"Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit."
So writes Samuel Beckett, referring to Marcel Proust, in his cute little monograph on the best writer of the 20th Century. We might reasonably wonder, to what qualities in Proust is Mr. Beckett responding?
This is simple to explain. Mr. Proust was discussing the deadening effect of repetition in daily life. He meant that people were doomed, once any wonderful thing (sex, riding The Cyclone, taking LSD) had been done more than once, to see its pleasure slowly depleted. Beckett understood that what gave pleasure to the human mind was any incident in which the rhythm of the usual was altered in some way. He took an idea from Proust and interpreted it in order to create a paradigm of such disruption.
Musicians--beautiful, brilliant, modern-day musicians--have understood Mr. Proust's comment (amplified by Mr. Beckett) and have come up with a kind of music which does exactly THAT--structures, then re-structures--musical forms. One such group is Nightmares on Wax. Another is the Viennese dynamic duo Kruder and Dorfmeister. These Simon-and-Garfunkel-look-alikes now have out, as best as I can tell, two virtually flawless masterpieces and a third that comes mighty close. The first two are DJ Kicks and the K&D Sessions. The third is a new import called, The G-Stone Book.
It might be difficult for people with non-music-critic ears and vocabularies (such as myself) to explain in language that makes sense just what happens to them when they listen to a Kruder and Dorfmeister cd. But something does, indeed, happen. The music takes place in levels. Listening to it, you are aware of a surface tension, below beats, and then structure even below that. It is music in 3-D, full of oblique, subliminal messages like shadows, and listening to it is nearly like hallucinating.
The music is percussive; it throbs. It undulates, like magic carpet. It stretches and retracts. It becomes transparent and then opaque, transparent and opaque again. And every single time you think you've figured out just what it is that intrigues you, the music changes again.
Where do Kruder and Dorfmeister get these marvelous sounds? I just don't know. I think of Proust and his little cookie, and then I fork over even more money to music vendors, trying to find that experience again.
Happy listening.
-- Alex Joseph
| Samuel Beckett | Proust | Guest: Alex J |
