My favorite music from 2020 is All Thoughts Fly, a forty minute instrumental album with one huge instrument raging against its walls.
All Thoughts Fly is written so that there’s room for nothing else except a quarter-comma Meantone-tempered pipe organ. A second instrument would have killed it, and vocals would have buried it. Thomas Aquinas once said “hominem unius libri timeo” (“I fear the man of a single book”). Of All Thoughts Fly he might have said “hominem unius organum musicum timeo”. It’s formidable in what it achieves with a limited set of tones: maximal miminalism. At times it’s forceful enough to punch a hole through reality, but it also attains moments of subtlety, and even sublimity. Let go of the safety rails and listen to it.
It’s inspired by Sacro Bosco, or “Sacred Grove”, a late Renaissance Italian garden scattered with huge, grotesque statues. These depict whales, bears, dragons, mythological figures, a man-eating elephant, disconnected body parts, and more. The perverse statuary is marred by cryptic irruptions of poetry. “And all other marvels prized before by the world yield to the Sacred Wood that resembles only itself and nothing else.”
The sculptor (credited as Simone Moschino) did with stone what Hieronymous Bosch did with paint, but while Bosch was motivated by faith, Sacro Bosco’s inspiration was more earthly (and sad). The park was commissioned by condottiero Pier Francesco Orsini in an act of mourning for his deceased wife Giulia Farnese, and while the precise meaning of the deranged strew of statues is lost to time; they are probably either manifestations of grief or expressions of hope: that are bigger and weirder things than man and his pathetic threescore-and-ten life, and death is not final. It’s notable that many of the monuments (Orcus, Cerberus, and Persephone) relate to underworld and the afterlife.
So what’s the album like?
It’s not classical music. The pieces are structured pretty simply and rely on force more than intricacy. There are suggestions of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Sigur Ros, Vangelis, SUNN O))), Berlin-era Bowie instrumentals and so on. Even when classical music is hinted at, it’s closer to Phillip Glass than, say, Bach.
And then there are moments that hint at nothing, where the music sounds like nothing you’ve heard before. Von Hausswolff allows you to climb a ladder of familiarity and then kicks the ladder away. Soundscapes pulse like the heaving flank of an alien beast, the air streaming from Hausswolff’s pipes like bubbles from the gills of a fish. In reality, alien things are everywhere. Gardens are fantastical, and Sacro Bosco’s monuments are largely drawn from real, living creatures.
“Theater of Nature” begins with ripples fluttering across a tonal sea, before progressing into a sequence of four-and-five note ostinatos, puncturing the background drone in huge knife-thrusts of sound. The song is stumbles along in a 5/4 meter, capturing the feeling of the park: man’s purpose knocked astray by nature. We pave a courtyard, but plants grow through the cracks. A man marries a woman, but she dies. There are piercing treble notes that sound like synthesisers. They glide high across the rest of the sound, hints of a heaven you hope exists but cannot reach.
“Dolore di Orsini” is a keening lament from Pier Francesco ‘Vicino’ Orsini to his lost love. Very simple and pared back. All Thoughts Fly breaks things down and builds them up again, again and again, as if letting you catch your breath.
“Sacro Bosco” is one of the higher builds: big, ugly, dark, and challenging. Black gasps of air swirl out like a the breath of a steam engine. But soon the mechanical rhythm is overwhelmed by an ecstatic wall of sound; nature is falling down, falling in, eating up man and his works. It’s pretty violent, and violently pretty.
“Persephone” takes us back to minimalistic sadness. A nearly empty box, with a little lost melody wandering inside it.
“Entering” sounds like a compost of all the proceeding pieces: gathering up “Sacro Bosco”‘s noise and “Dolore di Orsini’s” melancholy and “Persefone’s” melodicism and even a reprise of the “Theater of Nature” theme, along with some beater-box percussion. The track is two minutes long and comes in and out like a wave, as if clearing the ground for the next track.
The twelve-minute “All Thoughts Fly” is high-vaulted and airy, like a cathedral. Hausswolff constructs clouds inside the space, and dashes them to raindrops. The oscillating arpeggios produce a mild hypnotic effect. This is the longest track, and the most Glassian – it was like listening to an outtake from Koyaanisqatsi at times.
The song (and album) title come from the most famous part of Sacro Bosco, the vast mouth of Orcus, the Roman god of the underworld. He was largely worshipped in rural provinces, which allowed him to survive for a time after Rome’s urban dieties fell before Christianity (it’s fitting that his most famous monument is surrounded by plants). The garden is private thoughts and feelings projected into the crudest biggest form imaginable, and the acoustics inside Orcus’s mouth mean that whispers inside are clearly heard by those outside. Hence the inscription on Orcus’s upper lip, “All Thoughts Fly”.
Sacro Bosco’s patron would have agreed that there’s beauty in largeness, and in music there’s nothing larger (or louder) than a pipe organ. They’re bestial. The biggest ones barely seem like instruments: they’re more like engineering feats akin to suspension bridges. The Boardwalk Hall Auditorium Organ in Atlantic City, New Jersey has eighteen meter long pipes weighing over a ton each, cold-rolled on machines normally used to make battleships. These immense pipes play notes so deep that they don’t even sound like notes, they’re like jackhammers or helicopters. The first time an organist hit the lowest register C, a shower of tiles fell from the roof.
