Reader, I mean to tell you that if you listen to this stuff before sunrise in a midwestern household full of sleeping children, it’ll get to you, and I’d wager that there are a number of other situations in which it’d have similarly mind-altering effects. There are some cheesy recitations of poetry in German at the outset, but the relentless uniformity of the song has swallowed up their memory by the time ten minutes have passed; when they crop up again, near the end, you barely even notice them. Maybe they’d stand out more if I spoke German, I don’t know; as it is, though, they just sort of drift past me. I’ve got Join Inn playing here in the house right now, and it’s all cold and grey outside, and I feel like if the snow came and buried me completely it really wouldn’t be so bad. There are modern analogues for music that dispenses this particular kind of bliss -- maybe trance music is reaching for the same territory -- but it’s precisely from Ash Ra Tempel’s willingness to completely defer the question of rhythm that “Jenseits” draws most of its power. The music just floats up from the ground and remains airborne for nearly thirty minutes. It is frankly quite stunning. |
