This appears to be an actual thing.....Santa I think you know what I want for Christmas now...
Monday, day of moon, mighty disc in the sky, the dark side soon to be owned, TM and C, by China or perhaps they'll find Hitler there in his lunar berghof, polishing his UFO and listening to Wagner.
I'm definitely not listening to Wagner and this piece of shit train is neither a Chinese spaceship nor a Nazi UFO. Alas I sit here in the inadequate AC with acute dehydration deliriously listening to C.S. but it's not Clara Schumann (the core subject of this week's rambling nonsense), not yet, sadly there's not much to hear of her due to patriarchy and syphilis. But instead it is Chuck Schuldiner, one of the great composers of the late 80s/early 90s, and hell in this gender fluid world perhaps Chuck is Clara? An uninteresting question to pose my dear friends. Who is Chuck though and what does he have to do with Clara? Absolutely nothing, though I imagine a musician of Chuck's quality would've been well-versed enough in his music history to be familiar with Clara but probably only Clara as muse, and not Clara as genius virtuoso and composer. Fuck she probably wrote all of Schumann's music and he just took the credit. Chuck though, was one of the greatest innovators and composers of Death Metal. What? And yes I mean that.
As front man of Death (very unsubtle name for what was actually by extreme metal standards very subtle music) and mastermind of Control Denied he laid ground unfortunately for technical death metal, but he also inspired Black Metal with his more primitive and minimal first album and demo tapes, and created a progressive aesthetic and sound within the genre which is inimitable. A truly unique voice, he was taken from us too soon due to aggressive cancer at the age of 34. The tragedy of this highlighted by the fact that Chuck was the composer of a brilliant metal masterpiece called Pull the Plug! Poor son of a bitch. Robert Schumann embraced Death at about the same age, mad from syphilis he threw himself into the Rhine and spent his dying days in an asylum. But Clara lived on, inspiring the concert violinist Joseph Joachim and his friend Johannes Brahms, thus making her one of the most important figures in Romanticism, and through this, linking her to Death Metal, a music so indebted to the drama of dark romantic symphonic works. But how you say? Eddie Van Halen was a classical violinist before taking up the shred, the finger tapping string pulling style then adopted by Schuldiner heavily indebted to Paganini, Pagan in 'e?
I personally prefer A minor which is the very key of the stunning heartbreaking piano concerto I currently slurp up in my ear canals, the Piano Concerto in A minor by Clara Schumann Op. 7 to be precise. From the opening bars you can hear a talent and passion that pisses all over her VD-riddled more famous husband. It's said that ol' Robbie S kept her away from composition with a stern belief that she belonged in the bedroom making babies and banging keys only as a hobby no doubt to contain her uncontrollable feminine hysteria. I think he was scared and jealous as the remnants of her work show a Romantic Rebel of the highest order. All hail Clara. All hail Chuck. There it is, the ol' fascist creep once more. No really he's sitting in the same carriage as me, bald head and Slayer tattoo on his forearm, kmart sneakers and a manspread that would swallow Poland like a marauding Panzer battalion. Frightening stuff.
Minor key longing of the greatest profundity. Knowing that Clara could never reach her true potential like so many women over history is too heartbreaking for words, but Clara's G minor Trio and soul shattering Romances for violin and piano - a tribute to Beethoven's beautiful works of the same type and vibe I'm taking - are adequate representations of this loss and longing, a glimpse at potential unfairly bottled.
Speaking of being bottled, the Beenleigh line snakes along in relative quietude this morn, not a crackhead in sight and numbers of human-cattle decreasing as Christmas rushes up in it's morbid capital obesity guise like a bacchanalian booze up at South Bank's "famous" fake beach, denizens resplendent in Christmas-jumper-themed rashies, drinking piss while soaking up eachother's urine in the tepid brine, the cbd phallus temple gleaming behind them like the fetid welt it truly is. Ho. Ho. Ho.
