| I think the cassette format helps rather than hinders in this effort. It points up how futile the effort is, and in so doing effects a neat reversal: by mocking its own inability to rise to the task, it accomplishes a part of that task, viz. the evoking of the ocean’s vastness. And so we get a song like the opening “Kedge,” so nearly motionless that it’s just barely there at all: a saxophone and a slight bell sound, neither of them doing much, a tape-hiss heavy drone underneath. On the keels of “Kedge,” with whose title I am quite frankly in love, comes “Halyard,” whose title is also lovely: I am reminded of the track listing from Shap by Dead Voices on Air, a long list of words that look like unknown variants of actual known words. (Many of them are place names, as I’m sure the DVOA Army would want me to say, were there any such army.) “Halyard,” though, is self-indulgent noodling of the sort that will get you arrested when I am King: one or two fuzzy guitar chords struck arrhythmically again and again, the ghost of a thousand “experimental” seven-inches from the vinyl boom of ‘90-’92. On vinyl it’d be annoying. On CD it’d be unforgivable. On tape, though -- well, Christ: who are you or I to say what should or shouldn’t be on a tape? It’s just a tape, for cryin’ out loud, it’s not like they promised to do anything monolithic or anything. |