Nothing about Krill is ever unclenched, unless it is to be clenched again, and rapidly. Visual tableaux brought to mind by this record: someone (grimacing) in their early twenties imagining a well-used stress ball gripped in the right hand of a person standing in well-furnished office, person embedded in middle age and the attendant visible and assumed lifestyle solidities that come with that stage of life, as they repeatedly squeeze this ball while a gradual sense of ease invades their face, from the fringes toward the center, mouth fanning out into a kind of travel-agent advertising smile. Like, our actual subject experiencing this thought is immersed in an almost radical kind of inertness: thinking of someone squeezing a stress ball with regards to their own state of mind, as opposed to engaging in any form of action. This is the reflecting and turning over of a problem, with potential solutions (panaceas) considered, visualized, observed, ignored. Marinating in a problem.
Maybe the coldest song ever is called “Solitaire” by Krill, from 2011’s Alam No Hris. The subject describes having been inside a room, playing solitaire, thinking about a past time and past conversations, and having talked about without talking about, and talking about talking about without talking about. It’s recursive, like a rock being skipped across a lake without ever sinking beneath the surface, like a GIF of someone else’s emotional self-immolation. That kind of internal burning — the consumption of being self-consumed — is inverted here. Instead of picking over internal ashes, Krill rotate and swivel, holding a lighter, as if looking more closely at the moment might make action possible.
Concerning this: A Distant Fist Unclenching involves a lot of talking about potential, desired or feared situations: “Is it time to go back inside?” “All I wanted was to hold your foot.” If we are talking about thresholds — the liminality of choice, the gap between thought and action, the prism of unknowing through which all experience is filtered, etc. — then the songs of ADFU dwell exclusively in uncertainty, a mind that constantly poses problems, stacking them as if a pyramid or perhaps a worldview that’s sort of like constantly trying to unscrew a cork while giving up on locating a corkscrew.
“I was confronted with a choice.” “Phantom… huge unblinking eye.” “Judgement… withhold the sentence.” Choice. Choose. Certainty and action: any verb that is past tense, not present or future — leads to disaster. “In the distance, a villager has expired.” “Forget it in the microwave.” Anything heated up explodes. How do we solve the problem of the inherent risks involved in any kind of interaction? Turning around in a circle with a lighter, observing, flicking the flame anew, paralyzed. If you frighten a rabbit badly enough, it will starve to death. What is a desire? How can we trust it, and why should we? On the other side of the darkness between us and the light we hold up to the world is another light. Knausgaard minutiae: “I had a bad day, but it’s ending.” Boy, things are ending. “It ends.” “The villager was well-liked!” Life, considered as such, is the Bayeaux Tapestry. Horror from L to R, taken in flat perspective, deadened. Guernica twice removed. A distant fist, far left corner, locked in a reflex.
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