Arise Therefore by Will Oldham

Arise Therefore

$32.07
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Arise Therefore

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Arise Therefore (Audio CD) This is one of those albums with a personal resonance too deep to be separated from my opinion of the disc as a whole. This is the spare, haunting music that accompanied my summer of '96, a time of aesthetic and personal discovery, tempered with both existential and self-imposed loneliness. Will Oldham's lyrics are poetic and ambiguous, but always seem to connect an aimless, uneasy, backwoods sociality reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's "Suttree" with more abstract and personal anxieties. Meaning opens to khora at the edges of confusion, like the pastoral drawing on the cover that disintegrates into marks in a blank, mute space. The folkish, Appalacchia of Oldham's rough-hewn guitar is here augmented with David Grubb's Morton Feldman-informed piano chords, which hang over the proceedings in beautiful decay. The country-folksiness of his phrasing is undercut by the artful placement and sense of space, fitting perfectly within Oldham's world of high art meets rural low-life. Much has been made of the use of a drum machine, but Steve Albini recorded it with an open air mike, like everything else; and it doesn't occupy any sort of (cyber)space of its own-just a simple clunk from the back of the room. This mix of minimal indie musical molasses and idiot man-child psychoanalysis inhabits an odd corner of its own. It sits there, alone in its head in a smoke-stained room, with Adolf Wolfli and Henry Darger, each biting his fingernails and sweating profusely. Comment | Permalink | function showYesNoCommunityResponse(uId,result,value) { var msgLayer = getElement("thanks" + uId); if ( result == "SUCCESS" ) { msgLayer.innerHTML = "Thanks for the valuable feedback you provided to other Amazon.com readers and reviewers. Your vote will be counted and will appear on the product page within 24 hours."; } else { showVoteErrorResponse(msgLayer,result,value); } } (Report this)

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