A Suite in Four Windows – David Rix
SNUGGLY Slim no. 1 (2016)
When I real-time review this work, my thoughts will be found in the thought stream below or by clicking on this post’s title above.
I shall not be doing this until I have renewed my acquaintanceship with George Crumb’s Black Angels.
My review of David Rix’s story HENGE is shown HERE.
In preparation for reading this new Rix work, I have been loop-listening to George Crumb’s Black Angels again – a haunting work, but, for me, no less or more haunting than a LOT of such contemporary classical works of which I am an avid fan.
And that is not the Black Angels CD above, but the Blackstar one.
“Silently apologising for being haphephobic.”
Gradually characterised music course students in the overbearing heat of a reclaimed city bar, where passing overhead trains serve to shake it and ripple the tops of their drinks. But not for long. Too hot or something, while they were discussing George Crumb’s Black Angels: Thirteen Images from the Dark Lands for Electric String Quartet. The Nineteen Seventies, whence this music derives, seem more like a lost era than a modern one. But I remember listening to electro-acoustic music in the early Sixties and it still sounds modern, uncorrupted by the more amenable sliding chords of Glass. That’s all I am going to tell you about this forty-odd pages of a chapbook’s plot and my views on music, I hope — and maybe this book, too, is set not to tell me much more about the plot, either.
We shall see. Only four pages down so far. An intriguing start. The chapbook itself is smart and svelte.
Part 1
Basement. Terry
Night of the Electric Insects
“Who was stupid enough to think that love was something sweet and romantic?”
An upwards vision of people from the basement, rather than watching people radiating themselves sideways, but down here where the synaesthesia of colours, music-notationary George (mouth gorge) of geodesics and geomantics create almost accidental self-harming, veering towards the half of the couple ‘romanticised’ on the floor above, precluded love, but preluded, auditioned (pointillist Georgics, unrequited crumbs) in the earlier, also below-level, drinks bar. Much more to all this than that, but any worthwhile text can never be done justice to from outside that text.
Ground Floor. Kate.
Devil-Music, Danse Macabre
“The body was such a dreary thing, she thought. You struggled with it constantly — everything it wanted to do had to be kept under control.”
Another auditioned in the below-level bar now back in the same residential block, the floor above. A sweltering sort of Ayckbourn version of ‘Norman Conquests’, here with the promised bodyshower, the intertwining between those on different floors as well as with exterior weather colours and other colours and those trying to penetrate the high denier lace curtains, Kate’s sight-proofing from people outside to match her need for sound-proofing from the George-Geode devilish music and a lovers’ tiff..
A synaesthesia of bodily and geomantic levels and exteriors, where everyone in the story and reading it is studying the same piece of music. Listening to it again now, I am. Teeth-on-edge make and then collect quartz crumbs between the staves, I imagine. The urge to fly like Geol.
1st Floor. Mix
God-Music
“I think music like this allows you to paint your own stories onto it.”
And so it is. As Terry looks further upwards rather than sideways by gradually GOING there. Mix is someone’s name. He mixes the God-Music with his own versions of it, like Bowie did recently in the Villa OrMen. Like I am doing with this real-time review! Making gestalt concomitants or leitmotifs, ‘patterns’ as this text has it. Learning what and who interconnects with what and whom, with Acykbourn-like stage directions and staccato colours, David Rix ones not Brian Rix Whitehall ones. I haven’t re-read HENGE, but I think it might now be rewarding to do so?
Attic. Carrie
Night of the Electric Insects (Reprise)
“Everyone is playing at the same time. It’s all playing to itself…”
The only drugs I have taken in my life are alcohol and (once upon a time) cigarettes. Only?
And the ‘stoned’ (a geodesic or stoned henge?) level grows as high as the level of four floors and four Windows in this theatrical play-acting with music, leading to the final curtain (lace), as at the end of Tosca, operatic as well as theatrical, a spliffed Ayckbourn… The triangulation of all playing versions. The heat death of the storm breaks and the angels fly as the computers crash. That does not seem to be a spoiler because the spoilers and menders are within your own hands when you improvise with this artfully improviseable text as I have done.
Sky blue/wine red lips around a mouth-dentata.
A dead Rockstar now reborn as a real rockstar in the sky.
An apotheosis of London – however crummy the sidestreets and sideways-people below have become.
Unlike theatres and other buildings, books have no floors, ceilings, attic or roof, just pages side by side.
Only wordless music is potentially limitless.
An italicised article on the Crumb work followed by a short oblique coda to keep alive each reader’s improvisation or theme-and-variations upon this chapbook’s otherwise finite and self-meaning text.