to mourn for yourself, for the adolescent and young adult that you were and now the man that you are. To the adolescent who is also alive in you as he was in John Peel: to the inexhaustible teenager for whom music is the opening of the new itself.

John Peel. All of us who listened to him, who listened with him, owe it to him now to listen out for our youth as it comes towards us from the future.

What gives us an performer like Chan Marshall also takes her away from us; if she seems to present in her music what echoes in response to a future that has not yet come about it is the same future which seems to withdraw her from our presence. Even she seems to feel it, which is why, perhaps, when I saw her live, she demanded the house lights be turned on and the stage lights be dimmed to blackness. I asked myself: where are you, Chan Marshall? Where are you, behind the songs you refuse to play, beyond your yelps and chatter?

I could say seeing her perform live was a disappointment – she was, as Cat Power, the performer I wanted to see more than any other at All Tomorrow’s Parties. But something else happened, which I would say was fascinating if it were not also marked by frustration and a kind of sadness: she was, I think, too close to that uncanny place from which her music seems to arrive. I remembered, watching her, the obscure piping of Kafka’s Josephine. But also I remembered Gide’s account of seeing Artaud speak at the Sorbonne: Artaud who, at that time, had already disappeared into madness.

Artaud was not as pathetic as Chan Marshall, and Josephine was not as enlivened. The audience, in the brightness of the house lights, chatted and catcalled. Chan Marshall, in the darkness – just her, I think, though there may have been another playing with her (it was too dark to see) – played only three songs in a set of one hours duration. And when she played them, they appeared in the midst of her tomfoolery, which meant their profundity was as though adrift, as if Chan Marshall were ashamed of what she had made, as though she could bear what she could sing and play only by laughing at the uncanniness to which strange genius exposed her. Her tomfoolery, then, appeared in the midst of songs which Chan Marshall was given to be able to sing, to play and this was not by chance. For what gives us her music also gives itself as the unbearable.

Chan Marshall falls below the level of her songs – how can she not? But in seeking to rise to the level of those songs, performing them, she breaks against them as against the heaven which will not admit the crows in Kafka’s aphorism. Heaven means: the impossibilty of crows. Chan Marshall’s songs mean the impossibility of Chan Marshall. Her performance: the fluttering of a crow already broken against heaven.

Slint: a hard name, suggesting stone, flint, a dark surface which reflects nothing but darkness. Is it because it refuses to reflect us that Spiderland is loved? Do we love it because it brings the unknown very close to us? Because it passes by us without allowing itself to be recognised according to the signs to which we are accustomed to classify our music?

Spiderland, enigmatic meteor, an album from the day after the last album is recorded, music from the other side of the end of time. Rigid, hard, austere, it gives us nothing we can accommodate. What words can one throw at this dark event? Unease? Disquiet? Above all, this is a sober album, it is dry, it opens a kind of desert through which it is difficult to pass.

Album without precedent and without successor.

2.

The singers of Modest Mouse and Arab Strap are burly, angry men who swig from wine bottles. They move from fearful sincerity to drunken laughter to ironic bonhomie and all the while tremble on the void. Marvellous to note thes elf-deprecating humour of the singers: men afraid to take themselves too seriously lest they usurp the void.

3.

The members of Explosions in the Sky are men interchangeable with anyone else, plaid shirted, bejeaned, and who speak between songs with simpleness and humility. Theirs is a music, unlike Slint’s, on this side of the end of time, music of the novas and shooting stars, of deafening roar that might be like the music Pythagoras claimed roared all around us.

Here is an impersonal joy, a correlate to the impersonal anguish of Slint. A music of the upper atmosphere, the fiery element where the aurora borealis burns. We were carried, the audience, into the ghostly light where the air is on fire.

Recall Schopenhauer’s account of the encounter with the artwork, which allows one to break from the world of representation to seize upon underlying Ideas (conceived Platonically). Art presents us with objects in terms of what manifests itself in them without the mediation of concepts. Ideas present themselves sensuously; they reach us when we encounter the object in a disinterested manner. But they reach us such that, in disinterested contemplation, we no longer exist as individuals with individual wills. Instead, each of us mirrors the object we encounter; we exist, in Schopenhauer’s terms, as a pure subject who is as it were merged with the contemplation of the object. This purity is such that it is without will, pain or, indeed, time. Yet it is this supra-personal subject who is capable of knowing the Ideas; the relation to the work is cognitive; there is an aesthetic knowing.

What, then, when the encounter with the work is to be understood non-cognitively – when it is not contemplation through which one would merge with the work, but when, nevertheless, there is a certain purification of the subject. Purification? A despecification, when you encounter the work not, once again, as a detached ‘I with a personal will, but as the impersonal ‘it’ – the ‘il’ without attributes whom the work reaches because it bypasses every attribute. The ‘il’? Could I write here, less obscurely, of the body? Yes, so long as this suggests the non-cognitive locus of an affect, the open space into which the song is received (I am thinking of the music of (Smog), Will Oldham, Cat Power). And as long as the affect is no longer bound to Ideas nor to knowledge, but their inverse: the matter that is without form, the unruly element which escapes Idea and representation. And then, finally, there is no mirroring here, unless there is a mirror that allows you to see not you but the darkness of your body as it joins the body of a reserve without form, without Idea.

