I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: BÉGAYER-“L’image du manque” (2018).

At the end of every year publications and sites post year end lists.  I like to look at them to see if I missed any albums of significance.  But my favorite year end list comes from Lars Gottrich at NPR.  For the past ten years, Viking’s Choice has posted a list of obscure and often overlooked bands.  Gottrich also has one of the broadest tastes of anyone I know (myself included–he likes a lot of genres I don’t).  

Since I’m behind on my posts at the beginning of this year, I’m taking this opportunity to highlight the bands that he mentions on this year’s list.  I’m only listening to the one song unless I’m inspired to listen to more.

I certainly didn’t know Bégayer before hearing them here.  Bégayer is a trio from the south of France that howls in French and Arabic, bangs on homemade instruments and leaves a path of delirious distortion in its wake.

Lars describes them as a combination of Animal Collective, Malian desert rock and Eugene Chadbourne thrown off a cliff.

This song starts with a kind of unsure-sounding opening foray into a guitar riff (very Malian in style), after twenty seconds, the high-pitched guitar notes resolve into a furious frenzy–an almost amelodious riff that flies around at breakneck speed.   The super fast drums help to propel the chaos along.

After a minute or so the vocals kick in–they are sparse and peculiar–more keening than singing at times and I have no idea what he is singing.  On a few occasions, the guitar seems to almost have a breakdown while he is singing although by the end he starts to sound like Jeff Buckley having a bit of breakdown himself. It’s bizarre and eerily compelling.

The whole album plays around with these sounds for a different experience with each song.

[READ: December 29, 2018] “Feast of the Epiphany”

This surreal story was published in 2016 in Gronzi’s collection Claustrophobias.

It begins with this bizarre, hilarious opening

It must’ve been either my thirty-third or my thirty-ninth birthday, if one is to believe the numerological charts, and there must’ve been some kind of adult arrangement involving children or else I would’ve never agreed to show myself in public in the company of three or four diversely aged creatures whose cumulative understanding of metaphysics was equivalent to the curiosity of a wart on the nose of a Rajasthani kaan-saaf wallah cleaning people’s ears in the streets of Paharganj.

This dinner becomes farcical with the introduction of the waiter:

Unable to appreciate the animated performance of the waiter who insisted on joining his forefingers over his head and doing a little dance every time he mentioned the rabbit in orange and thyme sauce, I finished the rather cheerless ten-year-old Hermitage before I even read the menu.

Before the appetizer is even over, the narrator makes his excuses and heads for the restroom.

And that becomes the man’s quest.  Because he

 headed toward the darkest corner of the dining hall, where I imagined I would find a narrow hallway leading to the lavatory. I found instead a dwarf-size Roman arch and a short marble staircase opening onto another, lower-level dining hall whose vaulted ceilings were even more oppressive than the ones in the previous dining hall, and where the majority of the guests exhibited a kind of derangement characteristic of prolonged exposure to the mistral.

He continues his quest

through a second Roman arch and down a second marble staircase, ending up in what I assumed was the dining hall where I’d been seated in the beginning. Peeking somewhat discourteously at the faces of the women in backless evening dresses and startling more than a few short men wearing children’s clothes, I concluded that either I was in a third, contiguous dining hall or I had lost the capacity to recognize the faces of my companions.

The details of this story made me laugh a lot, which is why I needed to quote so extensively.  But there’s also a lot in the story that I have no idea what he’s talking about.  Like

estrangement from the third skandha made memory completely irrelevant, or as relevant as a pubic hair in the ganja-packed chillum of an ash-smeared sadhu watching a funeral pyre on the banks of the Ganges in Benares.

Context clues help a bit, but what the heck does that all mean?  (It’s a Buddhism thing).

As he continues to search for the restroom, he doubles back an winds up tripping in front of the rabbit waiter.  The waiter sends him to the restroom, but once again he gets lost.  He decides to act like a waiter to cover more ground, which only means that he causes all kinds of trouble for staff and patrons alike.  He eventually finds his way to the kitchen and also finds a half baguette in his jacket pocket

None of this has a sit-com feel. It is more of a Kafkaesque nightmare.

And nothing really sums up the year of 2018 much better than this.