54 Days

 54 to Halloween Album Review:

Aesop Rock "Spirit World Field Guide"


"step up to the spirit world / zero man pit crew"

-Aesop Rock, "Spirit World Field Guide"


This record performs, if you will, as advertised. It is a portal. "Not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach," as Aesop puts it in the intro. And indeed the tracks function as "plateaux", as levels of altered consciousness or multidimensional mind-chess. Duchamp saw chess as a metaphor for life, and in the world of this record, Aesop's unusual use of syntax makes grammar itself into a metaphor. As AR has gotten more confident over the years (his style has aged better than that of most rappers) in his use of unhinged vocabulary (earning him the rating of rapper with the highest vocabulary according to some computer nerd), one gets an almost Finnegan's Wake or Gravity's Rainbow effect, ingesting in a drug like state his peculiar phonological strata. This record has some of the weirdest hooks (aside from ESL rappers like Yung Lean), which I'd sooner not spoil. Like Gravity's Rainbow, it "mimics the strata" (Deleuze), enough to make the language explode into a kind of paranoid or schizophrenic delirium. Yet at the same time it is entirely coherent. Each listen reveals new spirals of grammatological drift. And in a world of grift and nonsense, one is relieved to get a taste of "something real". And this being a Halloween countdown blog I may as well refer readers to Urbanomic's Journal Collapse whose fourth issue, "Concept-Horror", is its own portal, if taken together with the "CCRU" collection would go well with AR's sonic montage. But Aesop Rock here is no mere lord of the hollow dark, but a genuine necromancer of love and weirdness. Never let him die on a regular hill. So this Halloween when you're gaslighting and grooming your cute little collection of dollhouse children and feeding them tiny little razorblade pineapples, put this LP on the aux cord.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Cylinder" excerpt 2

  Sal took the bus home to their non-binary partner (both had gotten mastectomies and took T, their gender was, in some sense, connected to their art, for both of them), Zeke. They kissed and started to prepare their vegan dinner. Everything in the apartment was just so, Zeke burned some incense, sensing that Sal had had a hard day, Zeke could see the tremors in Sal's body from the anxiety. As they ate dinner, they talked about their goals and aspirations. They referred to this as "G+A talk", and it was one of the items on the checklist that sat to their left on a dry erase board. They always tried to make time for "Goals and Aspirations" talk, which was separate from "Day to Day Necessaries" ("D2D talk") which included repairs, grocery shopping, clean-up, and so on. They were extremely organized, as a couple, and a lot of people really admired them for that. When Heidegger wrote about "care" in Being and Time he could have been d...
Read more

"Cylinder" novel excerpt

 Knives' other play, "Bambi vs Hamlet", written via Ouija Board by spirit-medium Slavoj Ganja who deferred all the credit to Knives and it was such a hit in the underground, this "written from beyond the grave" gimmick was such an attention-getter that it had not just a cult following but a cult religion based on it, like some kind of codex. Bambi and Hamlet were the Jungian archetypes governing the engendering of the master-slave dialectic in society, and its molecular proliferation like weeds or like urban sprawl, and Bambi's submission to Hamlet is the basic dynamic of this sexuality of the architectonic within society, this apparatus of capture and the drama queen antics of the ruling classes. This dialectic of sex subverted the irony of stupidity and made everyone cheer for an encore, they wanted more, oh boy did they want Bambi vs Hamlet 2! Cecilia was going to play Bambi in the new sequel production which was in collaboration with Ye Wretches, an enti...
Read more