Euglossine - Coriolis
A Closer Listen
You know how Pop Art tricks you into thinking it’s very simple while in fact being extremely complex? How all those images of comics expanded into huge canvases allude to certain forms of abstraction, or how those reproductions of publicity question the very foundations of what art might or might not be? How, in other words, the surface might hide all sorts of riches we ignore in favor of what we might find in the depths? Euglossine’s surreal collage of styles provoked in me that very same reaction, with its smooth jazz melodies and its light electronic harmonies luring me to dig deeper, to ask myself where all of its uncanny non-clichés might lead. But if you’ve ever seen a painting and been moved, you already know I was asking the wrong question, because what is superficial, what is pure surface, is almost always a world in itself, like the grand doors of cathedrals or the antique facades of buildings whose history has been hollowed out, rendering them more interesting than what lies beyond.
Coriolis moves at the pace of cloud-watching, its juxtapositions not a chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella upon a table for dissection, but one between an old VCR tape of a beach and a bird’s song upon the seabed: its beauty comes not from the shock of the new but its pleasure. It is common to think that the unknown causes fear and disturbs the mind – thus the stridency of avant-garde art and its relationship to the public – but there’s another fundamental element to it best explored by movements like Pop and which Euglossine aptly develops in this album, and which is, simply put, the comfort one might find in the uncertain. It’s counterintuitive, because comfort is usually associated to conservative dispositions of staying in your zone and listening to something that will not challenge your mind. However, what Euglossine’s sunny surrealism achieves is granting all these ‘conservative’ musics with an edge that does not cut but soothes, drawing the clichéd tones of new age and smooth jazz away from their own failings, turning them into points of interest for an uncanniness that inverts the sinister, turning something unpleasurable (at least for snobs like me) into its opposite. This is the work those tones were meant to do all along, instead of constantly reifying the business of feeling good in a world that treats us horribly. Euglossine’s surrealism has freed these sounds for their true purpose, so that we may feel good in opposition to that world.
Like the effect referred to in the title, which thanks to the particularities of the Earth’s rotation makes ungrounded objects (say, like hurricanes and other weather phenomena) move according to the variable speeds between poles, these tracks trace a path of sinuous movement across genres and styles without ever disrupting them or throwing them into disarray. The variability in each track is a wonderful aspect of getting lost upon the surface, happily journeying throughout a bright soundscape as if existentialist questions were no longer relevant (imagine that), allowing us to find vital meanings elsewhere than the abyss, in a place of comfort. “Eternal Mouse”, for example, flows around a Pat Metheny guitar and a sweet prog-rock synth melody that should clash with the repetition and short development of its main theme, and yet it works well as a fast, psychedelic interlude between the much more peaceful fusion of “Naturalist” and the muffled jazzy ambience of “Boudreaux”. Just like opener “Blue Dream” sets a clear-cut, synthy, cool 80s trippy vibe, album finisher “World Behind the Eyes” veers into a playful darkness, of the spooky kind you’d find in the haunted house level of a SNES videogame; the collage is not naïve, but neither is it against naiveté, and the pleasurable clash of sounds it produces draws our consciousness closer to the endless possibilities of comfortable action. Most interestingly, perhaps, it also points at the sheer wealth of those things we thought were worthless, questioning our wrongful commonplace equivalence between hardship and meaningfulness, affirming the joy and power of the things that announce themselves as nothing more than what they seem. The inside is important, sure, but it is our skin who first receives the sun’s caress. (David Murrieta Flores)
Mon Mar 04 00:01:00 GMT 2019Tiny Mix Tapes 60
Euglossine
Coriolis
[Hausu Mountain; 2019]
Rating: 3/5
How smooth it all is!
In other words:
1.
The manifesto, “To Clarify the Non-Visible,” for the Museum of Non-Visible Art (MoNA) begins as follows: “Art itself is nothing. All that matters is what is left. The afterglow. The ambition is to produce this. We strive for an afterglow with no thing preceding. A glow. Phosphenes.”
One of the two comments on the Facebook page for this museum (whose rating is .5/5) reads: “Pretentious douchebags with too much time and money that have no clue about art being a stain on the community have always been a cancer to the creative world. You arent about art, you are about money. Disgusting.”
The other reads: “sus ‘obras’, qui ni siquiera existe … todo es invisible. menudo timo”
The manifesto ends: “You must increase the world behind the eyes. The wreck of the Medusa. It left us with phosphenes. You must conjure them and sell them. Only when you have done this are you one of us.”
Phosphenes.
Likewise, Eugolosine’s album Coriolis ends with the “World Behind the Eyes.” But, unlike the non-works of art in the non-museum, this world isn’t invisible. Like the Medusa (and its wreck), it smooths, but not in stone.
