#eventually the personality of 2014 is passed down to jupiter mostly. and maybe some other ocs

[heliosphere-underthesky]

2014 vs 2024 Neptune

2014 is far more intimidating originally, until he slowly became what is the 2024 version today. Regardless, both are just pretty insecure of themselves and have their own ways to cope!

2014 prefers to stay distant by being tough and scary, 2024 tries to be more intimidating but is just really a soft shy boy who prefers to be left alone.

[un-nmd]

Recent listening—

The Mothers of Invention, Weasles Ripped My Flesh (1970) Strikes a somewhat psychotic balance between the whimsy of a Ween and the all-out avant of a Beefheart. The musicianship’s all there lest you fear that Zappa’s noisy conundrums were meant to hide a lack thereof—his magic band equivalents are able to don ‘general public’ masks and jam away just like any contemporary fellow, as they do on “Directly From My Heart To You” and “My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama” (note the electric violin on the former). But to those with ears of gentle predisposition: beware, and don’t be fooled, for the joke’s on you. The visceral beasts behind those vaguely satirical eye-holes are let loose more often than they’re contained. Take the two characteristic collages, “Didja Get Any Onya?” and “Prelude To The Afternoon Of A Sexually Aroused Gas Mask”: chaos, yes, but ritualistic chaos; Zappa, wielder of the wild. The sheer number of ideas, themes, and allusions introduced and just as quickly passed over in the space of, for each, less than four minutes, is nauseatingly impressive. E.g. about halfway through the latter, whose title suggests Debussy’s own ...d’un faune, some Satanic call and response gives way to the distant strains of the second subject of the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, over which some madman projects an uncanny valley imitation of a big cat growling—then final tremors from kit and a deep down electric rumbling to close. And if you thought music was one-dimensional (audio, you could argue, perhaps is) wait till you hear Zappa break the fourth wall on “Toads Of The Short Forest” which itself ends on a parodic consonance that’s rich with the same commercial irony of the album’s parting words— “Goodnight, boys and girls”—which follow one and a half minutes of some of the harshest noise you’ll ever hear. If you thought Penderecki was aggressive listen to this and reconsider.

Various artists, Planetarium (2017) You would think that with the extra personnel Sufjan would be somewhat protected from the subsuming ambition that fed Illinois and Adz to over an hour each—or that he’d personally outgrown it, as these mature words here would suggest:

A lot of those flourishes and gestures and aesthetic wanderings on earlier records were smoke and mirrors, a lot of obfuscation that were probably the result of me feeling either inadequate or feeling coy. There’s a lot of role playing and constructing facades.

But the 76-minute run-time indicates otherwise. Perhaps it’s the subject matter. These four gentlemen’s ode to the cosmos is as much about space as it is about substance—by which I mean: aside from the planet portraits they also craft sonic voids to match that of the great vacuum, and call it ‘ambient music’ so its justifiable. Is Muhly to blame? If so, its at least theoretically intriguing for its marriage of post-minimalism and popular music. It makes for dull listening though. You accept it the first couple of times but there’s no way I’m sitting through “Sun” or “Tides” or the “Moon” coda for a third or further. However with “Black Energy” the suspended dissonances are at least something for the ear to work on, and “Halley’s Comet” and “Black Hole” are short enough to accept as outros/intros to tracks preceding/following, with the latter also being interesting for its similarity to certain parts of Badalamenti’s score to Fire Walk With Me. But of the actual songs?—“Jupiter” and “Mars” quickly go from overwhelming to simply overcrafted. Likewise “Earth” is overcome by temporal grandeur, but it is defensible in the same way that the Mahler symphonies are, i.e. gushing Romanticism kills itself yet in doing so also transcends itself. “Pluto” and its interstellar string line provide the appropriate sappiness required of a work named Planetarium. The real gems, however, are “Neptune”, “Uranus”, “Saturn”, and “Mercury”—is it any coincidence that these are also the most Sufjan-esque?

John Coltrane, The Olatunji Concert (1967) This was all the Gods could muster: a cheap, dingy mic, a 30-sec intro, time for two jams with the latter cut off before the final hit—there the master laid down his pen. Like J.S. centuries ago it was, fittingly, on his signature move. Did he know it would be his last live recording? The notion would at least have been entertained as by then he was probably well into the throes of the cirrhosis that would eventually take him. Trane’s apocalyptic final will and testament, the culmination—if only chronologically—of a lifetime’s innovation, comes at you through an otherworldly haze, through cigarette smoke and spirit vapours, through half a century (exactly) of sonic decomposition of tapes that were at a poor enough quality to begin with. All that’s pretty is shed away, left behind for the blind and the shallow to fuck with. This is the primal essence. Trane, on the precipice, delivers a performance of catastrophic immensity. This was no Mahler 9, no sweet surrender—with one foot in the grave he raged.