They’re the most quintessentially masculine instrument, so maybe it takes a woman to wring texture and sensitivity out of them, as Von Hausswolff does on the haunting coda “Outside the Gate (for Bruna)”, which might be the album highlight.
Von Hausswolff could be described as a heavy metal musician who doesn’t play heavy metal. Indeed, her career has been marked by absurd moral panics that actual heavy metal seldom inspires anymore. In 2013, leftist groups attempted to deplatform her as a “fascist sympathizer” for the crime of wearing a Burzum shirt, and in 2021, she attracted protests and boycotts in France because of a hilariously tame reference to the Devil in her lyrics.
Her fash-symp Satanism sounds better with each new release. 2010’s Singing from the Grave, doesn’t stand out as exceptional. 2013’s Ceremony was massive and grand, though some of the “Pitchfork metal”* moments irked me. I like most of what I’ve heard from her next few releases, but here she’s delivered something truly complete and remarkable. All Thoughts Fly fills the the universe, and hints at luminous things beyond it.
(*What do I mean by “Pitchfork metal”? It’s a particular style that’s hard to describe, but bear with me. Imagine a Pitchfork writer with VERY thick framed glasses. No, thicker than that. You’re still not imagining how thick his frames are. Imagine someone with his head fully encased by a gigantic block of cellulose like an insect trapped in amber. But he has a tiny hole drilled into his immense frames, and a wire descending down to his ear. The music he’s listening to is Pitchfork metal.)
Michael Jackson’s recording career came to a sad conclusion on October 30, 2001. He should have released Invincible in September, when it would have only been the second greatest tragedy of the month.
It’s not an album, it’s a PR statement: “don’t listen to what everyone’s saying about me. I’m a normal guy!” By 2000 Jacko’s public image was absolutely out of control and he’d had two options: either rebrand himself as a Howard Hughes-type freakshow, or tamp down the weirdness somehow.
He made the boring choice, or perhaps Sony made it for him. The label had a lot invested both in Invincible’s success (its thirty million dollar production cost remains an industry record, though Michael demanded still more money and accused CEO Tommy Mottola of racism when he wouldn’t pay), and in its main star not appearing like a total lunatic. Before anything else, this album tries to not rock the boat, and unfortunately it succeeds.
Invincible wants to be vapid millennial R&B and follows a formula. Ballads, soft strings, “edgy” songs containing glitched-up funk beats and rapping, guest spots by normal wholesome dudes (ie, R Kelly), lyrics spat out by a Platitude Bot 2000, and when ideas run out (almost immediately) still more ballads. Most albums are accidentally forgettable. Not so here. Invincible was conceived and executed with that goal in mind.
The biggest problem with Invincible – aside from the fact that there’s nothing creepier than a man loudly insisting that he’s normal – is that it’s extremely dull. Who wants to hear a former titan ripping off people who were ripping him off to begin with? The lyrics (aside from “Privacy” and the nauseating “The Lost Children”) are just all about love and romance, and the music just blurs into Boyz II Men (emphasis on the boys, I guess).
Sony was heavily invested, but the same can’t be said for Michael. He barely seems to be in the studio, and he projects not an iota of coolness or attitude into these songs (which aren’t worthy of them in any event). He moon-shuffles. He’s a Smooth Criminal whose offense is an unpaid parking ticket, a Speed Demon doing 62 in a 60 zone. I aspire to someday be this indifferent to thirty million dollars landing in my checking account.
Needless to say, he didn’t tour off Invincible, sparing us the comedy of seeing “You Rock My World” on a setlist with “Don’t Stop ‘Till You Get Enough”. He made a few media appearances. For example, in 2003 the deputies of Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Dept got a unique meet-and-greet photo session when Mr Normal was charged with seven counts of child sexual abuse.
His songwriting talent had already started to crumble on HIStory and here it’s completely gone. Sixteen bad songs. No good ones. If you want to hear music like “Billie Jean”, you’re in luck. In 1982 Michael Jackson released an album called Thriller, and by sheer coincidence it has a song that sounds exactly like “Billie Jean”! It even has the same title! Don’t listen to this album, though. It’s shit.
I am sorry if I seem to dislike Michael personally. I actually don’t understand him at all. The more I learn and read and expose myself to his personality, the more my noncomprehension deepens. There’s something alien and unreachable about him. But I am repulsed by the parts I see: the glimpses of squirming tentacles behind an impenetrable shell.
I am strongly persuaded that he molested children. This casts much of his character (his philanthropy, his generosity) in a different light: the deeds of a manipulator trying to escape consequences. It makes his war against the paparazzi far less sympathetic. I hear “You keep on stalking me, invading my privacy. Won’t you just let me be.“, remember Robson’s story about finding bloodstains in his underwear, and accept that maybe Michael’s privacy should, in fact, have been invaded. The paranoid tenor of his later work seems less fanciful: it was no delusion, because Michael actually had everything to hide.
