This is not the most horrible sixty-three minutes and thirty-six seconds of music I’ve endured, I’ll give it that. Never mind who or what is or were the soulless, union-paid minions whose 401K-inspired realization of this… I don’t know, thing, I suppose, that approaches aural manifestations of caramelized, vitamin-impregnated, gum-slicing-even-while-milk-soaked breakfast cereal equivalent of who-knows-what a what-what-what purportedly near a universe where the subject1 of this review passes2 as music. The liner notes are more interesting than their subject.
And there-in lies the symmetry of the project.
I’m reminded of avant-guard art exhibits I’ve reviewed where the artist’s statement is more a work3 than the piece at hand. We are turned away from aesthetic perceptions toward the written word, printed symbols whose collective purpose, in an ideal world, serves the artist, the art and the patron. Nevertheless, we are taxed with a tax that is sorely to be born when a creation cannot stand or be understood without a manual. For, for this cause did God create Cliff who, in turn, created his notes.
As exhaustive and exhausting are these liner notes, the indicated 63:36 length of the recording receives no mention. Such an omission is not only glaring, it’s the most refreshing indication of what could be mistaken for scholarly restraint rather than as the failure to exploit every conceivable aspect of a subject, rendering even the most raw and innocent surfaces fully exposed unto humiliating deconstruction, whether relevant or not, for the sake of leaving nothing tacit.
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