I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: MOGWAI-My Father My King (2001).

Yet another EP release from Mogwai, this is a twenty-minute song that is everything that Mogwai does best.  It’s a slow builder that grows into a loud, epic track; it’s not only noisy and chaotic, but features some really catchy parts as well.

This song was produced by Steve Albini (which makes the Mogwai noise crispy and sharp and modifies their brand of waves of noise).  It’s a kind of companion to Rock Action.

It opens with a kind of middle eastern flair–Wikipedia says it was based on the melody of the Jewish prayer Avinu Malkeinu. Hear the original here.  [Man Wikipedia loves Mogwai, there are lengthy writes ups about nearly every song they’ve done.]

Even without knowing where the melody comes from, it’s a great song with wonderful structure, building and receding (in what is by now a kind of Mogwai pattern).   Twenty minutes rarely sound this good.

[READ: March 13, 2011] “Going for a Beer”

I’m currently reading Robert Coover’s A Child Again, which is a collection of short stories.  For the most part I haven’t really enjoyed it that much.  Nevertheless, I really enjoyed this one page story.  Part of me wonders, simply, if Coover works much better in much much shorter pieces.

So this story is a time-bending crazy quilt of reality.  And, indeed, the story is a lot more style over substance (which is kind of the point).

It opens in third person present with this mind-shredding sentence: “He finds himself sitting in the neighborhood bar drinking a beer at about the same time that he began to think about going there for one.” I admit I read this sentence three times before I gave up and accepted that he was fucking with me.

And, indeed he is.

For the rest of the story, Coover plays around with this split time while simultaneously having the story progress in time.  It is one long paragraph (I suppose we’re lucky that it has periods).  It continues: “Maybe he should take her back to the carnival, he thinks, where she wins another Kewpie doll…”

It is one big mindfuck.  And it is a lot of fun.  Because it is a very controlled mindfuck.  It follows its own logic, but it sticks with it very closely.  It’s also really impressive that, given the mindfuckiness of the story, a coherent story emerges.

This is experimental fiction at its best.  But as with other Coover I’ve read recently, if this were twenty pages long, I don’t thin it would be nearly as effective.