At the risk of sounding academic, music is experimental to the degree at which structure informs content. Think about this for a moment, recall that it’s going to be ok, try not to cough this pop-tart up all over your external hard drive.
I came to this realization 2 weeks ago after watching Little Women play Death By Audio and speaking to frontman Darius Jones about what the heck just happened. There were indeed elements immediately peculiar to the performance. The music preempted by a prayer circle; the concluding passage spawned by Darius and Travis Laplante detaching sax from mouthpiece and chasing each other around the room in curious courting ritual qua duck hunt.
At the risk of sounding grandiose, this is serious business. This music exists as an amalgamation. A paean to the compositional process itself. Stormy vignettes, entangling threads, compromised reverie, sprouting, sprouting, sprouting. Music that consistently turns its course on its head, mimicking moments of splendor and, with equal irreverence, building and substantiating the remote, the forgotten, the passages that have simply passed us by, as life inconsequentially ebbs and flows. The fantasy of self-referentiality.
Darius says they’d take a 3 minute segment and spend an entire rehearsal on it. What happens is you hear the piece as a whole and must confront what it means to understand something when you’ve never experienced it before. A wizard casts a spell and you’re no longer sure if this is your life, Louisa May Alcott just stole your seat. – Velrie Kuehne
