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October 10, 2005
pumice and obsidian
Steven R. Smith - Crown of Marches (excerpt)
There's a way to explain the intense appeal of this track, but it involves talking about an Indian movie from 1955 (bear with me). "Pather Panchali", set in the early part of the 20th century, is concerned with a Bengali family that lives in extreme poverty on the outskirts of a village. Filmed in black and white, the narrative of the movie concentrates on the relationships between the children (a daughter and a son) and the parents (husband, wife, older-than-old aunt) and the way they cope with different hardships. The most impressive part of the movie though comes when Apu and Durga (the brother and sister) are trying to find the family's calf, which has wandered off into an expansive field of long grass. They encounter a line of electricity towers (or poles, really) and stand stock still in awe of the size and noise of these totally alien constructions. The only sounds during this sequence are the hum of static in the wires and the wind blowing through the dense Kash flowers (right after that, a train comes roaring through, on tracks that plow through the field). In fact, listening to this movie is probably one of the best ways to experience it- the sounds are emphasized so heavily that it's almost overwhelming (especially when there's also long stretches of silence in the film).
Steven R. Smith's (Hala Strana, Thuja) "Crown of Marches" inspires the same kind of frightened wonderment; this 40 min. drone moves through empty, wasted stretches- sometimes via monsoon-like passages of feedback, sometimes delicately tiptoeing with quick gusts of chimes. "Crown of Marches" is sublime in the traditionally aesthetic way (e.g. in the Kant sense): it is vast, dynamic, and overpowering. It's frightening in the way that it sounds just so ruined and isolated; it's like discovering some kind of dark, complex machine that's been left running, miraculously and strangely, inside an abandoned factory for the past 50 years.
"Crown of Marches" was released recently on (the amazing) Catsup Plate Records. Let me just say a word about the packaging and artwork, because Rob Carmichael (who runs Catsup Plate) has really outdone himself with this one. The CD comes in a hand assembled digipak, with black on black (and some white) silkscreened cover that features a very Japanese art-influenced (and very pretty) rendering of a cloudy mountain range. Looks kind of like a woodcut, actually. Anyway, you can get it for a mere $10 from the label.
Posted by Kevin at October 10, 2005 12:54 AM