Saloli The Deep End

[Kranky; 2018]

Rating: 3.5/5

Styles: “Her moonwhite skin, her hair sparkling with diamond prisms under the moon. The moon’s dead eye watching the death of our world.”
Others: Suzanne Ciani, Seven Waves; Anna Kavan, Ice; Wave Notation 3: Erik Satie; La lune s’attristait

Your breath wavers. Somewhere, something shudders. Like a wind that stirs you. A quivering silence in its wake. And abandonment. And a trembling emptiness. A brush of wings in the dark. Dew gathers, then drops. There is a dark pool at the center of everything. Silent, its sheen. But tremulous, a whisper slips sleek across its surface. Tears don’t, perhaps, disturb the night. But what then is this tremor? What then through us seeks release?

Like the choke, after sobs exhaust a surfeit of sorrow. This is the resonance she spins, soothing. A breath stifled but sonorous. No more strength to cry; breath returns and its fullness like a flame can do nothing but exhaust its froth. And effervescence. And the smoke its vestige shudders, then disperses. The strident silence after breath has been consumed. Is it still a breath? Not yet nothingness?

It wavers, that’s all. Something shudders in Saloli’s lunar waveforms. A whisper, for instance, that slips sleek across lovers’ lips, signifying nothing. Precisely because only the hesitation in a shudder qualifies a truth that is too much for two hands to hold. Even in intimacy and its shelter. Even in a shared silence. In a shard. Yet it is this very wavering that varies, dissimulates love into a loving awash in waves.

Like Suzanne Ciani’s Seven Waves (1982), there is a sense of being submerged. Being, submerged, desires nothing but its own surge, swell, and sweep. A spiraling ascendance, whirlingly echoing the luminosity on which it rises. Yet where Ciani was all foam, froth, and the sparkling sea, here all is frozen. Saloli’s miniatures shiver with crystalline arabesques of ice. Shimmer amidst a mist of breath in which its pale transparency might perish. Yet we might say that it was Ciani who was all frozen, and Saloli’s wavering disrupts the synthetic cohesion of sound, fracturing light, scattering song.

Cold coruscations pulse through prismatic resplendence. Freezing, iced-lace fissures. Fragments into an intricate tracery of devotion. Or else, inside, our window to the world is fogged. But the waves are frozen. But warmth and its wish recede into a shivering mist. Where it once surged, now in fragile, slight miniatures our desire can be examined in its torturous entanglement, without our being overcome. Is that it? Freeze light? Upon its rays, still, static, what will you then perform?

A new-age ice-age. A ballerina in a box. Twirling. Charming. Repetition that disrobes its excess, focuses force, scatters, sparkling. It wavers, though, for the crank soon needs to be spun. The center immanent, a hesitation, a thin trembling, a frill quavering, faint. Does ice wilt too? The mirror disperses its image in an infinite variation of loss. Fine-spun fragments of grace. Every face is a mirror that reflects this radiance. We are pervaded with a luminosity that is not our own. Nor is there an original light, only ever infinite glimmers of a sky inside us.

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