“My pops used to say it reminded him of bebop
I said well daddy, don’t you know that things go in cycles”
– Kamaal Ibn John Fareed a.k.a. Q-Tip f.k.a. Jonathan Davis
Heavy enough snowfall dampens everything, drowning out even its own voice, the wind that brought it down to earth. Against all sacred notions of perception, it’s as close to complete silence as any able-eared entity will ever know, and yet there it is, sticking, coating, accumulating; alive, vibrantly/violently so, it should howl, moan, whistle, wail, or at least hum, but all it does is inhale, drawing in the air it’s expected to fill with sounds of life, love, work, rage, or death, never exhaling its one-sided breath.
If its music is a static reception, its texture is a fleeting sting, searing cold, wet, numbing us to nothingness. All its fractal dimensions and hexagonal symmetries equate to little more than dull blades scraping desensitized surfaces, nubby nails scratching shell-shocked skins. The sublime’s sublimated. A unicorn’s unique. A snowflake’s something else.
Trudging through the tundra in search of rations, not food stock — the pantry’s full — but rations of reality — sanity stock of sounds and feelings — explorers need more than periodically planted tethers to find their way home, for those are as futile as boot prints and breadcrumb trails here, along The Path.
This, then, is that, the “um” in “ad infinitum,” the wonder of the wanderer imagining oneself alone on a desert island, the hot sand an oasis in cold snow. If you can bring only three albums, make damn sure to pack some mean synths and an MPC (or whatever Olof Melander’s sampler of choice is), then go jazz hands all over that sumbitch, because after all, there is no island except Antarctica, and how the hell else are you gonna stay warm?
More about: Olof Melander
