hello everybody! it's a thursday, in new york so beautiful, air & the wind's eye & I have the day off now we're blogging with gas.
but there's something else, another space my mind goes listening, magnetized interstice between the original let it be & this song, which sounds like Cyrill & Methodius having a drunken sing-along in bunker. I mean, you can almost feel the cinder-block yr sitting on. & there it is the ambiguity of let it be, floating sort of blankly in the ambient culture-goo, that seems to be the source of this song. an unhearing of this always already overheard song, that seems to me to take this glitch in the translatability (let it be? vat eez it? let it be vaat?) as an opening in. & then kind of lovingly tramples it, for an opportunity to do something beautiful. yes!
did I mention the band is called kommunizm?
something I was really glad for the chance to see recently was this movie of the first book I ever read in russian, Viktor Pelevin's Generation 'П' (there are two english translations, one called Babylon & one called Homo Zapiens. that same problem -- how do you translate a title that's mostly in english into english?).
the movie's recommended. it embraces the bombast & goofy exuberance & acerb impatience of the novel. hallucinogens are well-rendered. the notorious Che Guevara scene is given a loving best attempt. it extends things a little farther into the future than the novel & somewhat downplays the ancient-aliens aspect (never a winning move in my book), but still, give a viewing if you see it going by.
a record I'm much crazy about right now is Julia Holter's orthogrammically-entitled Ekstasis. it has so many terrific songs! some of them have videos:
yay.
"what we assume is given -- our humanity -- might be being taken away, eradicated, annulled before our very eyes.... do we cease to exist when we are here, in the actuality of the physical elsewhere?" Ann Lauterbach asks this in The Given & The Chosen, her super-interesting lecture & book, which begins by epigraphing that Michael Palmer poem. (the 'here', of course, right now, for us, is, uh, there. but read my blog!) the present elsewhere. what an unseeing eye would see. Gennady Aigi writes of "река -- уже иная", that is, "the river -- already other".
anyhow, thanks a lot for reading my blog! I mean, if you are reading my blog? listen, why not leave some comments! that way, I'll know you read my blog! or send me an email or something. let me know what you think! because that's fun. also, sorry if you had some trouble downloading the songs listed on last week's entry. there were a few problems (turns out file-sharing changes over the course of time? va savoir.), & they'll be fixed within about 24 hours. Team InGurgitem apologizes. profusely.
there's something really great that caught my eye recently, a video piece by a dutch guy called Sebastian Schmieg. the title is Search by Image, Recursively, Transparent PNG, #1, & what it actually is is a chain of 2,951 images, each the result of a google 'visually similar' search based on the previous. I so completely love this! if I may, I'd recommend using as a soundtrack vc love song by Eo Sing & Namh Hao. (you can also stream it on youtube here.) they both follow a complicated line of transformations & strange visitations, both situated in the richness of a lot of ambient noise. (vcls is on a terrific german compilation of vietnamese songs of many kinds & incidences.)
watching this -- which I have been doing a lot of -- really got me thinking about things that operate, at least partly, by closely remembering other things. Michael Palmer:
for instance, there are a lot of eyes in extended niceties by Peter Gordon & the Love of Life Orchestra, and I'm pretty sure a lot of them see nothing. how anything can so much like so much & yet so little like anything is amazing. this is straight molten disco mirror, a song that sounds like back-then but could only be from now, that pulverizes itself toward freedom but only in struggling against a pretty rigid form. also, it is a fucking marathon dance party squeezed into seven minutes of ultraluminous boogie-down. this is a howl so go go get scorched.
my nuclear vision is everybody's business, sings Dr. John on his new record locked down, maybe channeling Michael Palmer. the record, produced by Dan Auerbach of the black keys, has been getting gigantic amounts of attention. Dr. John has done some truly uncute things over the years, but I'm with the consensus on this one: great & good & vital stuff. here, dig on ice age. eh? eh?
