something that is more or less uncommunicable
Welcome to the 102nd edition of this newsletter!
With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If you want to support my work, you can sign up for my Patreon. This will get you access to exclusive material every week.
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The other day, I looked through the comments on Bandcamp that had been left for one of the albums I had been listening to. There was a recommendation for a different artist, and I decided to follow it. This brought me to Everywhere at the end of time by The Caretaker. I listened to a few samples and thought I'd enjoy it.
I listened to the album, or parts of it (more on this a little bit later) during some of my walks. I started at the beginning, a selection of relatively short pieces that sound a little bit as if one were listening to old records on a record player.
A day later, I decided that I'd skip to the vastly longer pieces. I listened to a number of those for two or maybe three days. They seemed to fit my mood a lot better than the earlier ones (I'll regret writing this shortly). I thought of them as sound pieces more than music. They're infused with static, and sounds are wafting in and out. The perfect soundtrack (at least for me) for a walk at the gloomy ends of my work days.
I don't know what had me look into the album yesterday. I had never read the text underneath the song listing on Bandcamp. I literally didn't know anything about the music.
I suppose in a photo crit, you would call this a cold read.
As it turned out, the album has been causing massive waves over the past years. It has a rather lengthy Wikipedia entry (which, to put this into some perspective, is a lot longer than the one for Robert Frank's The Americans, possibly the most talked about photobook).
I also found a number of articles written by people who decided they needed to listen to the whole album in one sitting, to the write about it. Here is one: "Be warned," Joe Boothby writes, "that this is not a musical piece for the faint of heart".
Turns out that what I had missed when I only bought the album and listened to it much like you might listen to anything else is its concept. It's a piece of music that tries to convey the experience of dementia. In fact, the music comes in sections (Stages), and the artist added an outline to each one. Here's the one for Stage 3:
Here we are presented with some of the last coherent memories before confusion fully rolls in and the grey mists form and fade away. Finest moments have been remembered, the musical flow in places is more confused and tangled. As we progress some singular memories become more disturbed, isolated, broken and distant. These are the last embers of awareness before we enter the post awareness stages.
When I listened to the longer pieces, I started at Stage 4. I had no idea. And honestly, if someone had not told me all of this, I probably would have never figured it out. Or maybe I would have eventually. Maybe I would have figured out the longer arc of the over 6 hours.
I find all of this deeply fascinating. To begin with, I have long maintained that artists should not insist on their audience having a specific experience. You could say that my listening to the longer pieces and my response to it had nothing to do with the intended outcome. And maybe you're right. On the other hand, I responded to the music -- it struck me as deeply meaningful on these gloomy walks (I told you earlier I'd regret writing what I did above).
But I'm also in awe of the sheer ambition behind this work. Trying to convey with music something that is more or less uncommunicable is an incredible artistic goal. And to then have so many people respond to it -- just look at what has been written online -- is a massive success.
This might be the oddest of comparisons, but I'm reminded of Anders Edström's massive Shiotani, a photographic masterpiece that appears to have originated from similar ambition. Like Everywhere at the end of time, it demands a lot from its viewers -- and it delivers.
Coincidentally, someone just sent me an interview with Edström, which contains some unusual parts. The following is not how I approach editing, but now I'm really intrigued:
When I pick images I tend to go for the weak ones. I find that weak pictures are easier to put in a sequence but they also, I feel, live longer. You don’t get tired of them as fast. But sometimes I like to go for a strong one. If there’s a sequence with very weak pictures for a while, and then all of a sudden you want to make something happen, even a small something will feel quite big.
"Politics," George Packer writes, "is almost never a choice between good and evil but rather between two evils, and anyone who engages in political action will end up with dirty hands, distorting the truth if not peddling propaganda; whereas an artist has to aspire to an intellectual and emotional honesty that will drive creative work away from any political line." I'm not sure that I agree with everything in the piece. But read it. There's much to unpack in it. It's important, especially in these times.
Or don't read it.
Nobody should tell you how to approach the world and your own being in it. Especially these days.
Too many people do that already.
In a world where so many people demand our engagement, trying to pull us into this direction -- or maybe that one, it's even more important that we decide how and where we will engage.
We only have limited energy, limited capacity to engage. It's important to be mindful of this.
I'm not much into movies, so I can't say much about them. There was a Q&A with Tilda Swinton published a little while ago that I read for reasons that I can't remember. And I found a really interesting snippet in it that had me think I'd share it. I can't remember what it was. But it also doesn't matter what it was because maybe a different snippet will inspire you.
It's much less important what one is inspired by than to be inspired at all.
Lastly, I also found a conversation about Japanese women photographers, which you want to read.
“Feminism” means different things in the U.S., in France and in Japan, because of course of different histories, societies, different struggles for women to become independent. Many Japanese women photographers have struggled to not (or not only) be domestic, many of them express this in their work, and many had to study or work abroad, at least for a while, in the U.S. or Europe, because it was too hard for them to exist as photographers in Japan. But most of them do not feel comfortable with the label of “feminist”. The issues related to feminism in Japan are quite layered and sensitive.
These are Pauline Vermare's words who now appears to be working on a book about the topic.
And with that I will conclude for today. The first snow has fallen, but the rain will wash it all away. The sun has finally risen far above the horizon that it's light out -- well, "light". Time to start the work day...
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg