I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: JEFRE CANTU-LEDESMA-“Stained Glass Body” (2010).

This album, Love is a Stream, came in at #8 on Viking’s Top Ten albums.  Viking references My Bloody Valentine in his description of this song, and it is an excellent frame of reference.

This song sounds like My Bloody Valentine if you removed the songs.  Take away the drums and the vocals and just leave the swirling, mesmerizing washes of sound, and you get this really cool and captivating song.

As you might expect, this is background music, and yet it is background music that draws you into it.  It has texture and depth and you can feel yourself getting enveloped in the music.

Often it seems like music like this is simple, almost inconsequential, yet there’s something about the way Cantu-Ledesma manipulates these simple washes of sound that make them something more than just notes on a keyboard. Cranking this up very loud in a snug room on a cold sunny day would be pretty awesome.

[READ: January 2, 2011] “Getting Closer”

This is a simple story about a boy trying to make a grand statement.  In fact, there’s very little to the story plotwise except for a boy psyching himself up to begin the summer.

Jimmy is nine, going on ten.  It’s summer time and his family has gone to Indian Cove for a summer vacation.  He has made a deal with himself that summer, or perhaps something more nebulous like “fun” would not begin until a certain point was reached.  He is excited at knowing that “this is it” and willfully wants to put that off as long as possible.

He inches closer and closer, metaphorically and literally, willing himself not to reach that moment when the day, the excitement, the summer, begins.

It’s an interesting little story. It certainly captures a lot of the excitement of anticipation, but it comes across as more of a trifling story than anything terribly profound.  I have seen some people compare this to David Foster Wallace’s “Forever Overhead” but I don’t really see it.  Aside from there being waiting and water, there’s not a lot that the two have in common.

I enjoy Millhauser’s stories, and this one is good but not amazing.