“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, January 14, 2016

Of Riddles

Someone asks (below) whether I take the term riddle seriously in Dark Ecology.

Yes. I reference mostly Inuit riddles and Old English riddles, for sure. I was talking with Björk about riddles. After we'd written our piece, I realized that this kind of riddling is exactly how she writes lyrics. Riddles preserve the withdrawnness of a thing. That's why “Hyperballad” is one of the greatest love songs of all time. Because it never says so.

This is my very very favorite version. I just can't stop hearing the mantra-like repetition of “closed, or open?” as the most colossal, spine chilling riddle, this perfect mix of relentlessness and curiosity...

And the way that enveloped sine wave riff sinuously snakes around it, inaudible, then crescendoing, taking you around and around the loop, like an artefact of the voice that has deliquesced into low resonance filtering, the other way, a chiasmic contrary motion.




2 comments:

D. E.M. said...

Anglo Saxon riddles are so grand. "Say who I am".
And that riddles bear affinity with sieves (riddled w/ holes) & sieves in turn with ancient roman herbalism (only ick the ones that grow up through the sacred sieve's holes).

D. E.M. said...

Ick?! Pick pick.
The p slipped through.