A few years ago, when I got into basketball, I noticed something about the way teams played on a given night. When someone looked good, they were ‘in rhythm.’ There was a rhythm in the way a hot player would dribble, drive and pull up for a shot, and a larger rhythm in the way a team would push or slow down tempo and would hold the ball or execute plays quickly. The way to beat a given team on a given night: to get them out of their rhythm.
On Charles Spearin’s neat album “The Happiness Project,” there’s a song based on an interview with a deaf woman. Speaking of the way she responded to her first perceptions of sound after receiving a cochlear implant, she says “all of a sudden, I felt my body moving inside.” Coming across sound for the first time as an adult, it struck her as a physical sensation.
Activities of Dust is a studio project of drummer Doug Scharin. He’ll show up a couple more times, including on what is probably my favorite album ever (June of 44’s Four Great Points, for those keeping score at home). According to the interwebs, Scharin had hours of feedback taped, and brought in Jeff Parker (of Tortoise), Bernie Worrell and Bill Laswell to help put the album together. There are four songs that span 45 minutes, and a short dvd.
Around that time I got into basketball, I developed what is still my functioning Theory of the Universe (which I know you’re really interested in, but fuck you, it’s my blog): that Everything Is Rhythm. The most obvious example is the human heart (beating, presumably, in 3/4). But almost by definition, anything that moves linearly through this 4th dimension with the rest of us has to be operating on some sort of rhythm. Even in a block of lead, the atoms are dancing to a particular beat. It’s actually what that rhythm is that determines what something (or someone) is, and how it affects and interacts with other things.
Appropriately named, Activities of Dust is about the ghost in the amplification machine. Feedback pulses, ebbs and flows across the album while instruments support and dance across the top of it. Not unlike being underwater, washes of sound are supplemented by melodies that fade in and out.
It’s not a life-changing album, but every one of these contributors has been a part of at least one of those. It’s an album about finding the music inside a block of lead, about playing the right song at the dance of the atoms. The source material may be the result of machines interacting, but the final product finds the nature in it.
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Our Next Episode: Aesop Rock (“Float” and “Daylight EP”)
That was 10 min of Fucking Awesomeness!! -mario
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