Howlround - The Debatable Lands

Russell Cuzner over at The Quietus, a site that's always given me more than I expected and less than what I hoped for, has a writing style that could be best be described as "simultaneously pinched and diarrhetic." That is to say his style feels very precise, but also very random. To put it more bluntly, I have no idea what he's fucking talking about half the time.

Our collectively rested and newly revived listening powers were at their keenest as water coursed anew through dry plumbing while chattering servers booted and backed up rendering artful the accidental sounds of our surroundings.

The end of that sentence has prose so purple that even Prince would have been like, dude, that might be a little too much (because Prince likes Purple! Get it! He also liked making his wife pretend their baby hadn't just died so she wouldn't fuck up his interview with Oprah!). And a comma before rendering would have saved readers from having to double back and re-read the sentence to understand what he was saying. Here's another example.

While we were all prepared to value sounds that are found, we realised that the fervency with which we listened to the unsourced aura was greater due to its mystery - had we known it was the building our sensitivity would have been sapped. And so, listening with uncertainty is the mode we have adopted in selecting this month’s Rum highlights, letting ourselves be guided more by each sound’s narrative and less by its source.

Yeah man, like totally. Of course, he spends almost the entirety of the article telling us all about the sound's sources. So whatever. Cuzner writing reminds me of something a teacher used to yell at us. "Don't try to sound smart. Either be smart, or don't be smart. But don't try." Cuzner's writing resembles sitting through a toddler attempting to tell you a joke. It's not that their not capable of doing it well, but in their need to overreach, to do more than they're capable of, they just end up going on way too long and kind of failing in the process. In Cuzner's case, that means attempting to sound lyrical and profound, but instead ends up sounding vague and like he's not really sure how to use the language (that change in verb tense in the first sentence's introductory clause--that "are" should be "were," Russ).

But then maybe his prose is meant to be as abrasive and annoying as the music he tends to champion. And while I'm not a fan of annoying writing, I'm a big fan of annoying music. And holy fuck is Howlround annoying. I love it.

I'm going to spare you the backstory on this album. Backstories are, after all, one of the ways in which experimental music folks provide a context, that is to say a narrative, around music that doesn't have much of either on its own. I think music writers like to use music like this as a way to stretch out and indulge, to project their own poetic impulses onto the blank(er, compared to most music) canvas provide to them. (I know I always liked to, anyway.) But I'm not going to do any of that here (you're welcome). The Debatable Lands sounds like a silicon aneurysm (okay, maybe I'll do a little bit). It makes more-famous challenging things like Metal Machine Music sound like (insert example of innocuous new-age-y sounding thing here). It could clear a room in minutes, get you fired from your coffee shop if you played it over the speakers, and makes my ears feel the way strobe lights make my eyes feel. It would make a great soundtrack to a panic attack. If you played it while fucking, your children would be born with inexplicable tremors in all of their muscles. It is extreme to the point where beauty and banality intersect. And in an era where most people's motivation--socially, creatively, occupationally--is to try and be liked by as many people as possible, to the point of beige-ing out themselves into they are nearly indistinguishable from the chair they're sitting in, an album like this is a brave act of insurrection. Power to the Howlrounds.