In 2011, the “museum” “scandalized” “the art world” when a woman bought a non-visible work of “art” entitled “Fresh Air” for $10,000. It helped that James Franco contributed his name to the venture. It also helped that the air in the painting (or rather, in the frame) was fresh and clean, at least to the imagination, which wherever it can will breathe.
2.
There’s something grotesque about how surely smoothness saturates space.
Stretching the face poreless.
Here’s Bahktin on Rabelais:
As conceived by these [modern] canons, the body was first of all a strictly completed, finished product. Furthermore, it was isolated, alone, fenced off from all other bodies. All signs of its unfinished character, of its growth and proliferation were eliminated; its protuberances and offshoots were removed, its convexities (signs of new sprouts and buds) smoothed out, its apertures closed.
///
Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on the apertures or the convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body, the link in the chain of genetic development, or more correctly speaking, two links shown at the point where they enter into each other.
3.
It could be very fresh and clean. It could be a balloon. All these are the days, my friends. And these are the days, my friends.
Right channel: It could be Franky
Left channel: Do you remember Hans, the Bus Driver?
4.
Easy-listening, adult-contemporary artist Claudine Longet (see also: the JFK assassination) was formerly married to “Moon River” Andy Williams murdered skier Vladimir “Spider” Sabich, then married her defense attorney.
Maggie Thatcher’s (whose grave was the first gender-neutral bathroom, may she RIP) favorite song was “Telstar.”
Joe Meek (of Joe Meek and the Blue Boys) murdered his landlady before murdering himself.
5.
City Pop. Lounge. Exotica. Dixieland. ECM Style Jazz. Kmart Realism. Future Funk. Nu Jazz. Smooth Jazz. Cool Jazz. Easy Listening. Chillwave. New Age. Dinner Theater. Neoclassical Crossover. Miami Vice. Celtic New Age. New Romantic. Blue-Eyed Soul. Spaghetti Western. Surf Rock. Post-Punk Baptist Revival Hymns. Sophistipop. Pajamapop pour vous.
6.
The French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez introduced the terms “smooth” and “striated” to describe a spacetime “one occupies without counting” and a spacetime “one counts in order to occupy.” He also conducted Zappa.
Deleuze and Guatarri write, “the striated is that which intertwines fixed and variable elements, produces an order and succession of distinct forms, and organizes horizontal melodic lines and vertical harmonic planes. The smooth is the continuous variation, continuous development of form; it is the fusion of harmony and melody in favor of the production of properly rhythmic values, the pure act of the drawing of a diagonal across the vertical and the horizontal.”
7.
Hear how smothering the smoothness is in Rilke’s description of the birth of Venus:
dim awakening, like an early morning wind.
In the tenderest branches of the vein-trees
to murmur over its deep places.
And this wind grew on: now it threw itself
with all its breath into the new breasts
and filled them and crowded into them,—
so that like sails full of distance
they drove the light girl to the shore.
as she strode swiftly past the youthful shores,
all morning flowers and grasses
sprang up, warm and confused,
as from embraces. And she walked and ran.
But, where the body is sewn up, sown shut, tongue swallowed, and sealed tight, something still escapes, grotesque. In this case, it’s a dolphin, the sea’s bloody placental afterbirth.
the sea rose up once more and threw
a dolphin on that selfsame spot.
Dead, red, and open.
8.
9.
The orchid-bee and the bee-orchid.
Aphrodite and testicles.
Linnaeus.
10.
Pat Metheny.
11.
“exotica.”
12.
When D&G wrote A Thousand Plateaus, they were thinking, not of Euglossini (the only kind of bee, incidentally, without a queen), but of a different bee-orchid and a different orchid-bee. They were thinking of a cat and a baboon, not an eternal mouse. (The bees also mate with perfume)!
Deleuze’s son is an investment banker, or some shit.
Orchids.
Phosphenes.
13.
From the bed of my birth to the bed of my death and beyond, I would have to travel with the bees to find the person who I was meant to kill on a planet inside the earth. The Mesopotamian bees of my grandfather were waiting on this planet; they would show me my victim at the moment of the kill. At the end of the story, I was still dead.
Coriolis by Euglossine
Tiny Mix Tapes 60
Euglossine
Coriolis
[Hausu Mountain; 2019]
Rating: 3/5
How smooth it all is!
In other words:
1.
The manifesto, “To Clarify the Non-Visible,” for the Museum of Non-Visible Art (MoNA) begins as follows: “Art itself is nothing. All that matters is what is left. The afterglow. The ambition is to produce this. We strive for an afterglow with no thing preceding. A glow. Phosphenes.”
One of the two comments on the Facebook page for this museum (whose rating is .5/5) reads: “Pretentious douchebags with too much time and money that have no clue about art being a stain on the community have always been a cancer to the creative world. You arent about art, you are about money. Disgusting.”
