amon tobin's foley room.

I don't know if any of you are listening to this album, but it is one of the few things that justs sits on repeat for days, and never gets boring. But it got me thinking about a comment a prof made, either last term, or last year. He was trying to point out the special status that literature had, due to its age. He was saying that there has never been a musical equivalent to James Joyce. This was, in part, due to the massive intertextuality and metatextuality of works like Finnegan's Wake. Music usually only goes as far as to reference it's own genre, or the classics. A great example is the hip-hop community and the reference to the greats, and their lyrics, that percolate through a vast many songs. Each of those references brings both the gravitas of the original lyricist, and the context the line was extracted from. And I think that is extremely interesting, in terms of placing the music into context. On the other hand, there is the subtextual reference to reality, thinly veiled protest songs, etc.

Tobin manages, in my interpretation, to reference something wider. The example of 'Big Furry Head', off of Foley Room, took a completely different take. While the foundation of the song includes the growls of lions and tigers, they exist in a musical framework that is built both around the sound, and the sense / emotions /instinctual human reaction to it. This isn't just referencing the sound, but what it evokes, and complementary to the aural text he creates. On top of that, the whole package works as an insanely entertaining song. I think this is a genuine selectively dense experience, but at the same time, I suppose every song can be taken as one likes. I just feel as though this album in particular allows one to go deeper into the analysis, focusing on sound with it's own linkages and meanings, as opposed to lyrics.

I think this would have been impossible in any other genre of music. I also think this is why I consider this to be the new classical.

This is probably because this is one of the few artistic works without visual or text/speech content, that I can fall into analyzing. I'm beyond impressed. And that's my excuse for listening to it on repeat for a week.