The holiday season is here once again. Snow is settling quietly outside, stockings are being hung, kitchens are thick with the smell of mince pies. Lists are checked and gifts are bought: it’s a time for giving, while we grind our teeth into a fine powder, dredging up the willpower to maintain selfless affection for three sanctioned weeks.
My December is being spent as usual: rounding up waifs and vagrants on the street and ushering them into my beautiful manor, where I can sing carols at them and wash their feet with my hair. After being invited into the dining hall for an afternoon meal, watching Wentworth lift the pewter covers from each platter, one of the little wretches piped in.
“What…what is that?”
The audacity! The cheek! The nerve of the boy! As I was uncovering my bejeweled walking stick to administer a beating the likes of which he would never forget, Wentworth began to describe what lay before them. “Cosmos, sir…” he began with a sneer.
“Drained from the melodic juices of previous works, Cosmos is left to bubble atop of a seething pan of sharp shards of metal, to be later buttered with a mechanical hum. It is then combined with the corpse of Hungarian composer György Ligeti and left on a light simmer, shucking the traditional use of samples for a variation of musique concrète, as organic sounds and original classical instruments are fed into the meal.
“We then make sure to thin all acoustic elements until they become an almost unrecognizable porridge of lock grooves and mathematical precision. Strings are layered overtop of a vast recess of humming silence: a conceptual interpretation of a cosmos that is occasionally sparked to life with the sloth-like passing of a pebble, curving with gravity, only to be plucked back into a black pool of space minutes later, leaving you to dip your toes into the sucking whirlpools of yet even more echoing silence. Once fully cooked in polytonal vibration, this is to be served as a giant, faceless black monolith. Not to be eaten, of course, but to stare down at you forebodingly until you begin to cry.”
The look of doe-eyed panic befell them as they recoiled in terror and bolted in to the white afterglow of the frozen streets.
It’s the same thing every year.