Pynchon Music: Land of Kush

“Bilocations” is next. Clocking in at 21 minutes, in the glory days of prog “Bilocations” would have occupied an entire album side. It begins with liquid electric guitar, lazily meandering through lysergic puddles left over from the Sixties. Just when you expect Jim Morrison to start mumbling about ancient galleries or the milky coming of the dawn, drums kick off another Nasser-Radio whirlwind, and Molly Sweeney begins her song. While the lyrics are English, the phrasing is decidedly not, which gives the song an unexpected, intriguing appeal—which is a good thing, as the lyrics are unpoetic and clunky: “Darling I can’t help but tease you / You’re a businessman and you never swam in the nude / Come on you mustn’t get offended / You’re an expert on mergers and acquisitions in the field of economics / But you don’t know squat about biology or immunology.” To her credit, Sweeney delivers even these cringeworthy lines with conviction, and for readers of Pynchon’s book, it’s hard not to hear Yashmeen in her arch poses of defiance: “I can make myself ten times more ferocious / When I was eight years old I scared away a mountain lion.”

Nine minutes in, the song reinvents itself. A sensual flute solo unspools aloft the driving beat, eventually crashing headlong into a Zappaesque orchestral traffic jam. What emerges from the wreckage is unexpected: a delicate, mysterious trio for bass, clarinet, and electronics. The latter takes the upper hand, ushering in a return of the spooky chorus from “Light Over the Ranges.” Soon we’re back in outer space, transported far above the dunes into the (recently-disproven?) luminiferous Aether.

“Against the Day” begins with a flurry of drums pushing through dense clusters of horns and reeds. After this dissonant introduction, the piece transforms into a galloping prog-rock instrumental—there are vocals, but each syllable is stretched to unintelligibility. An extended drumroll carries us to “Rue du Départ,” a recapitulation of earlier material now deconstructed as a shimmering, atonal mirage. The strings attempt one final gesture of Egyptian big-band greatness, raising a stately minaret of sound above the quivering dust. This attempt to impose orders fails: the instruments drop out one by one, leaving a buzzing drone. The album doesn’t conclude as much as it’s forcibly extinguished, the drone squelched like someone snuffing a wick.

In his liner notes, Shalabi indicates that “each section of the music stays pretty close to the arc that Light traverses in the novel,” and it’s clear that Shalabi has his own interpretations of Pynchon’s book. But this is not programmatic music, and distinct connections to the novel are far from self-evident. Unfortunately, the lyrics are not reprinted in the liner notes, and with the notable exception of “Bilocations,” they’re generally buried deep within the mix—a deliberate choice, as Against the Day features stellar mixing and production, all the more exceptional given the complexity of the project. In the end, it really doesn’t matter. With or without the Pynchon connection, Against the Day is a remarkable album. Ambitious in scope and played with confidence, it’s a wonderful testimony to the hybrid vigor of cross-cultural music.

Liner Notes

Inspired by and named after the Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day, the music is broken into five sections, named for the book’s chapters. The three primary movements are centred around solo vocalists (Jason Grimmer, Molly Sweeney, Radwan Moumneh) who composed their own lyrics for the piece. In between vocal performances, Shalabi gives the orchestra ample opportunity to strut its stuff, including solos and long instrumental passages that display Sam’s unique balance of composition and ‘expository’ or improvisational instruction. Against the Day is a complex, intense, but accessible hour of hybrid, genre-defying music. The marriage of middle-eastern, north African and western modes and influences yields a recording that evades categorization, by one of Montréal’s most challenging and prolific musical iconoclasts.

For me, Thomas Pynchon’s writing, like the best most powerful, profane ritual or scientific experiment, allows a pattern (or as he’d call it a “Creepy Correspondence”) to emerge that wasn’t there before. So much of that pattern (like the prose itself) feels like primal wisdom just below or above the surface of things. In Pynchon-land, a lot happens in these barely there, barely audible frequencies, wavelengths and sustained tones that shape the lives of his characters.

Pynchon has said that, ultimately, he is an historical novelist, and each of his novels does seem to tap into and animate the particular motion, chemistry, molecules, and GOOD AND BAD VIBES of their times and places. Against the Day, being mostly about that febrile period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when Light, The Photon, Electromagnetism, Apocalypse, Magic and Technology fused together to create the beginning, middle and end of the modern world, glows and shines with a light very much of its time but like Light itself is beyond time; in the beginning there was Light and for Pynchon there still is and always will be.

The book is also an historical novel as invocation, like an ancient Egyptian hymn to Ra: different hues and shapes of Light streak across the words and envelop, suffuse, and illuminate every detail of the story’s particular world. That same idea or organising principle is what structures and informs this piece of music. But that world, as the Thelonious Monk quote that opens Against the Day so beautifully states, is always dark. Light creates a beginning again and again or a possibility to think, do or say something that has never been done before, but Light is also born into a world of entropy, corruption, violence and decay and that is the place that Light illuminates and clarifies.

Amongst all writers, I think Pynchon has the deepest, darkest, funniest, most absurd and truest vision of the ‘human condition’. I believe he’s saying that in the beginning was Light AND a very ugly, paranoid, funny, fun, fucked, doomed world—and maybe it has always been this way, the battle between heaven and earth rages on and on with no end in sight. And yet there are still many many (and this was the original title of Pynchon’s other epic novel) ‘mindless pleasures’ to be had…it’s all very much like a flickering silent film or cartoon.

Against the Day, temporally set right before the apocalypse of the first world war, feels like one giant, multi-coloured, layered tremolo note. It’s all about chance, freedom and possibility and how they are all funnelled down into death, capitalism and decay. And of course, it all feels familiar but isn’t. I suppose I’ve tried to tap that aspect of the novel. In the same way someone could rip-off say, Charlie Parker or The Stooges, or that Morton Feldman made sound from painting, each section of the music stays pretty close to the arc that Light traverses in the novel because I really think there’s a deep deep method to HOW and WHERE Light travels in the book, and what it does to the characters. In a way, it’s not something to read but to stare at like a too-bright crystal ball.

Finally, this music is homage, a giant THANK YOU to Pynchon for permanently fucking my mind.

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