But then remember the condition of music for Schopenhauer: it does not represent an Idea but presents the transpersonal cosmic Will itself, in all its gradations. Thus, the material part of the Will is analogous to the ground bass, organic nature in harmony and subjectivity, spirit and feeling in melody. Now think of the affect of a song like, say, ‘Little Girl Shoes’ by (Smog): it would be towards the ground bass that the work tends, the throbbing or pulsing that is the undoing of the ‘higher’ forms (harmony, melody) – or perhaps the background against which the ‘higher’ forms unfold. Better still, perhaps: the song emerges in the struggle of the ‘higher’ forms against the lower – such that, with some music, matter, unruly matter is as it there, rumbling even as the voice, the guitar seems to have left it behind. Then the ground bass is the rumbling within music: the barely musical drone in which harmony, melody threaten to disappear.

The Will: is this the right word? But it presses nowhere and it cannot be unified. Think of it instead as the outside, scattered in uncountable multiplicity, of the arrhythmia which has not yet gathered itself into a pattern. And the ground bass? It is the rumbling of that place in which the world tears itself apart.

How can I write of Low’s Secret Name? I have tried many times, if only to have done with the claim it has upon me (ridiculous dream!) For are there not those works which frighten because they cannot be determined – more, because, listening to them, they begin to dissolve the bond through which you are bound to yourself? Who listens? Not me – but something in me, far from me. Secret Name summons the one who is without name within me. Within me but also outside me. Who listens? But there is no name for the nameless. Which is why I always fail to begin to write about Low.

Let’s say you are sick of a piece of music you have just heard. Dream, instead, of a kind of destruction that would lead harmony, melody, themes, to their ruin. Not elaborating them in the manner of Bach with King Frederick II’s theme (The Musical Offering). No – a battle needs to be fought. Sometimes a movement towards exhaustion is necessary – a theme must be run into the ground. Repeating it over and over again. Think of The Fall, or of Smog’s Rain on Lens. Something is being destroyed. The ‘substance’ of the work: an old form, a popular form. There is violence done to the ‘figure’ – to melody, rhyme and metre – without doing away with them entirely. This is not free improvisation. Destruction: lead the work to the point where it affirms its own materiality. When it affirms the matter from which it is born and reborn. Where it affirms its rhythmicality, its sonority, the nudity of music …

I have in mind the rhythmic composers – the early Stravinsky, Prokofiev…. Scriabin as the third piano concerto becomes pointillist – little dabs of music. Then Miles Davis’s polyrhythms. Then The Fall, with repetition, ceaseless repetition (Slags, Slates …) And sonority? I have written of this before. Yes, Berlioz is the composer of ‘pure’ sound. But he has not approached resonance. Resonance does not lie, as it were, at the end of his work.

Still this is too simple. What about irony, satire – Shostakovich’s terrible humour. So cold – it is hateful, even. And what does it hate? Itself. It hates what it is and yet it continues, laughing at itself, shaking with laughter through and through. Torn apart – nearly – by its own laughter. Then think of Bataille’s laughter which resounds through On Nietzsche, Guilty, Inner Experience … these books are lightning-struck.

Then there is the breaking apart of melancholy, loss. Eloge de l’amour. And isn’t Nostalghia a broken film – wonderful because of its monotony? Tarkovsky’s honesty saves everything he does from parable (except for one or two places … why does he stage the sacrifice in the Roman square as a dream? – it spoils the film, it’s horrible) And then the 15th String Quartet by Shostakovich: flakes of sound. Adagio follows adagio all the way to silence.

What I am trying to formulate: a typology of destruction. Of hatred in the arts. Of a destruction that occurs as the work. Not the serenity of Rothko, say, not the heroism of Newman. Not the purity of Pärt. – No it must be a work that devours what we receive as a work. I’m tired of abstract art, if I can put it that crudely. Tired of decoration and wallpaper. Where is the drama? Where is the intensity of affect? – This can be rapturous or lugubrious. An ecstasy that is joyful or solemn. It is intensity alone which sets it apart.

Cat Power: I associate Chan Marshall with a gift, a giving. She takes songs, very familiar songs by The Rolling Stones, Procol Harum and then strips them of their familiarity. No longer, then, is ‘Satisfaction’ part of the unfolding of the Rolling Stones’ career; no longer is it part of that endlessly rehearsed story about the ‘glimmer twins’, about heroin and Marianne Faithful. Chan Marshall has disclosed what, in that song, join itself to an impersonal force.

Is it appropriate to observe an asceticism in her work? It becomes simpler, but not monotonous – do not think she reduces songs to the same mood. Nor is it a matter of imposing a style – her style – upon the songs she covers. Chan Marshall holds these songs, these too familiar songs, into the draft of the outside. They become no-one’s songs. And, in that moment, they are able to be touched, in the great fragility of her performance, as a spider’s web is touched by the wind. They bear what they could only bear if they were allowed to become as thin and as delicate as the strands of a web.

I hardly dare write of her own songs. No, I must stop here, out of discretion.