philip sherburne

Black Earth

Outside perhaps Morton Feldman or George Crumb's Black Angels, can't think of more fitting tribute music to today's Spanish tragedy than Bohren & Der Club of Gore's Black Earth (out May 4 on Ipecac), which arrived today. Despite the death metal overtones of the artist and title, it's actually a slow, mournful assemblage of bowed standup bass, death-march jazz drumming, and keyboard melodies that bubble up from underwater depths where no light reaches. It is coelecanth slow and chillingly wise, killingly lonely music. There is tenor saxophone, which is something is something I usually do not suffer, but it works (it sounds, perhaps, like the saxophone that must play in one of Murakami's characters bars, noirish but strangely without affect). Elegaic in a non-saccharine way, yet not without a wry sense of humor, it is music for the after of everything.