Friday, July 03, 2009

Silence is Preserving a Voice

your rails. you're thin.
your thin paper wings.
in the wind. dangling.
your sun. fly high.
your window shattering.
your rails. you're thin.
your thin paper wings.
sugar box. sugar boy.
riding in. riding in.
sugar box. sugar boy.
handheld candle. sugar boy.
your rails. you're thin.
your thin paper wings.
in the wind. dangling.
your sun. fly high.
your window shattered in the wind.
your coca cola sign rattling. rattling.
resonator. resonator.
homeless trees. gathering.
outside your window bootleg babies call to you
and lie among the mosquitoes.
that summers fever coming.
cats are gathering outside your window.
homeless trees.
bootleg babies calling to you.
lie among. lie among the mosquitoes.
your rails. you’re thin.
your thin paper wings.
get up in your sun. fly high.
dangling. dangling.
your window shattered in the wind.
the sun on your coca cola sign.
your rails. your thin paper wings.
paper wings.
resonator.
***
there is a sound on the other side of this wall.
a bird is singing on the other side of this glass.
footsteps. concealed.
silence is preserving a voice.
walking in the wind at the waters edge
comes close to covering my rubber feet.
listening to the barbed wire hanging.
there is a sound on the other side of this wall.
a bird is singing on the other side of this glass.
footsteps. concealed.
silence is preserving a voice.
silver chain.
thrown away.
broken wing.

If you think it's these alien sounds that attract, well, maybe you're right but only after a fashion; all attractive songs have a need to be attractive. Electronic music, especially, has an unapologetic claim to glamour because it packages sound—not voice—to sell itself (and transmutes voices to make it sound more appropriate). If you ask me: what attracts me to an Underworld song has to do almost as much with the lyrics and the singing, as with the sounds. If it had been just an issue of the songs, then I only need to listen to Fat Boy Slim, which I don't do much. (And, by the way, Fat Boy has made a very famous copy of the first part of this composite, `Drop the Hate'.)

This Goliath of a song stretches the limit to what you can package in one session of song—or whatever you choose to call it. There are many independent strands to this song, which is when the song becomes almost imperceptibly smooth and you're aware only of your thoughts gliding among the clouds; but then there are those excruciating transitions, which in this case are really drastic, and you almost feel like you're in a club watching a DJ decanting one after another of those stuffed up stock songs...and the singing gives way to whispers and looped chants and ghost noises...which is when we realize the point about Underworld's song writing. When they have a nice song (screenplay? poetry?) going, their songs are smooth like whiskey, you don't notice that you're (just) listening to a song. And when that lyric gets blocked, when it makes way to those inane chants (even if it is to make a musical point or in support of a theme) it gets a bit hard to sit through.

And in this particular case, I have been typing non-stop from 06:10 into the song. (It's that point when the reverie is broken by some really jarring transition music.) Well, I just had to. And now Hyde's voice is back (around 12:00; in the meantime they really took us through the paces, and unloaded all those loops they habitually put into their live shows, succeeding, for the most part, in eliciting an urge to go out and join a protest march because it is so rousing), if only to mouth the elegiac finale:

silver chain.
thrown away.
broken wing.

You never can hope for a more fitting service to a broken kite. (And the child's babble, looped electronic gizmos of course, assure us that the kite is of the paper-and-tube variety rather than the Ken Loach type.)

Rest in peace, Kite.

**
This song, more than any I have recently listened to, opens up the great failing of literature. To really know how a kite feels like (the question itself is fallacious in literature), to really know how it feels to flutter in the wind and crash against windows and finally, twisted and stretched beyond reason or logic, how it feels when the thread snaps and you are borne lifeless to the ground, when you see the homeless trees gathering round you, and the cats come for a party. The images thrown together finally converge: the kite, the wind, and (love's? But I don’t seriously think that) death.

For those who stay away from Underworld for the sleaziness: this is perhaps one of their cleanest, some awful loops notwithstanding. There is a total lack of innuendo at least in the lyric, which is surprising for an Underworld song (and thus it must somehow be deficient in depicting reality, you might say). But no, this is a wonderful biography of a dying kite. And everything, right from the halting, spiralling, muted drum loops blooming into the bubble-boom drums to be siphoned off into the gospel chant…everything is perfect and trance-like. To be sure, this is Underworld's longest song to date; it's more of an anthology, weaving together (or is it rails crossing?) three different strands, one laying on top of the other...and leaves us…dangling. The finale is catastrophic, it really gives a tremendous slap in your face and leaves us essentially cataleptic.

**

Now all it remains is for you to listen to this song somehow. If you don't have it, you know where to search. (Those who know about this song probably don’t need to read this any way; so I can tell you now that it’s about the song Juanita: Kiteless: To Dream of Love). Google it, smuggle it, steal it or rent it…but listen to it. Otherwise, it’s just lame—what I’ve just written. And when you’ve listened to it, you can throw this away and forget that you’ve even read this.

Because, when you’ve got the real thing, it just proves how little is achieved by writing about an artefact. If I’ve convinced and made you listen to the song (available, among many other albums, in the original cut of Second Toughest in the Infants), I consider my job done. Until then, let this silence preserve a voice.

[1116/130']

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