The other reads: “sus ‘obras’, qui ni siquiera existe … todo es invisible. menudo timo”
The manifesto ends: “You must increase the world behind the eyes. The wreck of the Medusa. It left us with phosphenes. You must conjure them and sell them. Only when you have done this are you one of us.”
Phosphenes.
Likewise, Eugolosine’s album Coriolis ends with the “World Behind the Eyes.” But, unlike the non-works of art in the non-museum, this world isn’t invisible. Like the Medusa (and its wreck), it smooths, but not in stone.
In 2011, the “museum” “scandalized” “the art world” when a woman bought a non-visible work of “art” entitled “Fresh Air” for $10,000. It helped that James Franco contributed his name to the venture. It also helped that the air in the painting (or rather, in the frame) was fresh and clean, at least to the imagination, which wherever it can will breathe.
2.
There’s something grotesque about how surely smoothness saturates space.
Stretching the face poreless.
Here’s Bahktin on Rabelais:
As conceived by these [modern] canons, the body was first of all a strictly completed, finished product. Furthermore, it was isolated, alone, fenced off from all other bodies. All signs of its unfinished character, of its growth and proliferation were eliminated; its protuberances and offshoots were removed, its convexities (signs of new sprouts and buds) smoothed out, its apertures closed.
///
Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on the apertures or the convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body, the link in the chain of genetic development, or more correctly speaking, two links shown at the point where they enter into each other.
3.
It could be very fresh and clean. It could be a balloon. All these are the days, my friends. And these are the days, my friends.
Right channel: It could be Franky
Left channel: Do you remember Hans, the Bus Driver?
4.
Easy-listening, adult-contemporary artist Claudine Longet (see also: the JFK assassination) was formerly married to “Moon River” Andy Williams murdered skier Vladimir “Spider” Sabich, then married her defense attorney.
Maggie Thatcher’s (whose grave was the first gender-neutral bathroom, may she RIP) favorite song was “Telstar.”
Joe Meek (of Joe Meek and the Blue Boys) murdered his landlady before murdering himself.
5.
City Pop. Lounge. Exotica. Dixieland. ECM Style Jazz. Kmart Realism. Future Funk. Nu Jazz. Smooth Jazz. Cool Jazz. Easy Listening. Chillwave. New Age. Dinner Theater. Neoclassical Crossover. Miami Vice. Celtic New Age. New Romantic. Blue-Eyed Soul. Spaghetti Western. Surf Rock. Post-Punk Baptist Revival Hymns. Sophistipop. Pajamapop pour vous.
6.
The French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez introduced the terms “smooth” and “striated” to describe a spacetime “one occupies without counting” and a spacetime “one counts in order to occupy.” He also conducted Zappa.
Deleuze and Guatarri write, “the striated is that which intertwines fixed and variable elements, produces an order and succession of distinct forms, and organizes horizontal melodic lines and vertical harmonic planes. The smooth is the continuous variation, continuous development of form; it is the fusion of harmony and melody in favor of the production of properly rhythmic values, the pure act of the drawing of a diagonal across the vertical and the horizontal.”
7.
Hear how smothering the smoothness is in Rilke’s description of the birth of Venus:
dim awakening, like an early morning wind.
In the tenderest branches of the vein-trees
to murmur over its deep places.
And this wind grew on: now it threw itself
with all its breath into the new breasts
and filled them and crowded into them,—
so that like sails full of distance
they drove the light girl to the shore.
as she strode swiftly past the youthful shores,
all morning flowers and grasses
sprang up, warm and confused,
as from embraces. And she walked and ran.
But, where the body is sewn up, sown shut, tongue swallowed, and sealed tight, something still escapes, grotesque. In this case, it’s a dolphin, the sea’s bloody placental afterbirth.
the sea rose up once more and threw
a dolphin on that selfsame spot.
Dead, red, and open.
8.
9.
The orchid-bee and the bee-orchid.
Aphrodite and testicles.
Linnaeus.
10.
Pat Metheny.
11.
“exotica.”
12.
When D&G wrote A Thousand Plateaus, they were thinking, not of Euglossini (the only kind of bee, incidentally, without a queen), but of a different bee-orchid and a different orchid-bee. They were thinking of a cat and a baboon, not an eternal mouse. (The bees also mate with perfume)!
Deleuze’s son is an investment banker, or some shit.
Orchids.
Phosphenes.
13.
From the bed of my birth to the bed of my death and beyond, I would have to travel with the bees to find the person who I was meant to kill on a planet inside the earth. The Mesopotamian bees of my grandfather were waiting on this planet; they would show me my victim at the moment of the kill. At the end of the story, I was still dead.
Coriolis by Euglossine