This Week’s Reading
The Review’s Review: Nocturne Vibes
By The Paris Review
Added to “Gen X Soft Club” Are.na channel by Evan Collins.
I love this time of year. It takes a little while to adjust to the shorter days, but soon I settle into and relish the long dark hours. Some evenings I turn out the lamps, except for the dim reddish one, lie on the sofa, and listen to terrifying music. I love to feel my heart pound, my stomach drop, my blood move backward. I remember as a child encasing my head in my dad’s enormous leather headphones and listening to his Hawkwind, Kate Bush, Pink Floyd, and Captain Beefheart records in the dark. The padded headphones were a helmet and the spooky eccentric sounds they emitted conjured a nocturnal universe that I soared and tumbled through alone, so alone. Over the years my repertoire of spine-chilling night music has grown and includes Scott Walker, Krzysztof Penderecki, Pan Daijing, Pauline Oliveros, Swans, and Aïsha Devi. A few years ago I splashed out on a ticket for Only the Sound Remains at the Opéra Garnier in Paris. Inspired by Noh theater and based on translated texts by Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, this musical work by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho was unlike any performance I’ve ever seen. So still, so minimal, so slow, and the auditorium was dark, so dark; cell by cell I was slowly blotted out. It was intensely unnerving yet weirdly consoling at the same time. Last night, after gnawing on some leftover sticky chicken and poking at eye-wateringly astringent red cabbage, I lay down and communed with the spectral sounds of Lichtbogen and Petals (performed here by the unsurpassable Imke Frank) and within moments I was overcome with the same feelings of terror, exhilaration, curiosity, and willful independence that swarmed around me as a small child. Bliss. —Claire-Louise Bennett (Read Claire-Louise Bennett in conversation with Lauren Elkin here.)
