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A Minor Appreciation - Part 1
Would the sound of our times be chimney-smoked chorales of
thunderous nuclear bombs, roaring a doomed acoustic testimony of humanity’s
self-destructive instincts?
Will this sound be a polished portion of a sacred lie about
civility and progress, about man’s overtures of victory over his own vices?
When bombs and rifle serenades are far too familiar to many
a war-torn country and home, street wars and economic suicides are a lyric of
our age of decay of course, and music must provide the melancholy soundtrack
and The Irrational Library’s latest offering is that score that settles the
score for the under-scored.
Machines are turning everyone into freeloaders and new-age
hobos, a neo-bohemianism emerging on the fringes of a decaying bourgeoisie.
Cults of altruism are going beyond tree-hugging, where man
no longer saves trees but himself from fires consuming dust, avoiding dancing
in radioactive rain.
But when all is said and done in closet-revolutions, what
will be the final din at the back of a skull when the iron curtain falls on the
rot of social super-structures?
It is when Joshua and his tribe sings walls to the ground,
reminding us that missile sizes are vicarious armor for presidential erectile
dysfunctions, that BlackLives are comedia del’arte played out in legislative
lavatories with Trumpian lyricism of racist verbiage and tragic reliefs.
Yet, in their wild and sullen art, they forge a symphony of
the discordant whine of today’s eternal wail unto forbidden gods and glamorous
demons of a shadow world.
And I am left to wonder, is Haarlem yet another ghetto
haunted by a million of Whitman’s ghosts or a harem for spilled egos who strip
naked before museum vaults and library entrances?
The long standing tradition of music composed to poetic
lyricism has always permeated aural traditions of man for millennia, and it
does make adequate logical precedent for the ushering of an automated age to be
lauded with hymnals, even though algorithmic, which clank and his of grundged
up jazz craze of a dystopic psychology of EVERYTHING AT ALL TIMES AND ALL
THINGS AT ONCE.
At first, a video montage I was teased with from their
upcoming album simply knotted my guts, left me gnawing my last knuckle before
puking this review on screen.
And it being their second offering since the inaugural NOW
THAT WE STILL CAN, the density of a suffocating world stinks through the
monitors blurring lines like…………..
The Jewry is out in full throttle towards defending
Palestinian liberties, mongrel slogans of racist mutes sinking to the
background static of defunct TV stations.
And the many euthanized voices of the dis(eased) awaken with
each beat and bass kick that molds rock and mortar of souls, somehow into an
aged cry, old as man’s states and dynasties hauntingly climbing an invisible
ladder.
A halo on a mess, this is what the music is. Sanctification of roughed up nomads lost in a
time without time. A remix of parallel times, all stewed up into a brew
gurgling in a rusty throat of morphemic saxophone.
Resuscitated beatniks are jostling among deranged ravers and
the music of a grey bearded oracle with a band of misfits stand atop the pile
burning towards ceilings of power. The ludicrous sincerity of rhythm keeping
the paces of joy and pain in synch; is lucid.
While a Fela Kutian jinx keeps sprinkling voodoo rhythms to
a blown wind of protest, we see faces of poets who knew that they knew nothing,
the song becoming an ode of the deadened voices of dissent.
And what bizarre visual poetry of evangelized massed falling
on carpeted floors, the spectacles juxtaposed with cannibal lectures by men of
god, and deranged youths sending “A Warning To The World Of False Poets Who
Preach…”
It is this cool madness of KNOWING THAT YOU KNOW NOTHING, like
experimented fragments of a wounded dream carrying a link to a musical genetic
memory borne only by martyrs, that wails like church gossip in a preacher’s
heart? Yet what oratory is this, I ask myself, as I sit watching this montage
of outdated and out of date party-mongers in euphoric disregard.
I can only be nostalgic for future past, and through this a performance
of the first single from their upcoming album, raged and arranged to quarrel
industrial machines, I find myself waiting patiently for September 20th
2019 release of their EAATAATAO.
