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...and this is
what makes “Quiet Friend” such a lovely little gem of tranquility:
if there’s anything at all going on here, it’s so subtle that
you can’t really say what it is. You will try in vain to describe it:
it’s elemental. You might as well try describing what water tastes
like. The song draws you into a very still center and quietly but firmly
holds you there; the other two songs on the album do the same thing at different
depths. At the same time, you can be sure that you’re not listening
to Terry Riley’s extended love-letters to the Great Drone That Precedes
Time, or to Klaus Schulze’s rock jams disguised as slightly-varying
chords. Free jazz advocates talk about breaking free from structure, but
if you listen long enough you’ll always hear the jazz underneath the
skronk. This stuff, though, is music that has really made the crucial leap.
Something must be going on: time passes while you listen, after all, and
when you’re done, you wind up in an entirely different place from where
you started. Wiseguys will say: “Yeah, I’m asleep by the midway
point and then I wake up when the changer whirrs,” and there’s
certainly that aspect—I listened to this CD once late at night, and
I literally passed out with the headphones on—but something else is
at play, too, a kind of monkeying-with of ideas like “progress”
and “development” and similar words that once seemed like good
ideas but which, in recent days, have begun to sound rather like names from
the Necronomicon. The song doesn’t go anywhere; it makes “Louie
Louie” look like Wagner’s Siegfried. This is harder to
pull off than it sounds, but just try actually sitting still and thinking
of nothing for fifteen minutes. People devote large portions of their lives
to the effort; whole religions are founded around the concept. “Quiet
Friend” does for a listener willing to suspend a little disbelief what
a hundred self-help books can’t: it shuts out all the interior and
exterior noises and achieves stillness, or something damned close to it.
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