Chris Weisman, Transparency, Autumn Records

DISC ONE

Round is, and is about, a shared world. Against Assange and Zuckerberg and their vulgar ideal of what sharing and transparency and togetherness might be—radical homogeneity of content, translation without remainder, minds freed from bodies and arrayed in a standing reserve—the togetherness here is always togetherness-with-difference, respect for what is withheld, openness to someone who is allowed to remain other, must remain other. Like the way we'd share a pie—you would have some, and I would have some, but we wouldn't be eating the same bites of pie, probably. I find the opening chords incredibly relaxing.

Music in the Line expresses ambivalence toward the power of art to redeem moral error, whether personal or world-historical. The "where did the magic go?" riff is beguiling, one of the album's many programmatic acoustic guitar cartoons. And what is the music in the line? Weisman: "Line cognition is backwards. The vague finger-pointing of 'phrasing'. Isis."

The Winning Blues pits the humiliating non-being of near success against the infinite value of not competing. One win away from a trip to the Super Bowl, Chicago's Jay Cutler took himself out of the NFC championship before halftime, complaining of knee pain, and watched the remainder of the game from the sideline, bundled in a black cloak. The feeling was widespread that he had bailed not just on himself and the Bears but the whole Windy City. Although the MRI confirmed that he had indeed suffered a sprain—an injury many veteran players regarded as trivial, especially in a playoff situation—it could not reveal exactly what transpired in Jay Cutler's soul as he made the decision to walk off the field, whether it was cowardly self-preservation or something nobler, some state of conscience invisible to the value system of the National Football League. (Consider also the strange case of Denver's Jake Plummer.)

Bicycle is an instrumental but you can hear the word "bicycle" uttered musically throughout. Based on a verbal description of jazz understood in isolation from actual music—as much jazz must have been in the early days of the form. The "Wild Honey Pie" of the double record. A "corporation" in the Weismanian sense: a music-body. Rob Martin shredding rock n' roll piano, piano scarf flying. Fearless; three times as long as you expect. I admire Chris's faith in this composition; the faith kind of is the composition: I can make this bicycle fly!

The moralizing Weisman of B.O.A.C. returns in Symbols and Signs, a jaunty 6/8 romp with a coasting chorus. It's worth wondering whether the premise of the song is even true. We occupy a place in semantic and economic systems we did not choose and might not find flattering, and beginning to cognize this enmeshment ("beginning" because the webs go so far out that beginning to begin is the most you can hope) can make us giddy and vertiginous; yet it would be crassly reductive to insist that cipher-being is all there is. Language rebuilds the world in its own likeness, then congratulates itself that the world seems to conform so miraculously to its requirements; but it mistakes this power for its own inevitability. Wide tracts of our lives can live only outside it, even if these open spaces of the spirit are increasingly difficult to access, and can be expressed only indirectly. But when by some act of grace we find ourselves opened to Being, we ourselves are revealed as a different sort of being. Is Linkin Park now considered classic rock? This guitar solo (the reeling triplets over muted strumming) takes a revolutionary attitude toward music; please jam it out forever. And when the band comes back in, it's this amazing monophonic oasis, an incomparable momentary timbre mirage, and you realize that you've been experiencing stereo-fatigue from the endless double-tracking, which over time can have the effect of draining the humanity from Chris's voice, turning it into a representation of itself.

Number 2 Man recalls the many disappointments of the recently concluded NFL postseason, as we watched great heroes—Brees, Manning, Brady, Vick, Roethlisberger, each a colossus of the sport—fail on the gridiron. One thinks also of the endless slow-motion replays of Brett Favre getting sacked and concussed after taking what would be the final snap of his NFL career. The tobacco-chewing, Southern-drawling endorser of Wrangler jeans brought the Vikings tantalizingly close to the Super Bowl in his second final season, then came out of retirement yet again to give it one more shot, only to suffer a succession of legacy-destroying disappointments. The lesson of Feathers: quit while you're ahead, retreat into the infinite. Save your brain. This song has such a supernaturally relaxing flow that the recorder countermelody, brilliant though it may be, arrives like an intruder. The pace and delivery and accenting of syllables during the first harmonized verse must be one of language's top ten appearances in music.

