light as a feather
the record label ecm asks the age-old question: does silence breathe??? plus: albert camus' the plague, and the visual and thematic splendor of direct-to-video horror films
1 ecm records (1969-current). time is passing in strange units. weeks blink by. hours stretch like hallways in dreams. airplanes drone in the distance, so loud the sound rattles the windows. it’s spring and the only surviving weather patterns are wind and rain. the wind has blown so aggressively the past few days that it knocked loose a metal structure outside of my apartment. it creakily weeps in the 30mph gusts. but then, after a few alternating sequences of wind and rain, sunlight sinks through the clouds and the air slows and everything grows very still and cold and sparkling as if it were framed in glass.
i have spent this spring getting into ecm records. since its founding in 1969, the ecm label has consistently released music where the distinctions between jazz fusion, smooth jazz, free jazz, new age, and contemporary classical music melt away almost completely. (if the label, which has put out a vast number of records in differing styles over five decades, can be said to have a single project, it might be to argue these distinctions are meaningless.) i can’t decide if ecm’s output feels particularly well-suited for spring because i happen to be working my way through it right now or if it’s some objective quality belonging to the music itself. i’m probably projecting. regardless, if you are like me and often feel like you live in a glass elevator getting brushed and dented by the elements outside, ecm has released records that sound exactly like that. ecm has also released records that replicate the perfect stillness of a cold spring day, the ruminative hush of things growing soundlessly.
some of this quality is down to founder manfred eicher’s gifts as a producer, and he has produced nearly every album the label’s put out. he brings a really intuitive spatial awareness to the separation of instruments to his studio recordings, which is why an ecm record never feels crowded even when it is busy. the amount of space on eicher’s work makes me think of the amount of air between skyscrapers—the scale implied is enormous, yet there’s almost nothing in it.
and the musicians eicher records, at least when they’re recording with him, seem to have an almost meditative awareness of the studio as an environment, a terrarium where different sounds grow and decay. eberhard weber’s bass playing is an oil-spill of shadow slipping over an empty field. steve tibbets’s guitar work billows like a sheet in the wind, its fabric boiling and trembling in little waves. dino saluzzi’s bandonéon improvisations are evocative and moving as keith jarrett’s on piano, stirring up memories that don’t even belong to you. like: you are standing in a large, empty room lit only by the sun pouring through a hole in the ceiling. there’s no floor, just dirt, and the sun is so bright and hot you can hear the earth hiss as it cooks beneath your feet. you walk outside and see the desert shimmer in every direction, as far as you can see, the hills of sand dotted with other little houses like yours.
or: it is raining and you are watching raindrops gather and explode on the steel ladders and gratings of your fire escape. you can see them making brief dents in the fabric of the coffee shop awning across the street. the pale odor of smoke curls upward from someone smoking a cigarette on the floor below. you glimpse your reflection in the window and for a while you watch yourself watch the rain fall. your eyes blink and each blink lasts a little longer than the one before it, your gaze drifting sleepily toward the space between yourself and your reversed image, between the real world and one hazily duplicated in the window. though it is impossible to focus on, you somehow manage to stare directly at it, this envelope of dark lurking where your reflection ceases and you begin. just as you lean forward to give it a closer look, you fall into it.
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here are 17 ecm releases i’ve grown attached to over the past few months. thanks to david drake and other members of ilx for recommendations:
eberhard weber yellow fields (1975)
jan garbarek, keith jarrett, palle danielsson, jon christensen belonging (1974)
oregon crossing (1984)
gary burton and chick corea crystal silence (1973)
john abercrombie, dave holland, jack dejohnette gateway (1976)
terje rypdal after the rain (1976)
mark isham, art lande we begin (1987)
pat metheny group pat metheny group (1978)
kenny wheeler, lee konitz, dave holland, bill frisell angel song (1997)
john surman, jack dejohnette the amazing adventures of simon simon (1981)
steve tibbetts northern song (1982)
dino saluzzi kultrum (1983)
rainer brüninghaus, markus stockhausen, fredy studer continuum (1984)
nils petter molvær khmer (1998)
steve eliovson, colin walcott dawn dance (1981)
gary burton quartet with eberhard weber passengers (1977)
ralph towner blue sun (1982)
2 the plague (1947, albert camus). given the circumstances, i’ve been reading the plague. it’s only my second camus novel; i read the stranger twice in high school and barely remember it, and i sort of wonder if it’s designed to fire through your consciousness so quickly it only leaves a hole in your memory. the plague is conceptually and literally bigger than the stranger: it’s longer and more complex, and instead of just following one character it traces multiple characters arcs at once, the most compelling of which is the steadily darkening mood of the town it takes place in, the french algerian city of oran. oran comes alive on the page; you can feel it convulse as the plague advances through it, its inhabitants struggling to make meaningful choices in the shadow of a wave of death that flattens the meaning out of everything. they spend most of the book trapped inside of their own aimless fears and longings—whether for friends, for lovers, or for their former lives—though this is also what ultimately unites them; as camus writes in the novel, “a feeling normally as individual as the ache of separation from those one loves suddenly became a feeling in which all shared alike.” of course, except in a few isolated cases, this doesn’t bring them any closer together. silence starts to grow over the townspeoples’ conversations like grass over a fresh grave; having exhausted all other subjects, with no new subjects arriving to take their place, there is nothing to talk about but the plague.
