Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2001 13:17:54 -0800 (PST)
From: ishbadiddle@yahoo.com
Subject: This week in Ishbadiddle (3/19/01)
To: meverettlane@yahoo.com

This Week in Ishbadiddle:

* Kruder, Dorfmeister, and Proust
* Changes at Ishbadiddle!
* Your Assignment (Should You Choose to Accept It)...


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Kruder and Dorfmeister

"Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit."

So writes Samuel Beckett, referring to Marcel Proust, in his cute little monograph on the best writer of the 20th Century. We might reasonably wonder, to what qualities in Proust is Mr. Beckett responding?

This is simple to explain. Mr. Proust was discussing the deadening effect of repetition in daily life. He meant that people were doomed, once any wonderful thing (sex, riding The Cyclone, taking LSD) had been done more than once, to see its pleasure slowly depleted. Beckett understood that what gave pleasure to the human mind was any incident in which the rhythm of the usual was altered in some way. He took an idea from Proust and interpreted it in order to create a paradigm of such disruption.

Musicians--beautiful, brilliant, modern-day musicians--have understood Mr. Proust's comment (amplified by Mr. Beckett) and have come up with a kind of music which does exactly THAT--structures, then re-structures--musical forms. One such group is Nightmares on Wax. Another is the Viennese dynamic duo Kruder and Dorfmeister. These Simon-and-Garfunkel-look-alikes now have out, as best as I can tell, two virtually flawless masterpieces and a third that comes mighty close. The first two are DJ Kicks and the K&D Sessions. The third is a new import called, The G-Stone Book.

It might be difficult for people with non-music-critic ears and vocabularies (such as myself) to explain in language that makes sense just what happens to them when they listen to a Kruder and Dorfmeister cd. But something does, indeed, happen. The music takes place in levels. Listening to it, you are aware of a surface tension, below beats, and then structure even below that. It is music in 3-D, full of oblique, subliminal messages like shadows, and listening to it is nearly like hallucinating.

The music is percussive; it throbs. It undulates, like magic carpet. It stretches and retracts. It becomes transparent and then opaque, transparent and opaque again. And every single time you think you've figured out just what it is that intrigues you, the music changes again.

Where do Kruder and Dorfmeister get these marvelous sounds? I just don't know. I think of Proust and his little cookie, and then I fork over even more money to music vendors, trying to find that experience again.

Happy listening.

-- Alex Joseph

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Some words from the Ishbadiddlemeister:

This little experiment has been going on for a few weeks now. So far, not bad. I hope you've read some interesting reviews, and have not been too annoyed by these sorta-weekly emails. Let me know what you think.

Also, a few changes around here. First, the whole chain-letter-as-marketing-the-list concepts pretty much bit the dust. I'm thinking the best way to expand the list is just to have members (that's you guys) recommend a few people. Just email me their names, and I'll send them a brief intro, and then add them to the list. OK?

Secondly, it seems that we get the most reviews in response to direct responses. So, I'll continue this practice. But if you've just seen a great movie, or finished a book that's changed your life, and want to tell us all about it, by all means do, even if it's not in line with the theme of the week.