And now I'm listening to a beautiful collection of Klavier werks by Clara and the present gem is a theme and variations on Deutschland Über Alles. I guess considering the date it's more proto-fash than crypto but I guess that's the Romantics for you sometimes. I think they would've been mortified by Hitler but not if revisionist academics have anything to say about it. Everyone should've known better. They should've just looked it up on Wikipedia like everyone else because it's all fake news that the internet has only been around since 1996 or whenever. Ah the tin foil hat has replaced the crown. But back to Clara and truly beautiful swirls of longing once more emanating from her chosen instrument, an instrument she was the greatest master of of her time. First meth head of the morning in the quiet carriage guzzling an energy drink and grinding their gumming mouth the poor bastard. Another sensitive soul no doubt lost to the cruelty of the so-called modern world. If there was meth around in the late 1800s I have no doubt Bobby Schumann would've hit it, then poor Clara would've had that hot mess to deal with and her longing tunes would rip the pit of one's guts out even more. The Adagio is the doom metal of deep classical - there's even a doom metal band with an album called Adagio - and Clara clearly penned the best Doom in town, the Tony Iommi of her epoch. And into the void once more we go.
Still churning through Clara's beautiful piano works while this 7th locomotive wonder of the world churns down the tracks, clapped out and crazed, another mind-numbing day of pointless haze. This train feels like a staircase to nowhere, but Clara is the compass that points true hope.
And hope I'm finding while traversing suburban wasteland on this Thor's Day where once again due to a massive earth-swallowing tropical cyclone re-brewing in a great band across Queensland we will likely hear said God's hammer in the skies soon enough. Hope found in what you say? Well other than the comfort of possible environmental calamity inflicted upon this dreamland of possibility, I am finding this hope in beautiful arrangements for strings and soprano of Clara's sometimes schmalzy often stunning and dark lieder. One thing one should try to avoid is vibrato in excessive quantities when playing this music, and these motherfuckers are well onto it, and it makes these songs so much more beautiful. Clara would've hated vibrato. All the late Romantic Germanics did, but the Italian bel canto thing won out in the recorded world and the warble decimates swathes of beautiful music like dumping an entire bag of parmesan on your pasta might ruin your meal. Too much cheese my friends. No cheese in this recording. But while this beautiful music is getting me going I may shift to some death metal history once more as I'm pissed off approaching closer the Unutterable that fucking bastard in its gleaming pretend enviro building coal loving hell den. Thor please strike it down 'fore this day ends.
Friday, Goddess day, a small touch of Clara's piano and vocals works on the silver serpent looking longingly out scoured plexiglass at destitute tracks, stone and rocks, brown grasses before beneath a pale grey sky. Here I go again with death metal references and yes I've shifted from Clara to Atheist and their peculiar progressive death metal style that like Death unfortunately influenced a tonne of shit bands. Atheist are far from shit though and the connection between extreme metal and Romanticism remains strong to me, technicality, drama, existential plight caused by internal battles and the horrors of the dark Satanic mills, perhaps less immediate than some but no less clear and present for the experiencer.
I wrote of Black Metal's very conscious embracing of National Romantic traits for my Honours dissertation way back when but didn't touch on Death Metal which like Liszt's Totentantz is a death waltz of ultra-technique and ultra-masuclinity which seems at odds to Clara right? Well. She was the greatest concert pianist of her generation, a technician par excellence, and while her work is beautiful, subtle and hardly aggressive, it is also dark and brooding, and with the very rare great Death Metallers such as Chuck Schuldiner, while the music is aggressive and endlessly associated by sociologists as hyper-masculine, evil Chuck et al were often deeply conscious blokes, keen for their sisters to be equal, for their fellow humans in general to be equal, to be well, and to reflect by being confronted with death, with mortality, on the preciousness of life. Clara was confronted with that mortality when she lost Robert to his mind, and yet she kept the strength to continue a great life in music to the very end, the great muse of her time, who should've just been one of the greatest of her time.
Minor key longing of the greatest profundity. Knowing that Clara could never reach her true potential like so many women over history is too heartbreaking for words, but Clara's G minor Trio and soul shattering Romances for violin and piano - a tribute to Beethoven's beautiful works of the same type and vibe I'm taking - are adequate representations of this loss and longing, a glimpse at potential unfairly bottled.
Speaking of being bottled, the Beenleigh line snakes along in relative quietude this morn, not a crackhead in sight and numbers of human-cattle decreasing as Christmas rushes up in it's morbid capital obesity guise like a bacchanalian booze up at South Bank's "famous" fake beach, denizens resplendent in Christmas-jumper-themed rashies, drinking piss while soaking up eachother's urine in the tepid brine, the cbd phallus temple gleaming behind them like the fetid welt it truly is. Ho. Ho. Ho.