the effect of reading the book has often been uncanny. the text echoes the last few months with such verisimilitude that it feels like almost all of the distance between the echo and its source has collapsed. every other page i’d be like, wow, the past sure is consuming the present. but the plague is still very funny at times, especially in the early chapters. one character spends the months-long epidemic revising the opening sentence of his novel, trying to polish it into something so perfect it will knock the hats off of the editors at the local publishing house. i have spent most of my time reading the novel trying not to feel devastatingly owned by this.
3 full moon features (bloodstone: susbpecies ii (1992) and dark angel: the ascent (1994)). here’s something i believe even though it obviously isn’t true: bad movies are better than good movies. bad movies aren’t even that bad sometimes; they’re just reaching for something they don’t quite grasp, or they’re trying to push good ideas through bad actors or bad ideas through good actors, or they’re too gnarled and too recently dragged out of a cave to be understood or accepted. bad movies are often boring but i bet right now there’s a growing awareness of the fact that boring things can be good. dreams, for instance, are boring; everything occurs for just a little too long in a dream, like you’re a horror movie character who’s been forced to explore a dark room with a flashlight for twenty minutes. time sags, the walls of the room stretch like the scales of a snake, and you’re never quite certain what’s ahead of you. it’s kind of a relief. for once, nothing ever ends when you think it will.
i have a particular fondness for efforts in this field from the direct-to-video production company full moon features. their films drone, sometimes out of total incompetence and sometimes out of seeming harmonic design. they produce the kind of low-budget genre fare where what can’t be expressed with special effects instead gets expressed as ideas, imagery, and atmosphere, if any are available at the time. (the movie gets made regardless.) if there are special effects on the screen they usually take the form of small creatures animated in stop-motion, puppets or demons or toys that stutter from frame to frame across superimposed backgrounds. i fell asleep to the puppet master twice this week, hypnotized by the dreamy low-angled glide of the puppet-point-of-view shots. in the subspecies movies, the vampire radu’s long, rakelike fingers, once severed, melt into walking demon figurines that i honestly think are pretty cute.
they’re one of my favorite things about the subspecies movies, all four of which i love, especially the second one, bloodstone: subspecies ii, which i love for the following reasons: 1) reflexive admiration for any sequel that has the nerve to place the subtitle before the franchise name. 2) radu’s teeth are amazing, his fangs curve like long crescent moons from his jaws. 3) some of the shot compositions remind me of murnau’s nosferatu because shadows are the true architecture of the set. 4) other scenes remind me of early darkthrone album covers, faces pale as death glowing through the grainy dark of an erased vhs tape. 5) there are two scenes of sensual vampire seduction at a death metal club. 6) at the end of the first film radu converts the series protagonist, michelle, into a vampire, and in subspecies ii she’s caught in this melancholy loop between sad, longing nostalgia for her former human life and the seductive pull she feels toward her new purgatorial existence as a vampire. how can one act morally when they’re stuck in the meaningless space between life and death, where notions of goodness crumble into absurd human pretensions?
i think the best full moon movie i’ve seen so far is dark angel: the ascent, directed by linda hassani, written by freeway’s matthew bright, starring angela featherstone as the titular demon angel veronica maria theresa iscariot, who runs away from her totally square family of torturers in hell to the big city so she can live among human beings and murder rapists and racist cops in cold blood. it is as rad as it sounds. hell looks like a desert of cracked orange earth where long fissures breathe smoke. the city is like another version of hell, but lit with a cold blue tint that makes the buildings and streets look like reflections on steel, a place too alienated and abstracted from itself to notice the evil and indifference operating it from within. featherstone’s otherworldly presence is suggested not by horns and wings (though they do appear) but by the inflexible deadpan of her performance—imagine someone who has never heard of irony and can’t process it at all: that’s veronica. the film has one of the best sex scenes i’ve ever seen, indistinguishable rivers of flesh giving way to sudden sprouts of burnt black wings from veronica’s shoulder blades.
it’s at this moment in the film that the mortal man who’s fallen in love with veronica sees and accepts her, in all her beauty and hideousness, which are one and the same, demon and angel, woven together in this film’s righteously warped cosmology even though they’re traditionally opposed concepts, split in the way we feel split between what we want and who we are. veronica has no nostalgia for her former life in hell; her gaze is fixed forward, toward whatever righteous thing she can do next. she has the power to see the world for what it is and to effectively change it, to take human corruption, weakness, and indifference and restore them to some kind of justice, and over the course of the film she figures out a way to do this without removing anyone’s spine. she is my hero.