David Grollman

http://turmericmagnitudes.bandcamp.com/album/death-edit

This is the only album I’ve not been able to write about and listen to in tandem.  Here there is no pretension; no artifice nor posture, no surface area to puncture.  For these reasons and more this four-minute-and-twenty-four-second tape release is terrifying.

This is a piece about death; no more, no less.  We are listening to death, we are staring it in the face.  This may be the bravest recording I’ve heard, because it is unabashedly factual to the point at which fact turns hot and deafening with emotion.  Death cannot be absorbed, and this tape makes this point 100% accurately, in a space that is truly pointed and denuded.  This is what makes this piece so very hard to listen to.  It has a soul, and the soul is completely naked.

Life is full of fear.  Fear of decline, fear of injury, fear of betrayal, fear of uncertainty.  Fear of Self.  We know the truth of any particular fear is, at base, the fear of death.  We know, but we struggle to expose.

Many have made art to concretize loss, to discover a mode of being in which the pain is secreted, past the brow and into cavities.  Never, in my years of listening, have I heard an attempt at showing pain so fully disclosed.  This is Self, broken.  Free of deception.  We hear it first on this tape, then never hear it again.