Clark : Body Riddle
The ears take the sound in. Clark’s Body Riddle is making its way through the ear. The quick erratic beats arouse the malleus, incus, and stapes into a frantic break-dance, the middle ear surging the crowd into a circle around the tiny bones, enough room to see the spectacle and still let it continue on without anything getting hurt. The movements of the bones seem almost illogical, like it would hurt more than it would feel like an accomplishment, and the brain can’t get around it. The mind is trying to combine the music into a simple unity, a package that it can ship and handle easily, but it can’t. The polyrhythm is moving too quickly, the melody almost switching places with it, but can that happen? Is it possible? Is it bad? No, too good to be bad. The sound is obscenely, almost breaching on rudely, beautiful, the kind of beautiful that makes you whip your head around fast enough that it has to ignore the whiplash in order to call it beautiful, otherwise you’ll be too busy trying to convince your neck to stay solid. Reason has crammed too many highly improbables into one moment. The statistical weight of it all is too much to bear.
It’s a queer thing when logic takes a sabbatical. The body has to make as much sense as it can by itself. The senses are without the mind’s convenient proofreading skills and your vision turns upside down and cigarette burnt, feeling thresholds start tumbling in somersaults and every footstep a fly takes on your skin feels like a bee-sting. Listening to music is quite dangerous and almost never recommended. If at all possible, it is best to be listening to Peter, Paul, and Mary, something comforting and regular, and as sane as possible. Body Riddle on the other hand sends the other hands and feet and everything in between on a goose chase, and something’s spooked the goose good. The body wishes for some sort of mitosis to happen to make everything a little bit easier, but humans are blessed with the horrible convenience of sexual reproduction, and even then, it still takes nine months. This album won’t go on for that long, will it?
It is a question that the mind can’t even ask itself, even just too provide itself some comfort, because it is long gone. The body is left with the terror of uncertainty, the primal fear that came at night, and the sun seemed like it was taking just a little too long. A doper on acid can worry about when he’s going to be able to touch his own consciousness again, or he might not. Body Riddle sends a body ripple that throws terror and confusion out, and replaces it with complacent lack of care. All of the unexpected arm extensions and back flips and sucker punches deplete the body until it is nothing more than just a pile on ground that gurgles with the occasional twitching limb.
Logic has no place to turn to now. The body has lost itself, the mind and made itself lost, and now the ears can only take in the Riddle, not trying to figure out the answer, but just enjoying its pun-derful play on music.
Similar Albums:
Prefuse 73 – One Word Extinguisher
Autechre – Untilted
Boards of Canada – Geogaddi