Friday, January 26, 2007

on floating

Menomena - Wet and Rusting



This past week was a single, drawn-out day. Finals and major projects were due. My sleep patten ranged from two to three hours every night since Sunday, and the result, after weariness, was predominantly a feeling of continuity between each day, as if every full night of sleep were actually a brief nap snatched between more courses. This side of it, I’m (again) coming to accept the axiom “you reap what you sow.” Menomena's track conveys a similar feeling of relaxation in the face irreversibility, of accepting the course of events as they have played out. I discovered them in a Sonic Boom Records newsletter; the Portland "experimental rock" outfit just released Friend and Foe on Barsuk. This track from it makes me float. Something like the way The Most Serene Republic's piano melodies and melding of genres achieves saturation and busyness, a holding of breath underwater in the middle of a distance event (yes, I swim competitively), Menomena applies smoothness with a nautical piano to buoy one to the surface of a swift river. Its current is tugging and insistent, and multicolored layers of sound are fanning out on the surface like oil, but we've already made peace with the order of things by :31. Our heads are leaning back to enjoy that precarious, precious feeling of being without responsibility, without ability to change the course of events flowing by, swiftly and irrevocably, like water.

image by: irana

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