Difficult listening hour(s)

Absolute Classic Masterpieces, a blog I started catching up on recently, mentioned a Pitchfork article on the subject of difficult albums. It’s an enjoyable piece of writing which begins:

In July of this year Da Capo will publish Marooned: The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs, the sequel to the 1970s critic’s classic Stranded. The earlier volume was edited by Greil Marcus and posed the eternal music obsessive’s question: What one rock’n'roll album would you bring with you to a desert island?

Mark Richardson, the piece’s author notes that the most interesting article by one Langdon Winner asserts that “The listener always completes an artist’s work… if [Winner] was going to spend the rest of his days with a single record, he may as well have a record that made him think, one that would change over time and that he hadn’t yet “solved.” This pretty much sums up my attitude to the art that lives longest in my heart.

The challenge that set the proverbial ball rolling for me was King Crimson’s Larks Tongues In Aspic. Purchased at the tender age of 15 or so as part of a job lot of all King Crimson’s albums up to their first split in 1974, it was the album - or, more accurately, the title track - that immediately confounded and alienated me. I still remember the sense of annoyance and frustration at hearing something I wasn’t prepared for and was unable to make sense of (the feeling has now become fairly familiar!). Two sides of my character quickly came into play: stubbornness and curiousity, and, after many listens, I was eventually able to understand and assimilate the music. It remains a favourite, though it’s been many years since I heard it.

The next, similar experience was with Harold Budd and Brian Eno’s The Pearl, the second of their two collaborations and the first I encountered. I recall purchasing the record at the big HMV store on Oxford Street and racing home to listen to it on my parent’s stereo (one of those combined radio/cassette/record decks). I was horrified to hear… well nothing very much - no discernible rhythm, little or no melody, in fact very little to get to grips with at all. In many ways, The Pearl was the antithesis of the subject of my earlier struggle. In those days, it wasn’t very easy to return music, even harder to hear it beforehand. You paid your money and took your chances. As a result, my (occasional) tactic was, if I was dissatisfied with my purchase, to deliberately scratch the vinyl and ask for a refund/exchange. I very, very nearly applied the tine of a fork to the black grooves of the record, but on an impulse held back. On subsequent listens I began to perceive the gorgeous subtleties of The Pearl, perhaps enticed in part by its delightful Russell Mills sleeve and those dreamily resonant titles (Late October, A Stream With Bright Fish, Dark-Eyed Sister, Their Memories, An Echo Of Night…)

I digress (hugely). Returning to the Pitchfork article, although I can directly relate to the author’s experiences of alienation and persistence in the face of challenging music, there’s one area in which I differ. His emphasis is upon a gradual (or sudden) assimilation of those works which fail to immediately resolve themselves into familiar shapes. My experience is that my favourite art is that which resolutely refuses to be understood, whether (in the musical realm) it be Laurie Anderson’s United States Parts I-IV, Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein On The Beach, Scott Walker’s late diptych (Climate of Hunter, Tilt), Kraftwerk’s Katalog or Jon Hassell’s Possible Musics/City: Works Of Fiction (there I go reading out my desert island list at the drop of a hat…) All of these in different ways resist being made sense of by me and therefore, to varying degrees, remain unfamiliar and continue to challenge.

Links: Absolute Classic Masterpieces, Pitchfork article