ok guys,
you managed to make me give richard james a last chance. i bought saw2
yesterday (i didn't even have to order it - that indie shop here had it!
what does that tell us about ladders that the press raises?), and i got
quite surprised. this post is (too) long, so delete it now if you think you
have to.
is this eno? no it isn't. is it? this record, apart from some chords in
D5/17/z-twig and the sounds in f2/22/tassels, doesn't remind me of previous
afx stuff i know (from order to dance 4; pw: surfin; pw: quoth single) at
all, most of which has left me impressed only very little (apart from
supremacy 2). but this record is very different, and it's very good. this
from someone who was quite suspicious from all the praise that polygon
window got, those comparisons to kraftwerk and lfo, that were not backed up
by what was on the records.
i'm not so sure how "new" all this stuff is from an artist's point of view,
my knowledge of "ambient" is limited basically to eno, but the whole makeup
of this record and the stories that are told about it combine to something
coherent that is less worthy because of its innovativeness, but for its
seriousness and dedication. the difference to eno is that as much as i
know, he was interested in a) sound experiments, broadening the field of
"music" (see also cage, john), and b) in listening experiments of the sort
satie had conceived: music not to be listened to, music that should
influence your mood but no more (that's the ambient/music for films part).
(let's forget about his songs and so on for here.) now of course this saw2
goes very well with reading (hardly anything else goes, in my case), but
this does not seem to be the idea. also, the envelope has already been
pushed that far, rdj does not make sounds or structures that you have to
get used to to be able to appreciate. so what's the thing that makes this
album stand out?
instead of all this "ambient!" rattling, that talk of his about lucid
dreaming, the state in the morning (?) when you're still only half awake
and full of dreams, or the state you get into under sleep deprivation,
seems to make very much sense to me when i hear his saw2. the first
impression i had, with all this talk here about the cover, was that this is
meant to be something futuristic, a code to be intelligible to an
extraterrestial - but that seems wrong. now i think the voidness of
language of the cover nicely conveys the idea that what the sounds and
pictures talk about is just not something that can be spoken of in words...
that it's very intimate (not really personal - it may well be familiar to
most people). it's not so much new in terms of means than of what the music
stands for or relates to. in this respect, i think the pictures are very
well chosen, in fact, an integral part of the whole.
to respond to some earlier postings: i don't get the impression that the
spaces he creates (and i think the sheer wealth of spaces on this release
is amazing! one dream follows another) are uncomfortable spaces. i'd much
rather call its air one of a combination of wisdom and tenderness that
results in serious poetry. true, some spaces come out dark and threatening.
but lots don't. whether they're dark or not (crude description) is also
less important for judging the record than the overall approach that is
made. ...melancholy, maybe even nostalgia (my bloody valentine, esp.
"loveless", comes to mind, imo) might also be words to describe the mood
you get into, but the content though is very abstract, not as clear as the
places in ambient 4 on land, for example. so it's also not easy to say
whether e2/*/stone in focus, the track that's missing on the cd, is worth
the purchase of the vinyl version. there's nothing really special about the
track, despite it's the longest track that works well (i'll come back to
the longest one, f3/23/white blur 2).
also, this record definitely contains melodies, harmonies and rhythms,
though it's pretty clear that they (except for the pieces that are heavily
structured rhythmically) just serve to carry the timbres (lots of them as
blurry as most of the pictures - something i find particularly
interesting), their tremulations, the fantastic harmonics reverb, and the
overall spatial structures, that are the real music. to take up a
suggestive picture from another thread: quite the opposite from traditional
western music, the melodies and such are the canvas on which the sounds are
painted. they're just there to give the whole thing a temporal structure,
but they're not the material. and i think they're well chosen for that
purpose: none of them are haunting earcatchers. the only thing getting
annoying on the record, i thought, was the laughter sample on f3/23/white
blur 2.
after the first listen, the pieces i immediately wanted to hear again (that
had "caught my ear") were c2/10/tree (this being really one of the
uncomfortable ones, tritonus and all. the grumbling bass sounds of eno's
ambient 4 on land, track 2, are also present here. do they sound like a
tank? i once played eno's record while a friend was asleep in the same
room, and she woke up after that track having dreamt of tanks (she hated
the record after that). now as rdj seems to be a tank fan himself...);
hexagon (one of the rhythmic ones, and one of those that call for equipment
that can deal with low frequencies; and of course the already praised very
last one f4/24/matchsticks (definitely wrong name, i think). this last one
though suffers a bit from the familiar deep-space-mood it carries - it
sounds like it could be the title track of a sci-fi movie, and this turns
me off a bit - it doesn't fit well with the abstractness of the rest.
the pressing quality of my black vinyl pressing is low, especially records
2 and 3 are crackling a lot, and there are a real variety of extra noises
and stuff that don't seem to have been intended in the first place. (the
hole in record 2 was also too small.) on the other hand, those noises fit
very well into the mood and concept of the album, so they're not a big
problem. moreover, the recording is quite loud, so the music isn't drowned
in noise, the noise is rather adding warmth. the occasional repeating pops
that are there are also sometimes in the music itself, like the soft
ticking in d1/13/blue calx. do other people than i also sometimes lie
sleepily on the bed playing rhythms with their fingers on the mattress,
with the ear on the mattress too, listening to the really thumping sounds
that result...?
the color coding, btw, has proper matchings on my sleeve/records, except
for the fact that b has exactly the same color as a, on the record itself.
obviously a mistake. the labels for side c and d were correctly placed.
extra stuff like stickers and credits sheet were missing.
does some of all this make sense to anyone?
final remark: i'm impressed. unexpectedly (to me), this turned out a
master's work.
i guess that it's more probable that this guy is going to open a funny
restaurant than return to idm.