Music is overrated.

John Cage's 4'33'' performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra (38.5 MB movie from Ubuweb).

I wrote about this piece before. When I saw the film of the performance at London's Barbican Centre 4'33'' suddenly reminded me of an excerpt from a church service. I mean the moment when the pastor has finished his explicit prayer and when he says to the fold:

For maybe ten seconds everyone tries to be silent now and I have always felt an extremely oppressive atmosphere in these few moments. I could never pray for anything and somehow this gave me a bad conscience. I know now what I would pray for during a performance of 4'33''. That the bloody thing should stop immediately. And the greatest about this prayer is that it will finally even be answered.

The funny thing about the performance is that the people seem to feel quite similarly. The applause after the piece is extraordinary long and frenetic. The audience enjoys the clapping much more than the applause after a conventional piece of music. It is the release from the false silence. Come to think of it, 4'33'' culminates in the applause of the audience.

I'd like to make a mixtape where each song ends with the same word with which the following song starts. Let's make a database then. There are about 350 albums in my possession with lyrics sheets (I am surprised how low this number is. Less than one in every seven). That will make 3,500 songs altogether if there are ten songs per album. 3,500 new entries with album reference, song title, first word and last word. That could be a good pastime during the next three days of Pentecoast. The weather probably will be bad so why not?

What would be good choices for A and B? Birth and death? Woman and man? I and you? Here and there?

Will there be enough choices for succeeding songs to make a tape with a nice flow?

I started reading Ian MacDonald on the songs of the White Album and I think it was on Helter Skelter that he mentioned something interesting. He wrote that from 1962 onwards the Beatles doubled the power of their amplifiers every year. They did this to drown out the screaming girls who made such a lot of noise at the concerts that you couldn't hear the music anymore. Apparently that was the beginning of heavy metal. Blame this aberration on those teenage girls then.

Driving to work this morning I listened to one of the CDs in my 1993 best of list. The Apartments Drift. The music clicked immediately. I was taken back to 1994. The year I met Catherine. Our first holiday trip was to les Landes in the South-West of France, the sandy soil South of Bordeaux. The gîte, the pine woods near the coast, the ruby colour of the Graves. It was all there in my mind's eye. I even had the taste of the Basque omelette on my palate.

But not only did I go on a nostalgy trip of that specific year but I started pondering on the transitoriness of life in general. An aunt of mine is in the hospice. I thought how incredibly sad it is that my second youngest aunt, who always seemed like an elder sister is about to leave this world. And that there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.

All this when listening to this lush sounding indie guitar pop CD by the Apartments which have this lightness, innocence, freshness and the gift for melody and wistfulness that only bands from down under seem to have. Is there a reason for this? Maybe the weather? The sunshine in specific? There are many more great records to relisten to from 1993. I am very much looking forward to them. 1993, what a terrific year in music. The next album on my list is the sugargliders compilation.

Translation: Lacan says, and he says it in contradiction to Wittgenstein, that language holds more potentials than thinking. If we accept this and add that music holds more potentials than language what you do would be something extraordinary in fact. Has music more potentials than language? And has silence maybe even more potentials than sound?

(A question by the journalist Jürgen Otten to the theater director Michael Thalheimer who intends to direct his first opera.)

P.S. The literal translation of Möglichkeiten is possibilities. But potentials sounds better in this context, I think.

last night I had this weird idea (on a kind of mortality again): Imagine you listen to some music you love and you know it will be the last time. The music will disappear, dissolve after your listen. The only way to conserve any lasting memory of the music would be to write about it. I think this should be the idea behind any decent music criticism. To try to create something which can maybe evoke the music you wrote about. Something which could stand for itself even if the music would be lost forever.

I haven't written a lot on music recently not because I didn't listen to any great music. It's more the opposite. I felt too insignificant to write about all those phantastic bands on my stereo. Talk Talk, Bark Psychosis, The Durutti Column, The Smiths, Kings of Convenience, Pale Saints to name a few. I am in the speechless and in awe state when it comes to music right now.

If I had to choose between a world with permanent music playing in the background and a silent world without any music I would go for the latter.

I write about music to surprise myself.