I wish I could see Almost a Mood in The Real Book, with "All the Things You Are" on the facing page. I wish Chris would go on a Rhodes-only tour and jam this one out (another fantasy of live Weisman allowed to flourish under the condition of his non-touring). Under the sway of a flan—Chris has more food lyrics than any songwriter I can think of. The Robyn Hitchcock narrative voice that completes the rhymes dares to become uncomfortably intimate. The opening notes suggest a song that never materializes: the meaning of curtains.

The Radial Spoke is a peep into the glamorous world of a small peer-group of elite academic composers. Nostalgia for the days when Weisman, Stillman, Longstreth, and Panaccione were all assistant professors at a large midwestern state university, buddies despite knowing that only two of them would be tenured. Got an alarm clock on my face—sometimes I feel like that's how I must appear to people. This lyric is a likely source of recent comparisons to Elliot Smith. Fleece-power: Clark at the copier in the basement of Dimond Library.

Money Madness is another foray into social reality, this one with a kaleidoscopically tumbling, continually self-recontextualizing Rosenwinkelesque guitar figure. The chorus floats us joyously away, though its story presages our extinction.

Transparency develops further the aesthetic theory proposed by "Bicycle." The doubling—masterfully held in reserve then deployed—has the function of asserting that the melody is intentional, and that the changes in tempo are knowable. From the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, 7th c.:

xvi. Glass (De vitro) 1. Glass (vitrum) is so called because with its transparency it transmits light to one's sight (visus). Anything contained inside other minerals is hidden, but any sort of liquid or visible thing contained in glass is displayed to the outside; although closed up, in a certain way the contents are revealed.

The aggressive, judging Chris is showcased again in Feel the Houses. I don't believe in the Eastern Seaboard. Me neither! I've been waiting for someone to try to articulate this non-belief! I got the emptiest feeling when a school chum once came back from a few weeks of travel claiming he had been "following Phish up and down the Eastern Seaboard." The phrase signals phoniness. Only a mariner could use it authentically. Speaking of phoniness, one reviewer cites Chris's "talk of eating magic mushrooms" in a list of cred-earning cultural reference points, which seems needlessly reductive and counter to the spirit of the song, which is that you feel powerful and awesome when you transcend normative interpretations of social reality, and sick and ugly when you force yourself to repeat their banalities as truth. The lyric in question goes: I'm eating your house like a mushroom. I think the suggestion is that I am consuming your house and it is transforming me, not I am consuming a mushroom and it is transforming your house. Drugged or not, narrator has become again a roving hunter-gather for whom all is spirit-food.

I love the dopey voices on the chorus of Anybody's Time, and the spooky keyboard melody.

Fire and Flame is one of the songs rescued from Chia, Chris's ill-fated follow-up to Fresh Sip. The neverending organ guitar reminds me of raindrops I once watched on a car window.† I like collecting in memory the nodes of its melody and listening to the big shape move. I believe the shape is a Zome. While the lyrics seem to suggest that potsmoking may be wrong, the music suggests that it may be very right.

†The car was the Jetta in which my friend drove up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

Rosenwinkel Vertigo poses an important question—why is it that reviewers draw comparisons to the Beach Boys, the Magnetic Fields, Beulah (?), etc., while ignoring Kurt Rosenwinkel, the hero he directly names? Is the reason the same reason Weisman is still somehow totally unknown? The anxiety of influence: "I guess you'd say it's pretty tough/not to just play Kurtish stuff." Weisman vs. Longstreth: Polytone vs. Jazz Chorus.
Metheny on Phish:

I have a friend that's got a lot of live tapes of them, and I'm totally knocked out with their flexibility and ambition to play all this wildly different stuff... and he's a really, really good guitarist too. And I'm sorry they broke up. They really opened up so many people's imaginations as to what music can be, and again, there's something that happens when you're playing for groups of your peers -- people your own age that kind of look like you and can really relate to you that's different than when it's a bunch of older guys playing. And I think that they really served a very important place, actually, I don't think, I know it for a fact, that they turned people on to what improvisation is and what it can be.

Longstreth:

You've been compared to the jam band Phish; Do you like that?
I don't see that. I think Phish is...I don't think that music is very good.