His fans are awful. He was incredibly talented as a musician, but in the 90s this talent was eclipsed by a different skill: building and leading a kind of cult. He is a fascinating example of a secular religious icon, and to this day, living Thriller zombies haunt Twitter and Tiktok, circulating his apologetics. The basic thrust is that everything that went wrong for Michael – his finances, his appearance, his death – was someone else’s fault.
There’s a grain of truth to this. Michael Jackson never had a chance at living a normal life. But his fans ignore Michael’s agency (and four hundred million records sold buys a lot of agency), objectifying him to the level of a puppet.
Did Conrad Murray cause his death? Yes, the Jackobots say. He gave him surgical anesthetic as a sleeping aid! Bad doctor! They don’t ask the next question: who hired Conrad Murray to do this? Answer: Michael. They also don’t ask what would have happened if Murray had refused this stupid and insane order. Answer: Michael would have fired him, and found a different doctor.
The same can be said for the ruin of Michael’s face, his oversized chin implant, the nose whittled away like a blade, etc. Unneeded operations. But what would be the point of a plastic surgeon refusing to perform them? Michael had endless money to indulge his body dysmorphia. He would just go to someone else. The problem was always Michael. His story is one of tragedy, victimization, and self-destruction.
But self-destructive people can make fascinating art, and this was Michael’s saving grace. I’d like to pretend his recording career ended with HIStory. That album, like the one before, was a paranoid, sweaty jumble of blame-laying and resentment. Disturbing though it was, it made for compelling listening. You felt you were getting ringside seats for a man’s breakdown, and you got some strong songs, too: “Scream” and “Stranger in Moscow” kick the shit out of everything on this album. There’s a class of words in English better known by their opposites (gruntled, hinged, domitable, and so on). Michael Jackson’s last album is very vincible indeed.
Garfield only has value as a deconstruction of itself. Jazz/R&B label GRP Records accidentally discovered this fundamental fact about the universe in 1991, when they released Am I Cool Or What?, the first ever Garfield concept album.
“Garfield concept album” sounds like a 4chan musical shitpost like MoonMan. Incredibly it’s a real product that was released on both cassette and CD, for a double dose of Garfield madness.
A cynical mind might suspect that the Garfield mythos cannot support a full-blown concept album. The character isn’t exactly Ziggy Stardust: Garfield is to comics what “Jim Davis” is to names, a desolate TS Eliot wasteland of unfettered blandness. I was a Garfield fan for ten seconds in 1997 because it replaced a comic I hated (Cathy) in the Sunday funnies. Then I actually read it and realized I’d cured a toenail disease with an amputation. It was the least funny thing I had ever seen. You can’t even use it as lavatory paper, because any paper containing Garfield has shit on it by definition.
Want to know why Garfield is bad? It’s often asserted that this is the all-time funniest Garfield strip…
Yes, I agree it’s funny. But it has nothing to do with Garfield. He is pointless. Not only could you cut him out with scissors without affecting the gag, he actually makes it worse by being there. (Why is he reacting in disappointment? Was he hoping to hear a long sponsored message?) It’s peabrained nonsense, even within its own universe.
The true load-bearing wall of Garfield is Jon Arbuckle, whose character trait (neurotic insecurity) at least enables things to happen. Garfield, by contrast, is a blob. Take Jon out of Garfield and the comic collapses into a black hole: take Garfield out of Garfield and it stays the same or becomes funnier.
What can you do with a character so bland? What can’t you do? GRP’s pitch meeting must have gone like this:
“Our market research team has identified four traits with the core Garfield brand: he’s lazy, he’s fat, he eats lasagne, and he hates Mondays. If we took each of those traits and wrote a song about it we’d have almost 50% of 1/2 of a real, honest to God album! Ka-ching! This is an even better idea than our Samuel ‘Screech’ Powers prog-rock suite!”
Obviously they had to pad it out some. Neither “I Love It When I’m Naughty” and “Next to You I’m Even Better” have anything to do with Garfield. I think they were included because they were written by a person called Catte Adams, by which standard Cat Stevens, Jon Bon Jovi, and One Direction should be on here. (Get it? OD? Odie? If Jim Davis could write KWALITY JOKES like that, the comic would be cooking with gas.)
I would call the music an afterthought but that would incorrectly imply that any sort of thinking was involved. It’s very cheesy and cheap, with sampled lifeless drums that sound like they’re coming off a midi keyboard. It doesn’t sound close to jazz, it’s more like New Kids On The Block or Billie Ocean or something. “Shake Your Paw” has a stuttered horn sample (think “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes) but that’s the only musical point of interest I can recall.
What’s amazing is that they recruited a stable of R&B/soul greats to make this turd. BB King. The Temptations. Natalie Cole. Just how broke were those guys by 1991? That leads to a fascinating possibility: with the demise of the music industry, there has never been a better time to recruit legendary musicians for cheap. Who’s with me? The world must hear Am I Cool Or What? II.
