Ta(l)king Stock

Talk Talk's Laughing Stock. Such an incredibly weird and unexpected album, full of silences and pauses, explosions and estranged river winter sounds. Listening to it is an experience alienated from "culture" -- it doesn't relate in any fashion to the time and place around it; it follows no cultural signs, it represents nothing of "pop" music or culture. I don't know if I know anything as far from pop that seems to still be linked to the notion of its existence. If Laughing Stock evokes, say, Miles Davis' Bitches Brew -- the first "fusion" album (not true yet who cares, it is still a recording that evokes a watershed moment, partly because, looking back at Bitches Brew, it doesn't sound anything like what you might expect something that is a landmark recording in a particular genre) -- it does so in a way that we, as listeners, hardly ever really consider, which is the tone of the record. It sounds like it is made -- and that listening to it, we are there while they are making it -- along the edge of a swiftly flowing and soft grey river, and the sky above us is filled with soft grey clouds, the sun sleeping beneath (or behind?) this lush blanket. But the sun is there, since its absence is an absence that evokes a whispered presence, a hushed, yet heightened present. This swift river pours into the center of the music, flooding it with a liquidity that pushes the distance between each instrument yet blurs the boundaries between them, too, so that you don't really know what you are hearing, or what it is you are hearing, or who is is that you are hearing be what it is they are being. It's a uniquely disoriented experience, and you adjust yourself to it. Perhaps you think they made a mistake, that the instruments spilling into each other, bleeding sound into other sound, shouldn't be like this but they let it somehow slip past. But that slipping, too, is part of this waterlogged world, a world that is waking up under the sea, a world that looks up from the bottom of the ocean through a cracked rain spattered windshield at the empty green grey valley.

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It was 20 years ago that I found this silence, actually stumbling upon it accidentally as a birthday present for my (then (first!)) girlfriend, my (now (long ago (ex-)))wife -- I knew she liked music I didn't know and didn't think I'd ever come to know or ever come to like (both of which ended up as being weirdly true, perhaps prophetic, perhaps predictive, perhaps predicated on my willingness to keep things between us boundaried, perhaps caused by my unwillingness to move towards things around me that were not what I knew), but I thought, since it was her birthday, and she was my first real girlfriend, and there were used record shops everywhere around me (this was Boston, 1991, too many shops to count, but just enough shops to frequent daily), that I could give things a chance, since I wasn't yet anywhere far along enough to give up on anything, yet.

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She'd showed me The Color of Spring, Talk Talk's 3rd record, a mixture of 80's synth pop and brooding emotional season tones -- a record clearly produced in a studio, with layered sounds of various instruments placed in mid to late 80's context, but with a larger sense of sound itself, guitars sounding like guitar, piano like pianos, choruses of voices choruses of voices shouting out and making contact with the heavens. I liked it, and I was surprised to like it, since 80's pop wasn't what I liked then, and the fact that I liked it and was surprised to like it made me want to engage that surprise even further when I bought my girlfriend something for her birthday. In the record store, I came across the image of Laughing Stock's cover, and thought it might be nice to buy her this, something I thought she'd like, something that reflected our commingling tastes. She smiled widely when she unwrapped it, she seemed delicately touched that I had reached out to her taste rather than simply reflecting my own, which, at the time, was quite dominant, a voice too loud in a public space to acknowledge the space as public. A few days later, however, when I came over to her place and saw the CD case sitting next to the CD player (but something else was in the player, not this), I asked her what she thought. "That's the worst thing I've ever heard," she said, turning towards the wall. "I hate it."

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Later that night, while she was sleeping, I quietly glided out of the bed and slid along the wall to the CD player resting on the dresser. I extracted Laughing Stock from its cover and silently slipped the disc into the player and pushed my thumb down on the play button. I held my breath. What could she have hated so much? What could Talk Talk have done on Laughing Stock that could turn such an ardent fan so definitively against them? Surely aesthetics are forgivable throughout history, and this forgiveness is what we, as consumers of creative product, are what we use to make up for the distance between what those who produce give us to experience and what we actually think of these art objects, right?

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I could quote lyrics as a way to explain the profundity of the sentiments, the deep humanist philosophy that Laughing Stock proposes. But the lyrics are intended to be unheard -- the words that Mark Hollis sings seem only to be sounds that allow his voice to move between one moment and one other. I almost wonder if the lyrics are actually written down in retrospect, as potential visions of what these sounds could signify in a world in which signification means more than empty thought. If you get the CD (or cassette, possibly, or more possibly) the lyrics are handwritten on the inside in a script that is nearly illegible, neatly and essentially organized, as are the actual words sung. I've often wondered if lyrics exist in order that we have the option to no longer listen to the sounds of the music we are hearing, that if all lyrics were actually sung in a language foreign to us, or if they were sung in order to obscure the words we are hearing and not clarify them, we might actually have the opportunity to hear the human voice in its true place amongst the distant lands of the instruments that always approximate it. We might actually hear the person shining through the rain spattered windows to the outside world, which crowds in from all around us, which is always speaking to us of our difference to it, its indifference to us. The world floods into us, and we withstand it by speaking back to it in the voices that dazzle it with ineffable alienation.