Deep Puddle Dynamics, The Taste of Rain... Why Kneel? (1999) And re-calibrate again for the emcees in this realm require of the listener a completely different approach. Here the gamut of receptors is tuned less to harmony, instrumental skill, or ‘compositional rigour’ (in the Western art sense), and more to verse, cadence, dialect, timbre, rhythm, and so forth—it’s only empty if you ain’t looking hard enough. And four voices means there’s plenty of variety to go round. The interplay between the distinct bodies to their voices makes them stronger as a unit, à la Tribe preceding. E.g. I don’t think I could handle an entire full-length full of Doseone’s nasal delivery but on this the other three contextualise the texture space he resides in so that his grating-ness means something. (See his entry on “The Scarecrow Speaks”.) Another point of difference between this and the records surrounding: I’ve had genius.com open for probably half my listens. The pace, density, and abstraction of the ideas expounded deserve more comprehension than a fleeting ear’s able to discern; the work is the word, mostly, so read the libretto. We open with Slug: “Descending on the centre / from the outskirts of obscurity”. An apt heads up for such is how you approach the meaning to these tracks, most of which exceed five minutes. Within them the majority of time is spent dealing in Impressionistic strokes of free-verse, free-associative syllables strung streaming out to the potent symbology of, say, a candle flame (as on “The Candle”) or the psychological landscape of a peeling ceiling (as on “Heavy Ceiling”—distant progenitor to Courtney Barnett’s “An Illustration of Loneliness”). However at times a rhyme catalyses the crystallisation of these supersaturated abstractions—here’s Sole towards the end of “Thought vs. Action”:

Man, I once had an idea but it didn’t get me anywhere Read The Art of War when I should have been out fighting Why is it the mass is unexposed to so-called great thinkers until they die? And why do they live in fear Of the fighters afraid to leave their insides?

But wait! Don’t forget ‘compositional rigour’ just yet as a certain hook on the track just discussed, the chant chucking nouns at each crotchet (“catalyst, cataclysm, fallacy, fortitude, medulla...”), appears also on “Deep Puddle Theme Song” and “June 26th, 1998”, albeit with different words, and as different answers to different questions. And formwise you’ve got the partition between the ‘98 tracks and those from June 26th, 1999. There’s a palpable maturation from the former to the latter. In the year of ‘98 they had more answers than questions—see the noun chant above, see the youthful arrogance on “The Scarecrow Speaks” and “I Am Hip Hop (Move the Crowd)”. And even the cynicism that closes #1 has with it a little bit of nihilistic tongue-in-cheek. One year on and they’re a lot more tired of the world. That sly grin’s nowhere to be found on lines like these...

How is it I’m motivated to endure Eight hours of pure unadulterated boredom? Then sit in front of another computer for Four more hours using the same old drum set Trying different loops, can’t find one to fit Maybe this is why I sit in front of a pad of paper, pen in hand with a blank mind And I ask myself Is the writer’s slump the best form of meditation? Rhetorical, don’t have an answer And I also don’t expect one.

...and all that’s left is a deathly wit...

It ain't all love, it's confusion and a waste of time It ain't all time, it's confusion and a waste of love It ain't all waste, it's confusion and some time to love It ain't all confusion, it's love and some time to waste It ain't all that It's all of the above So scared into this And you are And you wonder from the shores how deep the puddle is. 

...borne of the same fin-de-siècle dread that fed Radiohead’s OK Computer.

Alvvays, s/t (2014) Music that’s dense and complex and meticulous will never be difficult to write about, or, for some, even to listen to, because there’s always the task of ascribing theory to composition to hide in. Such an approach, however, can neglect what you might say to be the primary purpose of music: evoking a meaningful emotional response in the listener. This, to trained ears, can be tempered by knowledge and understanding of the underlying theory, but for the most part it is governed by right-brain perception; that is, the Dionysian response as opposed to the Apollonian. For example: I could write about how on “Dives” you can developmentally derive the verse theme from the prelude’s sinister synth line, or about the 3/2 bars on the refrain to the same and how Molly’s melody overlays a 6/4 structure in a sort of inverse hemiola to the colossal opening of Brahms’s 3rd—or, instead, I could write about the sweet, sweet ache I am immediately plunged into upon the first words to the first song (”How / Do I get close to you? / Even if you don’t notice / As I admire you / On the subway”), or the simultaneous melancholy of lyric and uplift of melody on the chorus to “Archie, Marry Me”, or the crack in my heart that accompanies, every time, Molly’s crack up to that high note on “Ones Who Love You”, that velvet vowel vocalise that’s recalled, in spirit, on the final seconds of their latest single when she, unexpectedly, epiphanically, goes up the register to a transcendent 5th scale degree falling to the major 3rd on what itself is a 6-3 on the I, i.e. a first inversion founded on yet another radiant, overtone-heavy 3rd. Point being, who really cares about the details when all you can think about is that it’s making you soar, or in some cases, sore (in the chest).