The soundtrack to Grant Gee's
film on
WG Sebald (amongst other things); once again, James plays around with the themes of memory (and loss of), decay, erosion, etc. I'm still working my way through this as I'm writing, but the pieces I've listened to so far are exquisite miniatures, beautiful exercises in understatement. Repetition seems to play a key part in the process: the effect is like listening to a series of digital music-boxes: distorted, broken, muffled, the fragments of music competing with artifact noise from their original host media.
Says James: "The audio is based solely around the very earliest recordings of Franz Schubert's Wintereisse". Interestingly, me and Schubert have had a pretty fractious and unsatisfying relationship over the years, but this now makes me want to revisit his work. I've got a couple of 80's-vintage Schubert cassettes sitting around in a box somewhere that someone once gave me; maybe I should play them on the oldest / worst tape-player I can find. I wish I'd heard this before I'd ever heard any Schubert; maybe our relationship wouldn't've been so, you know, sour.
"When The Dog Days Were Drawing To An End" almost has a sort of parlour-performance cum Satie-esque feel to it; if it wasn't for the slightly disturbing vocal fragament, it might almost sound like some strange piece of Victorian or Edwardian kitsch, yet the crackle, the repetition and the emotional double-density achieved by slowing the music down slightly, distilling it, making it denser, more concentrated in some way (Austrian Romanticism gets the New Beat reduced-bpm-isation treatment)...effects some curious form of transformation, turns it into a gentle, almost glacial waltz across the wooden floorboards of a drawing-room whose curtains are closed...it's like a pair of figures on an antique music-box slowly going round and round and round - I can almost see them - her skirt spinning, twirling, carching the air, except the figures are human-sized - they're real people...and I realise that what I'm seeing is a locked memory; it's someone else's neural-circuits misfiring, their brain caught in some endless, eternally-replaying moment from their own past that is as ghastly as it is beautiful - ghastly because they're doomed to revisit it over and over again...a moment from their youth they can never quite physically touch again.
"Everything Is On The Point Of Decline" sounds - oddly - like it's been played on a Fender Rhodes; there's a strange electric resonance to the melody, a side-effect of the plug-in / software / effect used, I guess, which adds a curious sense of distance which, when combined with the stately repetition of the music and the layer of hiss that hangs overhead, makes it sound like it's being played in a snowglobe. Which then makes sense of the cover art...
"Approaching The Outer Limits Of Our Solar System" plays a similar trick with the hisssss, except - to my ears - it sounds less like a deep-space Voyager transmission and more like I'm crouched in a damp crevice under a waterfall listening to music from a nearby church. It's quite...amazing. I'm hearing Cheddar Gorge, Wookey Hole, a cascading stream on Dartmoor, Ninesprings: West Country temporal reference-points from my own past.
This music is playing tricks with my memory.
In some uncanny way, I think James is achieving a similar effect with his music to what Hirst achieved with The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living...except, maybe, it's more like: The Physical Impossibility of Being Old in the Mind of Someone Who's Not.
Available from Boomcat - or Boomkat - or whatever it's called. I've already forgotten.
