Eli Keszler Stadium

[Shelter Press; 2018]

Styles: irruption, arrhythmia, undead architecture, “light has its songs”
Others: Laurel Halo’s Dust, E 11th St, Ashley Paul, Chris Corsano

“These are ‘dead intervals.’”

The silence between. Between the end and the beginning. The silence in. A rupture. An interruption, the silence in between. Or, a duration of a death. Eli Keszler makes and will have always made music in and of this interval. For instance, Dead Intervals. Piano wires strung through trees. Sounds that traverse the interval, but can one still call them sounds? Can one hear them? Transmitting the text, “Man is deaf.” For whom then are you singing?

“Music is what man owes to time. More precisely: to the dead interval that produces rhythms.”

The silence in a rupture. The present is. The present leaves itself. From self. The present is the departure. No instants or in the flux or in the flow, no moments either. But a present. In the silence. In a rupture. That tears apart and joins together. That tears together. A coming to be. That begins and is beginning, and is beginning itself. With no escape. Hear then, time. Rhythms that pulse through the cadences of nonexistent things. Or at least. The memory of solidity? At last. To be absorbed in time like this is to watch the world flow by. To be. Solitary. Flow, bye. And rhythms disperse. And gather. And the phrases and the noises of all else. “Which Swarms Around It.” But the percussion recedes in the flow in the fleeting in the fleeing, toward what?

“…dead interval: the very particular silence that, to the human ear, separates two successive rhythmic groups. The silence that separates these groups is a paradoxical duration that starts with the end and is interrupted by the beginning.”

Here are a few of the times I noticed while listening to this record: How long a leaf drifts before landing, the least arduous fall there ever was; how that man over there is fidgeting with his hands, how quickly he must rehearse his anxiety so as not to keep up with it, so as to be in its wake, so as to be it, so as and so as to avoid looking fear in fear’s face your fear are the face of your fear; how however many sounds and signs and sighs and jolts and jerks, they all coalesce, and it’s not that there is a measure over which they are synthesized, for perhaps one can only hear one at once, but one is in them all, that they are all there, looming, like “Measurement Doesn’t Change the System,” but, looming. There is an urgency to escape.

“Gabriel Fauré said of music that writing it as well as hearing it led to the ‘desire for inexistent things.’ Music is the reign of the dead interval. It is the irreversible that visits. It is the past that ‘repasses.’ It is nowhere that comes here. It is the return of that which is without return. It is death in daylight. It is the aseme in language.”

“We Live in Pathetic Temporal Urgency.” One day he writes me: Description of a dream. A face appears, a face disappears. In the department stores of Tokyo, in the subterranean tunnels that extend them. A trace is found, is lost. The present is because it is solitude. It has no past, it has no future. There are no others but it and the ghosts that dissolve beneath the blue neon night shade of its shadow. Yet, a trace is found, a trace is lost. A face appears, disappears. We’ve already conquered space, but time is now being colonized without our being able to describe what is happening, for time does nothing but absorb. Yet time can shatter. From an immemorial past, from an irredeemable future. An urgency toward what? An acceleration toward what? A tumbling toward what recedes, only because there was a “toward” at all. All the while. The wash of strings, synth, bass, keys are all a blur. A wish. An overexposure. A passing away. The light blurred flow of life blurs as it all streams by, resplendent. While the rhythm gathers all together in its spray. While the rhythm tears it all apart, in its sheen. Or not life as a light stream. But perhaps a fountain. In the middle. With “Lotus Awning,” shading its cool. Its clarity.

“My fingers are empty. I cannot bear order, meaning, peace. I gather the aftereffects of time. I rip to shreds the rules of the past and the present, which I have never understood. Logos once meant ‘collection.’ I collect rubble, patches of fugitive light, ‘dead intervals,’ the intruder and the lost, the sordidissima of the cavern: night is the bottom of the worlds. Everything goes toward nonlanguage. I have attempted to bring back things that were without code, without song and without language, and that roam toward the source of the world … Being born serves no purpose and knows no end: certainly not death. There is no end because death does not finish. Death does not terminate: it interrupts.”

Time flows in from the future, which we postpone, through the ceaseless repetition of, a pushing, a way, of the past. Stadium here is an exposition of time, in this stadion, this measureless measure, or rather, time is here exposed, , , there is an inexhaustible present in a choke, in a gasp, a suspension of time, of a gasp, in a choke, where as if floating, or rather, Time is a forceful gesture, imparting the sustenance of subsistence, where as if disembodied, all of your ghosts, slip surreptitiously through, for some reason I’m thinking of, in a subterranean shopping mall, Exposes time, the, there is a time for, there is not enough time, there are too many times, of that scene in Sans soleil, as if to say, you were in all of these times at once, of that scene in, as if to say, here is when I was born, here is when I, here, is when I died, of that scene ’ ’ ‘emergence of time, and it’s miraculous that time has no borders, all of them collapse into the rupture, into the space of the, beginning is the preparing for the beginning, but why speak of the future, for rhythms are just this, Is there measure on this earth? There is none, a measureless measure, to let time pass, to let time be, and to leave time, to be time’s leave of, and to believe time, We live in too many times.

“The dead interval is the hand that time extends to us. If death interrupts, this interruption is within us … in our birth, in our cry as in our sleep. In our breath as in our thought. In our walking on two feet as in human language. The dead interval, of which we are a precarious dependency, explodes in everything. ”

For whom then are you singing?

Eureka!

Some releases are so incredible we just can’t help but exclaim EUREKA! While many of our picks here defy categorization and explore the constructed boundaries between ‘music’ and ‘noise,’ others complement, continue, or rupture traditions that provide new forms and ways of listening. Not all of our favorites will be listed here, but we think each EUREKA! album is worthy of careful consideration. This section is a work-in-progress, so expect its definition to be in perpetual flux.

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