And now I'm listening to a beautiful collection of Klavier werks by Clara and the present gem is a theme and variations on Deutschland Über Alles. I guess considering the date it's more proto-fash than crypto but I guess that's the Romantics for you sometimes. I think they would've been mortified by Hitler but not if revisionist academics have anything to say about it. Everyone should've known better. They should've just looked it up on Wikipedia like everyone else because it's all fake news that the internet has only been around since 1996 or whenever. Ah the tin foil hat has replaced the crown. But back to Clara and truly beautiful swirls of longing once more emanating from her chosen instrument, an instrument she was the greatest master of of her time. First meth head of the morning in the quiet carriage guzzling an energy drink and grinding their gumming mouth the poor bastard. Another sensitive soul no doubt lost to the cruelty of the so-called modern world. If there was meth around in the late 1800s I have no doubt Bobby Schumann would've hit it, then poor Clara would've had that hot mess to deal with and her longing tunes would rip the pit of one's guts out even more. The Adagio is the doom metal of deep classical - there's even a doom metal band with an album called Adagio - and Clara clearly penned the best Doom in town, the Tony Iommi of her epoch. And into the void once more we go.
Still churning through Clara's beautiful piano works while this 7th locomotive wonder of the world churns down the tracks, clapped out and crazed, another mind-numbing day of pointless haze. This train feels like a staircase to nowhere, but Clara is the compass that points true hope.
And hope I'm finding while traversing suburban wasteland on this Thor's Day where once again due to a massive earth-swallowing tropical cyclone re-brewing in a great band across Queensland we will likely hear said God's hammer in the skies soon enough. Hope found in what you say? Well other than the comfort of possible environmental calamity inflicted upon this dreamland of possibility, I am finding this hope in beautiful arrangements for strings and soprano of Clara's sometimes schmalzy often stunning and dark lieder. One thing one should try to avoid is vibrato in excessive quantities when playing this music, and these motherfuckers are well onto it, and it makes these songs so much more beautiful. Clara would've hated vibrato. All the late Romantic Germanics did, but the Italian bel canto thing won out in the recorded world and the warble decimates swathes of beautiful music like dumping an entire bag of parmesan on your pasta might ruin your meal. Too much cheese my friends. No cheese in this recording. But while this beautiful music is getting me going I may shift to some death metal history once more as I'm pissed off approaching closer the Unutterable that fucking bastard in its gleaming pretend enviro building coal loving hell den. Thor please strike it down 'fore this day ends.
Friday, Goddess day, a small touch of Clara's piano and vocals works on the silver serpent looking longingly out scoured plexiglass at destitute tracks, stone and rocks, brown grasses before beneath a pale grey sky. Here I go again with death metal references and yes I've shifted from Clara to Atheist and their peculiar progressive death metal style that like Death unfortunately influenced a tonne of shit bands. Atheist are far from shit though and the connection between extreme metal and Romanticism remains strong to me, technicality, drama, existential plight caused by internal battles and the horrors of the dark Satanic mills, perhaps less immediate than some but no less clear and present for the experiencer.
I wrote of Black Metal's very conscious embracing of National Romantic traits for my Honours dissertation way back when but didn't touch on Death Metal which like Liszt's Totentantz is a death waltz of ultra-technique and ultra-masuclinity which seems at odds to Clara right? Well. She was the greatest concert pianist of her generation, a technician par excellence, and while her work is beautiful, subtle and hardly aggressive, it is also dark and brooding, and with the very rare great Death Metallers such as Chuck Schuldiner, while the music is aggressive and endlessly associated by sociologists as hyper-masculine, evil Chuck et al were often deeply conscious blokes, keen for their sisters to be equal, for their fellow humans in general to be equal, to be well, and to reflect by being confronted with death, with mortality, on the preciousness of life. Clara was confronted with that mortality when she lost Robert to his mind, and yet she kept the strength to continue a great life in music to the very end, the great muse of her time, who should've just been one of the greatest of her time.
Next week....Gloria Coates!
No comments:
Post a Comment