The homeless lady who sits outside the yuppie coffee bar on the corner of my street assures passers-by that the end is coming. I think she's desperate to convey her message. Though the United States is saber-rattling with the People's Republic of China, it seems that everyone has overcome their millennial tension, and the eve of destruction has turned to a morning of devil-may-care optimism.
Collectively, we're overjoyed that, without much effort or awareness, we kicked the Beast's ass. The Beast, as prophesied by some locust-muncher out in the Negev Desert thousands of years ago, was supposed to arrive last year and annihilate us before being mightily smote by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I missed this. Living as I do in America's capital, the seat of iniquity and corruption, I should have had ring-side seats to the most righteous beatdown of all time. I even missed witnessing the Rapture, the faithful's assumption to the right hand of God that was suppose to occur just before Satan's saurian shredded all of creation.
The homeless lady implores those who walk by to believe. "You've not gotten away with your godless existence," she seems to be saying, as she sits surrounded by two shopping carts and two decades' worth of daily newspapers. She never gets ranty or violent, and by and large, is on the presentable side of destitution. This way, one doesn't feel sullied when approaching her personal space to drop a dollar into her plastic cup. She always tells you you're blessed by Our Redeemer and wishes you a beautiful day. Nonetheless, she tirelessly reminds everyone that the end is coming.
She's right, of course. At some future point, by virtue of the inescapable effects of entropy, the universe will collapse in on itself and unimaginable havoc will ensue. But that's about a trillion years into the future, so I'm not going to let that distant apocalypse disturb me too much. However, the homeless lady's admonitions do remind me that, though I won't likely be around to fall victim to the utter destruction of time and space-- the reducing of everything to an infinitely small and massive energy blip-- some things around me now are evanescent, transitory, limited.
These evanescent, transitory, limited things are the stuff of poetry. They're the familiar beauty of Dante's Beatrice, the redeeming orchestral tuttis in the third movement of Saint-Saens' Organ Symphony, the consummate swish of Ted Nugent's cat tail. To this incomplete list, we must now add several moments from Arovane's Tides.
After his Pole-ish remix of Various Artists' "No. 8" and his Autechre-indebted debut, Atol Scrap, I was ready for Uwe Zahn (aka Arovane) to express himself rather than pay homage to his IDM heroes. And instead of drawing inspiration from the insides of his iMac or the boom-bip sounds of yesterday's tomorrow, Zahn dug the sea. Yup, a trip to the French coast fired Zahn up to combine ambient undulations of a vaguely Vini Reilly guitar with ebbing and flowing beats. After the harpsichordian trills of "Theme," the title track focuses on the subject of Zahn's meticulous study. And study he has.
These brief tracks need no remixing or extending for club action; they're far from being the background to bong hits. Their encapsulation of the hypnotic motion of water and the uniqueness of each wave marks Arovane out as unquestionably in the same small class of self-assured and talented musicians as Boards of Canada and Jake Mandell.
"Tomorrow Morning" is a windchime melody surrounded by cicada strings and the almost imperceptible hum of moth wings. It gives way to the Bill Frisell-like impressionist guitar lines of "Seaside." "The Storm" begins as another harpsichord etude before torrential rain pours down in the form of pounding-as-John Bonham beats. Zahn returns to tranquility with "Deauville," enhanced by oddly graceful squarks of seagulls gliding overhead.
Zahn has resisted the temptation to describe in glitch minimalism the hydrodymanics of solar and lunar influences on our oceans. And surprisingly, Tides is not an amateur attempt at eco-journalism (Zahn's seashore isn't littered with garbage and melanoma-hungry humans)-- it's an artist's impression of an earthly paradise.
The prominence Zahn gives to the harpsichord through this album exemplifies the deliberate, contemplative unrealism he wishes to communicate; he's taking a sound commonly associated with Baroque parlors and betwixt-minuet trysts, and attempting to reprogram our associations. And while I can't say that I've been wholly won over by this aspect of Tides, I have been-- and continue to be-- astounded by the rare reflective grace of the music. So let the end come. Satan's stormtrooper will destroy me, never less than charmed by the ceaseless undulation of Tides. I can conceive of far worse ways to go.
