I’m starting another of my real-time reviews. This time it is ‘Extended Play - The Elastic Book of Music’ (Elastic Press 2006) edited by Gary Couzens. As ever, I shall attempt to draw out all the stories' leitmotifs and mould them into a gestalt.

The book seems just begging for this sort of treatment, because I (as Nemonymous editor/publisher) understand the stories were initially chosen blind-anonymously by the editor.

The stories and interludes, as I understand it before reading this book, are written by Jean-Jacques Burnel, Marion Arnott, Gary Lightbody, Andrew Humphrey, Sean 'Grasshopper' Mackowiak, Becky Done, Rebekah Delgado, Nels Stanley, Iain Ross, Tim Nickels, Lene Lovich, Emma Lee, Tall Poppies, Tony Richards, jof owen, Rosanne Rabinowitz, Chris T-T, Philip Raines and Harvey Welles, Chris Stein.

As I understand it, all stories were to be music-based but otherwise written separately by the various authors in the normal independent way. Consequently, I say, there should be no connection between these stories unless it is by the purely serendipitous strength of 'The Synchronised Shards of Random Truth and Fiction' or, to coin a new phrase from that old one of mine, 'The Random Shards of Synchronised Truth and Fiction'! (DFL)

This review will be written here ... slowly, savouringly, in real time, so please do not look back more than once every few days (even weeks) for additions. 

All my real-time reviews are linked from here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/recent_reviews_of_books_by_dfl.htm.

I shall be merely making a short quote from each of the 'Interludes' and reviewing the stories in detail.

Interlude One: Intro - Jean-Jacques Burnel

"Songs and music have often been inspired by literature and here, within these pages, the literature is conversely inspired by songs and music." (3 Sep 09)

The Little Drummer Boy - Marion Arnott

"It was as if without his anger Dad was no one."

This is a very powerful story of a boy whose 'sideways' moments lead to animalistic retributions against the dysfunction this his violent Dad and chain-smoking Mum and others have induced in him.  Musically, it is the most basic; the rhythm of blood's drum beat.  Without exaggeration, this story is truly a classic, one that will live you forever.  Much telling detail of boyhood in, I guess, modern England.  Here lycanthropy and its ilk are more than just the product or possession of role-play.  The devil's not in the detail. It's out of the body in the open. And I am the devil's advocate. As Sandy Nelson once said: 'Let There Be Drums'. (3 Sep 09 - three hours later)

This first story presents possession as the ultimate or optimum karaoke, tuning drumbeat with drumbeat, on full song, on a (drum)roll... (4 Sep 09)

Interlude Two: Sexual Heaney - Gary Lightbody

"...as green as spring [...] I was writing thunder and dirge up from the basement..." (4 Sep 09 - three hours later)

Last Song - Andrew Humphrey

"Cal played in a band for a while [...] This was in the mid-nineties when Oasis and Blur were cool.."

This story is quite long with a style that flows like silk.  An old-fashioned, almost 'Romance novel', style that I don't normally enjoy, but here it works limpidly as well as insidiously with things that turn out to be even darker when compared with darkness's light expression: telling of narrator musician Josh and his self-diminishng rivalry with his elder brother Cal and his detached posh parents and music performer Lucy whom he and Cal meet in the present day (not the mid-nineties) at a gig in a club which one can imagine featured in a Joel Lane novel. The sense of the music is conveyed with a sure brushstroke. The characters are shown to have tantalisingly semi-fathomable pasts while their present moments are recorded by Lucy in exercise books in the form of all her verbatim conversations.  But can any fount of information be trusted implicitly, especially as to who darkens doors the most?  A sense of being filmed and recorded for posterity as touched upon, even eaten into by exegesis and cut-up. Brilliant stuff. [In 'Little Drummer Boy', the animals are possessed temporarily; here, it is one stage further, where the end result is cruelly enforced non-existence.]

"After a moment Cal says, 'She says it's all recorded anyway.' / 'What?' / 'Everything we say.' / 'You mean, Big Brother...'" (4 Sep 09 - another five hours later)

Interlude Three: Etcetera, Etcetera... - Sean "Grasshopper" Mackowiack

"In other words, we would like to celebrate that there is a congeniality of feelings that are present in the audience as well as the performer; an invisible connection." (4 Sep 09 - another hour later).

 

Tremolando - Becky Done

"Tamsin found Stravinsky to be useful in most situations."

Well, for me, this substantial story has everything going for it. Well-written, of course. A compulsive, well-characterised plot. And it is centred upon my passion: Classical Music (with many nifty prose 'movement' sub-titles from that field) - with believable references to the twists and turns of tractable Elgar, Britten, Debussy, Haydn, Mozart, etcetera, etcetera...  And, for once, a major character (Joseph) who is of the same age group as me! :)

The story centres on a String Quartet group called 'Viol' (two young women, a young man and Joseph) who regularly meet and play in Joseph's home. There are many cross-currents, initial congeniality of connection, then rearing sex, later mysterious or blameworthy pasts, drugs and, apparently, madness of sorts, and connections that are invisible to the reader except, possibly, until when the reader reaches the story's end.

I enjoyed it immensely but perhaps I didn't really understand the ending or the ending is fraught with implications too subtle for me or it is simply as over-melodramatic as I suspect it may be... Yet, when one thinks about it, Chamber Music (such as a String Quartet) is deceptively stylised and subtle but, intrinsically, as one begins to live with the music time and time again -- even with, say, Haydn, let alone with, say, Penderecki -- it starts brimming with passion and mystery towards a true ending of stridency-by-sensibility via an invisible connection between audience and performer if not via the actual up-front 'noise' of the music itself.  Given me plenty to think about. Bravo! 

"He's almost thirty years older than her. The thought of it was vile." (4 Sep 09 - another three hours later)