CORRECTION
The choreography needs accumulation. The baroque organist and composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, is considered the most influential musician in the history of Western music, not just because of the meticulous virtuosity of his pieces, but because of the scope of his compositions. Lawrence Hayward, front man and soul of the band Felt, who doesn’t appear in any musicological index of the twentieth century, moved from postpunk garage to lounge jazz and ambient, with stops along the way in new wave and folk, across a limited selection of songs. These two artists, of vastly dissimilar projects, converged unexpectedly in harmonies of The Band Project in the 80s and 90s. Inspired by the project of his friend and rival, Lawrence, the mentor planned a musical project that, straddling the line between Felt’s rhythmicity and Bach’s aspiration to infinity, spanning twelve years and twelve albums, would explore the twelve connections that, for him, constituted the chain of life, unfazed by successive accusations of forgetting where he came from, of anthroposophism, of art for art’s sake, of gnosis, and of sexual conservatism that would belatedly mark the reception of his albums. Illness forced him to prolong the completion of his work from twelve to thirteen years, a number charged with interpretations, though entirely lacking the symmetry he was seeking.
In its first five years, The Band Project seemed like it was going to reach a wide audience; its first three albums shot up the sales charts and the imperial media took great pleasure in making irrelevant comparisons between Band Project shows and those of progressive rockers who in decades past raked in millions playing sold-out stadiums. As the years went by, the fundamental tension the mentor maintained between rawness and artifice became more relevant in popular music; the catchy synthesizer riffs and the guitar atmospheres clashed with the explosion, the bass drum, and the scream, in such a way that the mentor became a musician only invited to perform by anti-imperial conservation institutions. The Band Project’s later albums were released on record labels of the worker’s collective; there were no more shows or sales, the mentor shut himself away in his studio and not a single reporter had any interest in finding out why. His death would change all of that. The year before, out of nowhere, there had been a rash of famous dance bands claiming him explicitly as musical model, and that pretense of authenticity would establish the supreme value of a new imitative aesthetic. Continental clubs incessantly played new danceable electronica versions of some of The Band Project’s anthems and pop music radio stations even played some singles from The Band’s second album, itself an homage to and, at the same time, a break from The Band Project. The fact that those albums are now available again is due in large part to the interest of fans who demand more and more of The Band’s material and who unconsciously see in that experimental voice that leads the choral and percussive masses a prefiguration of their own vocalist, who nevertheless, unlike the guitarist, never knew the mentor. “We musicians envy the class struggle, for none of you will ever listen to us the way you listen to your political leaders,” the vocalist said ironically in front of the crowd of kids who gathered in that southern desert valley for the release of The Band’s last album. Only a few people recognized those words, the words with which the mentor brought to an end his final interview, when, the day before his death, he announced that his last album would be left unfinished: “We musicians envy the sacred, because of the way people who believe in the existence of some intangible thing listen.”
The choreography needs displacement. I am he and he is the other, and the other insists that she come back to bed, instead of repeatedly stretching her groin, so the muscles send blood to the tendons in her foot.
With blood he, the boy, and the old mother were weaving string, like pancora rippling the surface of the water on the river. Following the marks the rain left on the fields, the old mother went to the place where she kept her stones, everyone’s stones, and all the other stones we could throw at the security guards of the paper mill.
He, recording, realized that it wasn’t his voice that hung in the air, but an echo. His problem, he’d tell the other in the middle of a heated discussion, when she and the two bassists had gone out to walk along the canals of that vacationing city, was that they were shut inside a glass box where their voices reverberated back at them, instead of finding a way to be exalted, exposed, released like insects gnawing their way deep into underground aquifers to protect themselves, to be knotted to the sticks that weiraos and coypus gathered to avoid the currents; the voice had to get lost so that someone else could discover the name of the person who lets it go when they hear it.
He, recording, didn’t expect anyone to understand his poorly translated words. So they shook hands when the other unexpectedly took out his keys, a bottle, hoisted a recording device onto his shoulder, and asked that he go with him. He rented a boat, pushed it out from the shore where the water made their legs glow, and said: now sing.
I, on the other hand, can only come face to face with the narrowing of these eyes in the homogenous, hard, and unbreakable surface where the blinking of my eyes writes and erases. The autobiography of The Band, underlined with the lowering of a brow, is neither the story of the other nor of her enlightenment, nor a character study starring the vocalist, no, it is the barbed wire, the streams, the tracks, the signs, and the pathways that divide these lands as they connect them. The mass of flesh, weaving together muscle, skin, tendon, vein, lymph, nameless matter, nerve, and bone doesn’t constitute a specific organ: it is our body.
He, the boy, squinted his eyes but couldn’t shut them when, coming down from the high boughs, he saw some unfamiliar birds pecking at the fingernails of the old mother, who had been tossed out of a truck belonging to the company that owned all the paper mills onto a pile of burnt leaves, between his and his twin brother’s trees.
He, singing, remembered that the old mother’s footsteps had to encompass not just the hill where they were walking but the river they were skirting and the volcano where they were heading, not just the kawellu that showed him the way, but also the witranalwe clutching the eggs in its talons, making him want to turn back, the pillanes and the imps, the insomniacs and the snorers. He, in his prison, was unable to privilege in his memory the old mother’s remains over the way she moved when she danced and sang, for to do so would be to forget that his own unknown name included her name, the name of the chicken and the goats, of the old mother’s mother’s mother, and of that place that is in all places.
“To each their own tree,” the percussionist would say in her island language when it dawned on her that he, tired, had brought her to live on lands he’d bought for her.
“For a tree isn’t a tree, it’s a vertical forest, a conjuring of boughs, insects, birds, fungi, larvae, vapors, and other creatures that don’t want to be seen and we don’t want to see.”
He, tired, sat down in his chair and never got up again.
I am he. He grew old because she, though she wouldn’t know how to say the name to him, had heard it. I, in hers and in all places, keep on blinking: what I previously set out before me to pulsate in the sun only appears now if I shut my eyes.