SOUNDTRACK: KHÔRA’s-Silent Your Body Is Endless [CST071] (2011).
This is the third and final disc from Constellation’s MUSIQUE FRAGILE 01 collection. Khôra is Matthew Ramolo doing solo work on the guitar. But unlike any other guitar album you may have heard, this one is processed and manipulated so that much of the album sounds nothing like a guitar.
Most of the sounds on the disc are washes and waves of guitars that grow and fade. Although the opening track “Natura Naturans” has a recognizable acoustic guitar melody, the washes are all processed guitar sounds. This sound also has an echoing church bell, the kind of sound that would bot be out of place on a black metal album although this is as far from black metal as you can get.
The church bell, by the way is a field recording, and in addition to the guitars there are plenty of field recordings on the disc.
He generates a wonderfully expansive amount of moods as well. There are haunting melodies like on “Body Aperbut also beautifully upbeat ones like on “Hushed Pulse of the Universe”
I find the artwork that accompanies the Khora album to be the most satisfying of all three.
[READ: February 15, 2012] Tres
Another month, another posthumous Roberto Bolaño release. Tres is so-called because there are three pieces in it. They are described as poems, although I have a hard time seeing them as such. It has the Spanish title because it was originally published as Tres and the English version is actually a bilingual version with facing Spanish and English pages (translated by Laura Healy–I guess if Laura Healy translated it, it must be poetry as she is Bolaño’s poetry translator).
Tres is also amusing to me because it is so clearly a way to make a very small book seem bigger. In addition to the facing pages of the text, most pages have a paragraph or two at most (short ones at that). So it’s total 173 pages is really half that and then, given how much white space there is, it’s easily half that as well. None of this is a complaint, it’s just an observation.
The reason I’m confused about calling it poetry is because of the three pieces only one “looks” like poetry (with line breaks and what not). Indeed, the first piece, “Prosa del otoño en Gerona” literally translates as “Prose from Autumn in Gerona.” The second piece (the one that looks like poetry) is called “Los neochilenos” or “The Neochileans” and the final one is a series of numbered paragraphs (again, with no poetry conventions) called “Un paseo por la literatura” or “A Stroll through Literature.” I read each of these pieces three times primarily because I found them hard to follow and wondered what I was missing. Multiple readings did help, although I find with Bolaño’s longer short pieces, the details are exquisite while the overall picture is a bit confused. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 