Weisman:

"I feel I've never told you the Story of the Ghost". We make our money in vacancy. Tonight we seem to live in a field of low lying pink and grey clouds. Minimal piano. Minimal synth. The maximum power in the minimum energy: the Energy of Absence. The ice cream scoop is loose, it keeps its ring. And out of this must come the Electric Guitar. Its use of cheap pink effects, official and otherwise. Pause. Except the Wah Wah pedal, a real friend from Clapton and Cream if not quite Jimi Hendrix. This is the Ghost the men spoke of in their economic testimony. But who's the Subject and who's the Object? Who's the Faces and who's the Vases? The Ghost is the jam of course, his lackadaisical willingness to engage only this way is the inertial powerpull that made its rickety front justify its ephemeral existence.

(Aspects of) the Grateful Dead have somehow accrued hipster respectability, but Phish will never be acceptable within the indie world. "Rosenwinkel Vertigo," though, with Chris's characteristic enthusiasm for what will never be cool, jumps uncountably many levels further than, say, an ironic Junta reference as Chris tips his hat to "Time Turns Elastic," Phish 3.0's magnum opus. Recorded and released as a single in the period between Phish's three comeback shows in March 2009 and that summer's tour—a space of tantalizing possibility, like the first months after a revolution—TTE, their first ambitious and proggy composition since maybe 1993, suggested that there might be no upper limit to the creativity of new Phish. But hopes that the band might be entering some phase of artistic recommitment deflated nearly instantly at their next show and have yet to be renewed. The opening notes of "Time Turns Elastic" signal that the next quarter of an hour will unfold without improvisation, and so the song's performance is nearly universally dreaded by fans, and widely regarded as an F.U. to the audience.

Sound of the Summer performs exactly the sort of accidental and backwards slip into luxuriant, breezy beauty that its narrator strenuously resists.

TWO

On the radio tonight I heard an interview with a high-class cook who, when you order a "root beer float," serves you a soft transparent cube that tastes just like a root beer float despite having none of its other properties. Maybe The Beatles is like that, somehow abstractly summarizing the total harmonic event of the Beatles in a featureless gel. Musically "The Beatles" recalls "The Meaning of Flowers," the instrumental that opened Three Kinds of Ears, a mostly improvised session featuring Chris, his brother Kurt, and Hilary Irons, the artist sister of brooding backwoods crooner and widely sought-after bass guitar sideman Asa Irons, recorded during Thanksgiving-time 1998. What is the meaning of the Beatles? Other than the scat-sung ascending "hello, goodbye" major scale, the clues are not overt; the bass is not even especially roving. I'll venture that the title refers not to the band but the LP, because this is the song where Transparency becomes a double album. I mean, this is true in a blockheaded, literal way, but I intend it as a substantive aesthetic point: the first disc doesn't read as part of a double album. It feels complete, self-sufficient, composed, and appropriately sequenced; even the oddball instrumentals have a place in the whole. It lacks the typical marks of the form—it's not excessive, incoherent, unedited, improvisatory, tossed off, etc. But "The Beatles" definitively represents the switching off some inner censor. It is the Wardrobe through which we pass into a wider world where the artwork finally escapes control of the artist, and secret correspondences arise unbidden. Whether or not the second half of this album is good, it is certainly multiply permeable, open, decentralized, and full of wide patches of forgetting.

I can't tell whether Be Easy on Yourself is advice we're supposed to follow or not follow. Can I take back what I said about too much double tracking? Because I love the doubled fuzz vocals. Giant spaces in this song; space-defining scaffolding; transparency.

I can give no musicological reason for connecting In the Walls with Chris's high school duo, Clov, but it feels like the world of I Am the Cornship to me. (Chris could tell you exactly which harmonic twists he did and did not know back then.) In many ways Transparency represents the totality of Chris's pop music vocabulary, a mini-encyclopedia of the styles and zones he's inhabited over the last 20 years. Maybe it's his way of quitting pop music forever. Another song salvaged from Chia, one I desperately wished Chris would not junk. The idea tape runs throughout.

The Pilot's Skull is an object that embodies a story; it would have been an excellent premise for a Hardy Boys adventure (Hardy Boys rather than Nancy Drew because the former series is, I think, more preoccupied with modes of transportation, their allure and consequences). I think I found the pilot's skull/He thought he could go anywhere at all. The moral of the story is implicit, though quite frightening. Maybe Chris scared himself making his last album; Transparency, even if it's better, whatever that would mean, represents a step back from whatever precipice Fresh Sip is contemplating. The line about the number-one complaint that he's ever told is almost certainly self-referential: what's the number-one complaint that Chris is ever told? Because everyone thinks they know what's wrong with his music. The snippets from idea tapes (it'll be a tape of me just doing the repeats) are just the sort of evidence of process one demands from a double record.