ice age isn't more immune than the rest of the record to occasional bouts of Winehouseworthy retro-chintz, but it's still a power station. please disregard the stupid lyrics, & instead could we talk about how reminiscent this song is of any number of times & places & other songs & how none of these times, places, & songs has, in fact, ever existed? incomprehension magic what's not to like. & besides that guitar riff (which sounds like the 1970s with all the fluids zipped out), I can't even really describe what it doesn't sound like -- instead, I feel put on the defensive by it, like before I can get a word out it's asking me what songs I sound like.
so maybe this song should be called well, me neither. but I dig it.
a totally different kind of deceptively elusive correspondence is found in this song, which is called пусть все будет так, pust' vsjo budet tak. an overly literal translation of which would be let it all be so. russian lacks the modal it of english -- one says not it's warm but warmly, & I've heard russians learning english puzzle over what the mysterious it of it's warm refers to. so let it be is a complicated thing to try & say in russian.
the band is called коммунизм, kommunizm. this is off their 1989 record лет ит би, a hard title to translate well because it is a transliteration into russian of let it be. kommunizm were the amazing Egor Letov, Oleg Sur, Valerka Rozhkov, & Kuzja Uo, who I hope in english goes by Kuzya Whoa!, but I dunno. when you hear it, unless yr from pulao or something, you will immediately recognize what it is. here's what they're singing:
Finisterrae
The eye on each wing, for example,
many have mentioned this.
That it sees nothing,the semiotic ecology of this is spellbinding to me. resemblance, maybe, is adaptive repetition, a form of change that stammers its sympathies. but it is not ambivalent -- a street may run in any number of ways, but traffic only one. I got to thinking of songs that seemed to have ghost referents, that stammered a sympathy with something off-site. music with unseeing eyes.
no one has mentioned this.
for instance, there are a lot of eyes in extended niceties by Peter Gordon & the Love of Life Orchestra, and I'm pretty sure a lot of them see nothing. how anything can so much like so much & yet so little like anything is amazing. this is straight molten disco mirror, a song that sounds like back-then but could only be from now, that pulverizes itself toward freedom but only in struggling against a pretty rigid form. also, it is a fucking marathon dance party squeezed into seven minutes of ultraluminous boogie-down. this is a howl so go go get scorched.
my nuclear vision is everybody's business, sings Dr. John on his new record locked down, maybe channeling Michael Palmer. the record, produced by Dan Auerbach of the black keys, has been getting gigantic amounts of attention. Dr. John has done some truly uncute things over the years, but I'm with the consensus on this one: great & good & vital stuff. here, dig on ice age. eh? eh?
ice age isn't more immune than the rest of the record to occasional bouts of Winehouseworthy retro-chintz, but it's still a power station. please disregard the stupid lyrics, & instead could we talk about how reminiscent this song is of any number of times & places & other songs & how none of these times, places, & songs has, in fact, ever existed? incomprehension magic what's not to like. & besides that guitar riff (which sounds like the 1970s with all the fluids zipped out), I can't even really describe what it doesn't sound like -- instead, I feel put on the defensive by it, like before I can get a word out it's asking me what songs I sound like.
so maybe this song should be called well, me neither. but I dig it.
a totally different kind of deceptively elusive correspondence is found in this song, which is called пусть все будет так, pust' vsjo budet tak. an overly literal translation of which would be let it all be so. russian lacks the modal it of english -- one says not it's warm but warmly, & I've heard russians learning english puzzle over what the mysterious it of it's warm refers to. so let it be is a complicated thing to try & say in russian.
