May 28, 2009

Night at the science museum

The itunes picture for "Time Turns Elastic" is a black square with massy sans serif block letters in the lower righthand corner, and fellow ECM lifers will recognize the Pat Metheny Group font in these Hubble letters full of space, a little too dense with planets to be an actual astronomical view, a little sickly space-measled like a tee shirt of the solar system and beyond that may have glowed in the dark in the early 1990s, which is exactly where in imaginative time you want to be with Phish, daring to be weird, hypnotizing yourself with the alienation effects, glad to be wrong, tripping on the whiteness of the high tops. Thank God Phish doesn't care if they're cool anymore. We have been many places with Phish, and we are so relieved to be back in the planetarium, following a laser pointer tour of the story of time and dreaming of the museum gift shop outside. "While all around the rocks collide." Thank God someone is writing about rocks colliding. Phish compositions: celestial elements in no orbits the universe would ever form (true orbits only in mindless jam

I don't know exactly which sound in early Pat Metheny Group is denoted by "Oberheim," but that's my name for the keyboard in TTE that saws through the surface of things and seems to signal a documentary flyby of frozen wastes. An actual helecopter flew over on my initial listening walk and though unrepeatable was the best part of the song. I got up late yesterday and ran to the bus stop in exactly 13:30 (space turns elastic, the rolling piano keyboard undulation of crumbly brick blocks of Cumberland Avenue sidewalk I run over, when the feedback ended the bus was just peeking round the corner, I even think the song may have 13.5 sections. So glad Phish is dreaming big, even if the music is incoherent and sort of embarrassing. "This life is bending and swelling around me"—the song succeeds or fails depending on whether you believe this line when Trey sings it (this lyric is the meaning of bVII to I, it's like the chords can finally sing themselves in words). "The blossoms all scream and it sleeps around me"—thank God they are mixing metaphors again (the song would be dead without everything that's wrong (this is the key to all rock and roll. "The winds all rising in the west around me"—so glad to find myself again in the wrong grammar of this double location