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Of course, my girlfriend was right, as any pure Talk Talk fan had to have been in 1991, 5 years after The Colour of Spring (although, to be fair to both history as well as their audience, Talk Talk did release Spirit of Eden in 1988, which clearly opened the path through a misty musical forest, on the other side of which is Laughing Stock, along the banks of the sopping river; this essay COULD be about the radical step Spirit of Eden was from The Colour of Spring if the goal was to talk about the relationship between an artist and their audience, but that's another topic for someone with a larger sociological mind than I. And, for the record, this essay is not about the value of Spirit of Eden as opposed to Laughing Stock -- it is simply about the total oddity of Laughing Stock as an object of art, and I refuse, for the moment, the applicably progressing context of Talk Talk themselves.) She was right because this record was totally unintelligible, muffled, mumbling, hesitant, definite, cloudy, obscured, fogged, elongated, diffused. It was everything you don't want to hear in pop music. It was all the content that pop music has nothing to say about, all the waste pop music discards, all the words pop music never uses. My girlfriend hated it because she couldn't recognize anything in it that was what she knew to be "Talk Talk"; but, more than that, she couldn't recognize anything in it that was what she knew to be what music was supposed to be or had been.

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It was dark and quiet in my girlfriend's studio apartment, with the parking lot streetlights peering in through the half-closed blinds. It was as if they were seeking me out; as if they, too, wanted to know what I would hear, as if they wanted me to tell them what I heard and explain to them what my girlfriend heard that freaked her out so badly, what jarred her and upset even the simple order of a man in a dark room listening to recorded music on headphones in the middle of the night with the light of the street illuminating the corners of the walls. And then, in the distance, at the edges of the headphones, a sharp pulsing like a tape machine, interrupted by a deep, clean, trembling guitar chord, soon echoed by wind instruments and the whimper of a snare drum being righted and set in place. The chord rumbled a second time, and the elongated notes of the woodwinds lighted up the night air beneath this liquid thunder. Everything was of a depth, submerged in something full, something invisible, something to be seen later. "Place my chair at the backroom door" sang Mark Hollis, the words less sung than chanted, less chanted than lamented, less lamented than flung to the floor with the energy of a man tired of everything, especially that which he has to say, especially that which he says and which no one hears. My eyes were open. My heart was quick, then quicker. I understood immediately what my girlfriend did about this music, but from the perspective of someone with no expectations, with nothing of the future, with nothing but the moment in which everything is being heard and will continue on in its hearing. I understood that what I heard at that moment was something that had never been in any moment I knew; I understood that I knew less about what I was hearing than about what listening was to mean for me later, after I knew what I was hearing. 

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If whoever you are that is out there could meet me, I'd choose a coffee shop where the coffee is fresh, dark, and strong; where there are not too many laptops to clutter up the silence; where at least a few conversations are punctuated by passion, gesticulating hands, perhaps even gazes towards the sky evoking the real world of the false god; where the windows are filled with either sun or rain and the chalkboard menus reflect the nature of the day outside. If we were to meet, I would say more about Laughing Stock and how it still, to this day, if I am able to listen to it, makes me rethink what I think about things in general, and things in specific -- about what I say and what I see, about what I hear and what I know. It makes me reconsider what luck is and who has it; what fortune is and where it goes. Who men and women are and how they interact. But none of this seems relevant to the actual content of the recording, which is the content of something other than what you may or may not be willing to know. And willingness, we know, is where aesthetics imprint themselves on the name of the world. Willingness is how we know what we may love, and why we can decide to hate something dear. I'd tell you about that girlfriend I once had, who then became my wife and then became my ex-wife, and how her hating this record impacted my experience of music more than almost anything, and that the rabbit hole of exploration down which it led me does not yet end, even when I remember her being gone, long ago, in the future that is ours to dream in time, the rain softly beating back the soft waves of the grey river.