the band is called коммунизм, kommunizm. this is off their 1989 record лет ит би, a hard title to translate well because it is a transliteration into russian of let it be. kommunizm were the amazing Egor Letov, Oleg Sur, Valerka Rozhkov, & Kuzja Uo, who I hope in english goes by Kuzya Whoa!, but I dunno. when you hear it, unless yr from pulao or something, you will immediately recognize what it is. here's what they're singing:
опять пришла весна и деревья распукаются
и поют повсюду птицы нам о весне
я иду по улице и сердце мается
нежно сердце мается о тебе, о тебе
opjat' prishla vesna i derev'ja raspuskajutsjai pojut povsjudu ptitsy nam o vesnjeja idu po ulitse i sjerdtse majetsjanjezhno sjerdtse majetsja o tebje, o tebje
spring has come again & the trees are in blossomthen here's how they sing the chorus:
& all around us birds are singing of spring
I walk down the street & my heart is breaking
tenderly my heart is breaking over you, over you
лет ит би, лет ит би
пусть будет так а не иначе
мы с тобой давно решили
пусть все будет так
ljet it bi, ljet it bi
pust' budet tak a ne inache
my s toboj davno reshili
pust' vsjo budet tak
ljet it bi, ljet it bi& then dig the last verse:
may it be so & not be otherwise
you & I decided long ago
let everything be so
ты идешь с работы и сияет солнце в окнах
и смеются звонко дети на все голоса
и гуляют солнечные зайчики по крышам
и счастливый смех мы слышим тает в небесах
ty idjosh' s raboty i sijajet solntsje v oknakh
i smejutsja zvonko deti na vsje golosa
i guljajut solnechnye zajchiki po krysham
i schastlivyj smjekh my slyshim taet v njebesakh
you head out of work & the sun is blazing in the windowsyeah, what?! the original let it be is a total false eye on the wing of this song. on one level, it's the ebb & tug of the original, which russians feels is theirs as much as everyone's (see also: the movie лимита, or am I the only human who's seen that?). the phonemically transposed title of the original anchors the chorus. & the loveliness of the original melody (which is all that haughty bullshit has going for it, sorrrry beatles-lovers) is brought into relief by how the new lyrics don't actually fit, or maybe by the tensions that brush up as the russian lines don't conform to the smoother contours of the original. (e.g. the way the word сердце, sjerdtse (heart) is stretched out in the third line.) classic pleasures of the palimpsest et cetera.
and the children are all laughing out their voices loud
and the beams of sunshine are walking across the roofs
& we can hear happy laughter melting in the heavens
but there's something else, another space my mind goes listening, magnetized interstice between the original let it be & this song, which sounds like Cyrill & Methodius having a drunken sing-along in bunker. I mean, you can almost feel the cinder-block yr sitting on. & there it is the ambiguity of let it be, floating sort of blankly in the ambient culture-goo, that seems to be the source of this song. an unhearing of this always already overheard song, that seems to me to take this glitch in the translatability (let it be? vat eez it? let it be vaat?) as an opening in. & then kind of lovingly tramples it, for an opportunity to do something beautiful. yes!
did I mention the band is called kommunizm?
something I was really glad for the chance to see recently was this movie of the first book I ever read in russian, Viktor Pelevin's Generation 'П' (there are two english translations, one called Babylon & one called Homo Zapiens. that same problem -- how do you translate a title that's mostly in english into english?).
the movie's recommended. it embraces the bombast & goofy exuberance & acerb impatience of the novel. hallucinogens are well-rendered. the notorious Che Guevara scene is given a loving best attempt. it extends things a little farther into the future than the novel & somewhat downplays the ancient-aliens aspect (never a winning move in my book), but still, give a viewing if you see it going by.
a record I'm much crazy about right now is Julia Holter's orthogrammically-entitled Ekstasis. it has so many terrific songs! some of them have videos:
yay.
"what we assume is given -- our humanity -- might be being taken away, eradicated, annulled before our very eyes.... do we cease to exist when we are here, in the actuality of the physical elsewhere?" Ann Lauterbach asks this in The Given & The Chosen, her super-interesting lecture & book, which begins by epigraphing that Michael Palmer poem. (the 'here', of course, right now, for us, is, uh, there. but read my blog!) the present elsewhere. what an unseeing eye would see. Gennady Aigi writes of "река -- уже иная", that is, "the river -- already other".
anyhow, thanks a lot for reading my blog! I mean, if you are reading my blog? listen, why not leave some comments! that way, I'll know you read my blog! or send me an email or something. let me know what you think! because that's fun. also, sorry if you had some trouble downloading the songs listed on last week's entry. there were a few problems (turns out file-sharing changes over the course of time? va savoir.), & they'll be fixed within about 24 hours. Team InGurgitem apologizes. profusely.
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