I was going to say that every once in a while some new, good music is stumbled upon. I feel like words are becoming more ascetic with every key typed. Spanish sampler-musician El Guincho (as described on that page) resembles Os Mutantes and Animal Collective, but more importantly it feels like some doped-up dub music from the late nineties (De Facto, anyone?). Speaking of At the Drive-In offshoots, I saw the Mars Volta a few years back, you know, when the Mars Volta was the band to like, wait for, and then go see, and they opened with an invisible deejay (probably a laptop computer) spinning some beat-heavy dub tracks.
Every time I find a band that can be effectively written to (preferably writing of critical import), that means there is enough substance in the beat for it to weave in and out of my consciousness, which is this strange semi-emotive functionalism that is often overshadowed by the ulterior, predominant focus that many place upon music: the emotive representation.
Sometimes what you feel when you listen to the music is not the point. Sometimes it’s what you don’t feel, or do not need or do not want to know you feel.
Two other bands that achieve this stream of consciousness escapism focus are Lightning Bolt, Boris (new album recently released and wonderful) and Melt Banana, whose sheer energy, regardless of distortion levels, transforms itself into a subconscious drone that is, strictly put, a wall of pleasant, black-hole noise, rather than songs based around melodic sequences.
On the other hand, sometimes art is most importantly revolved around concern for direct emotional reaction:
(Click this rendition of Leda and the Swan to visit W. B. Yeats’s phenomenal poem)
Click here for more haunting pictures by Fred Einaudi (thanks to www.reddit.com).
I first read the Yeats poem “Leda and the Swan” about a year ago for a British Literature course. Jeff had been obsessed over Yeats for a good amount of time by that point (he too was in the class), so it was no surprise when he did a stunning presentation on the work. The symbolism and mythology in many of the Yeats poems I read took me from the World War I British poets, lead me quickly past T. S. Eliot (thank goodness for then, but he’s not so bad to read now, I suppose) toward the complexities of Pound (that were unfortunately beyond me at the time–yes, I’m talking about the Cantos), and the crypticism of Joyce. Ultimately I lead down the road to William Carlos Williams, and ultimately bridged my attractions to Kenneth Rexroth (who coincided well with my aged love for both Richard Brautigan and Philip Whalen. The work of both of these latter “modernist” poets I find to be the most beneficial where my own vernacular poetry is concerned.
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