Desert Marauders

I will readily, yet reluctantly, confess, I didn't come up with that name. But, well, ain't it just the coolest? "Desert Marauders"? Even cooler, the group who decided their record should be called this (although I don't know who decided what, nor even what decision was made, only that there is this thing named "Desert Marauders", and this thing named this is a thing of music, the sound of music, the object that contains the sound, the object that is a record, the record that records what happened, once, many times) is Art Lande and Rubisa Patrol. I mean, they sound like a bunch of guys in a sandblasted space jeep who roam the edges of the desert and ensure that that which must be safe is safe, that attack that which must be attacked. I imagine bearded faces plastered with black sand, with white earth, with space between them and the edge of the world, the only thing behind them the blinding horizon.

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Like any good group that knows you can never overname something perfectly named (for example, Night Ranger and, also, Iron Maiden, amongst others), the first track from "Desert Marauders" is perfectly named "Rubisa Patrol", because the group that Marauds also Patrols, the desert is also somewhere we are not and will only have tried to have been.  When Ozzy Osbourne sings "Please God Help Me!!!" on "Black Sabbath", from Black Sabbath's "Black Sabbath", he's also enacting the remaining name, the public and the political, that lies outside the personal out of which he sings. The name that is the sign, the sign that makes the name of the world. Desert Marauders maps a world that the musicians patrol, inhabit, dominate, deploy, duplicate in sound from word. There is nothing left to say, nothing less to say, than what they wordlessly leave behind them.

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All good music seems to be plagued by the failure of description. It exceeds all description, but, also, the description of the music exceeds the effort made to know it in words. Yet, there's never a reason not to try; as James Brown crooned, "Nothing beats a try but a fail". The try here is the excellence of the raucous midnight that is the 16 minute opening track, where the piano plants a staccato palm tree in the midst of a sea of sand, and what arises are the cool pool of southpaw trumpet, bass bouncing and then bobbing along the imaginary waves on an imaginary sea, the drums the thunderhead in the distance, the war planes and dreamtime drama of the new day. All of this is the failure to describe itself, only to mimic and homage Miles Davis' best years, from 1967-1975 all in a brief whisper of progressive distancing, de-stancing..

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You can't really find "Desert Marauders" on cd, I don't think. If you buy a turntable and hunt down some used records, you can pick it up on album, which is kind of cool, although probably more obscure than is necessary, because you join yourself to the legion that are their own desert marauders. those fast flipping fingered men who mine the faded cardboarded past of smudged black plastic. But then, this is necessary, so the obscurity is worth everything, even if it means you become someone you thought you'd never mean to be. The record starts, also, in a kind of obscurity, the sound of a banging piano on a simple chord, rhythmic and near, immediate and suggestive of some infinite distance beyond it. A drum trots out, silently rolling in like wind to kick up sand in the face of the blazing sky, the piano standing firm with its mechanical rhythm, one chord, full and round and stern and stoic. A horn whines, it's a trumpet but you might not know it, it might not matter what the horn whining is, it may only mean that what matters is that it whines and whimpers and breathes and burns into space. Of course, this happens for a little bit, there's a drama to building what is to come, cities are not the result of one or many days, but of every day that it takes to take what is empty and forge walls and caves and what links these two forms in the beyond of the world, above ground, reaching all arms up towards the sky.

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The thing, then, that happens, is that the piano changes and swells and advances into a rhythmic romp, a riff open to the new world -- dah-dah-dahhhhh-da-da da-da-dah-dah-dahhhhhhhh -- in a strange time signature and signalling a strange time of the world just then. Just then because of the immediacy of the change and the intensity of the tone and the open ended nature of everything that comes forth, the drums skipping down the side of the mountain and jumping into the sea, the trumpet jabbing out into space as if to knock down the danger at the edge of the desert with its pointed fists and knife-edged knuckles, the bass burrowing deep into the sand and hiding amongst the beetles and worms that sleep in the cool earth. The quiet night of the earth that arises with the cacophonic polyphony that rolls out of the record, of the circle, of the system that is theirs, that is there for us to hear.

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There's more to this record than just the opening track -- and all of it is to be known, to be heard, to feed the mind with the sound that lies inside the mind. But all of it comes after the announcement that the landscape of the moon is the empty desert the patrol will ride and protect. Protect yourself, I say, from what is out there, by venturing into the white empty distance, the black open evening. Everything is there for us all, even when we close our eyes and our eyes become the ears through which we see the dark sky, the open book of the dark sky.

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Interesting, then, that the second track on side one is called "Livre (Near The Sky)" -- a book that lies in proximity, then, to the open air that yawns over us. But what an odd juxtaposition, an impossible imposition that -- that anything is ever "near" the sky -- the sky is up there, always over us, and the only thing anything can be is "in" it. But then, when you mine the desert -- when you ride along the edge of the cursed earth, the crest of the morning and the deep crusted sand that curdles against the sea -- perhaps what you are is only where you are: near the sky, pages upturned towards the yawning night, the wordless dawn of man and of the battle for the end of time.