Chris usually has one "rocker" per album, and Contact High is it. The fuzz riff is a vocalization of outrageous drug pleasure, the wicked opening of a primal maw. Chris doesn't usually allow us to enjoy his music this much—his approach is largely based on subverting musical expectations, which at times can make the music seem like it's more about him than us—so it's nice to have one song that generously gratifies desire.

No Business Shoes is a skipper when I'm cruising for good ones, but a favorite when I'm listening straight through; why is this? Chris has apparently learned some lesson in crackling high-end frequencies from his work with Greg Davis (effected cymbals?). The uncomposed excess of the cymbal's rhythm is welcome; Chris's recorded performances often sound like they're straight from the sheet music, like, if a sound isn't intentional, functional, and repeatable, it doesn't exist in the right way. A victory for indifference.

In spite of the record's multiple disavowals of competition, Ordinary Consciousness may another example of Chris versing Dave. During candles on the map of the persistently solutionary, one of the vocal tracks omits the "the," causing the rest of the phrase to be displaced by, I think, a 16th note, which makes the vocals staggered and shimmery. It's cool that this isn't an electronic delay effect, but a human effect caused by musical thinking.

Sort of similarly, 1999, related to Fresh Sip's "999" in digits only, features this brilliant stitch in time: the beat (= the whole sound-world) is momentarily shifted when Chris deletes an 8th note as an illustration of the lyric I cut my life along the line. The song narrates an failed attempt at dropping out; out of what I do not know. The Fender Squire may be Clark's Bullet.

Like most of Chris's songwriting, The Sun Comes Back is not programmatic in the sense of "a visit to the circus" or "the fireman's parade marches by," yet it is poetically illustrative; its synaesthesias are unnameable but true; the words and music do not mimic and are not artificially grafted together, but are coordinated, like the organs of a living being, and seem arise from some third, common thing, perhaps the imagination. Is this song mastered too hot, or is this perhaps, again, the sun? I think I can tell that the bass guitar is purposefully buzzy, beginning with the performance; that drum though? Jesus, I forgot how awesome this chorus is.

Does Rain Doctor sound like a Ben song from new Clov? Again, Transparency feels like a career retrospective or Greatest Hits composed entirely of new material. Flying over all the cities where one has lived in order to decide whether it was all worth it; mastering the pop form in order to kill it. Ryan and Kurt and Ruth and Kyle are all somewhere on the record, too, though it cheapens things to try to say exactly where.

Noting semi-correspondences to the Beatles may be the lowest form of criticism, but the warbly beginning of Mystery, presumably imported from the original ideas tape, is sort of Transparency's "Can You Take Me Back?" Gasping through the 90s nihilism of Infinite Jest. You're already cool with the blues outdoes the humorless Elliot Smith.

The Sweetest Flags may be what the pilot of "The Pilot's Skull" was singing during his daring final run. This song addresses the Coleridgean moment when the poet of the inner sublime drops whatever pretense of aesthetic investigation and admits the rawness of his greed for satanic pleasure. ("And all should cry, Beware! Beware!/His flashing eyes, his floating hair!") I'm inventing everything in time—this kind of thought, when it's not a thought but a direct observation, is usually the result of poisoning, and one wishes to repeat it immediately. Ever seen atoms? This song makes me think of Flagstaff Hill, in Pittsburgh's Schenley Park, and its majestic view of the Oakland skyline. My favorite drinking fountain is near there.

Arabesque defies recollection and exists only in the moment of listening. There is no internal reason why its druggy orientalism must come to an end.

As Bono of U2 has said, the trick of pop songwriting is to write lyrics that are general enough to appeal to a mass audience, yet sufficiently evocative of individual experience that each listener believes the song calls uniquely on them. Crosst Bridge has this illusory effect on me.

Angleterre Anywhere argues that England just is a mode of perception. Durham, Dover, Newmarket, and Portsmouth, NH are each named after a location in England; New Jersey, the site of Keith Jarrett's recorder-heavy Spirits, is named after the Island of Jersey, which both is and is not part of the UK.