{"id":294,"date":"2004-04-20T21:43:14","date_gmt":"2004-04-21T01:43:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=294"},"modified":"2004-04-20T21:43:14","modified_gmt":"2004-04-21T01:43:14","slug":"misery-is-a-butterfly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=294","title":{"rendered":"Misery Is A Butterfly"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blonde Redhead<\/a>‘s latest album, Misery is a Butterfly<\/em><\/a>, is utterly gorgeous. Minor keys, static rhythms, slow melodies, angular, dissolving riffs, Kazu Makino’s high-pitched, ethereal vocals: these all convey, not a message, but a mood. This is blank-affect music, rather than high-pitched-excitement music.
\nBy “blank affect,” I don’t mean affectlessness, but almost the reverse: an affect, or an intensity, that is so strong as to be “without qualities,” without labels or narrative reference points. A pure state of feeling, rather than a state of feeling something (or other) in particular.
\nThat is to say, Blonde Redhead doesn’t tell stories; rather, it envelops me, drawing me into a zone of “mere being” (reference both Giorgio Agamben and Wallace Stevens), a state of disillusioned, quiet agitation (only such a desperate oxymoron can point to how this music at once convulses and soothes me). Absorbed in the music, I float, rocked by gentle waves that nonetheless are the echoes, or the aftershocks, of ferocious churnings deep below.
\nNothing really happens in this music, and nothing can<\/em> happen. Not because I am safe within these sounds, but precisely because I am absolutely unsafe, because the disaster has already happened. The music of Blonde Redhead confirms and registers this disaster; it is subdued only because it comes afterwards, when the storm has already done its worst. I look through the emotional wreckage, pick up the scattered fragments of my heart, and feel at peace: not the resolute peace of a determination to rebuild, but the peace of knowing that such a rebuilding will never take place, the assurance that I will never get back anything of all that I have lost.
\nAll this is gorgeous, rather than bleak. Melancholy has never been so seductive. Blonde Redhead’s music seduces me like a hot bath, a bath heated almost to the point of intolerable pain. I can barely force myself to get in, but once I am immersed, once I surrender myself, I am suffused by a kind of suffering that is indistinguishable from bliss.
\nMost of the reviews I have read of Misery is a Butterfly<\/em> have emphasized how different this album is from Blonde Redhead’s earlier work: the harsh dissonance on the guitar is gone, the rhythms are more straightforward, and the basic guitar\/drums\/vocals setup (no bass) is supplemented by keyboards, horns, and (I think) strings. But to my mind, these differences don’t amount to much. The production may be more conventional than in the earlier albums, but the mood or affect hasn’t been changed: it has only been deepened, intensified, metamorphosed more fully into itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blonde Redhead<\/a>‘s latest album, Misery is a Butterfly<\/em><\/a>, is utterly gorgeous. Minor keys, static rhythms, slow melodies, angular, dissolving riffs, Kazu Makino’s high-pitched, ethereal vocals: these all convey, not a message, but a mood. This is blank-affect music, rather than high-pitched-excitement music.
\nBy “blank affect,” I don’t mean affectlessness, but almost the reverse: an affect, or an intensity, that is so strong as to be “without qualities,” without labels or narrative reference points. A pure state of feeling, rather than a state of feeling something (or other) in particular.
\nThat is to say, Blonde Redhead doesn’t tell stories; rather, it envelops me, drawing me into a zone of “mere being” (reference both Giorgio Agamben and Wallace Stevens), a state of disillusioned, quiet agitation (only such a desperate oxymoron can point to how this music at once convulses and soothes me). Absorbed in the music, I float, rocked by gentle waves that nonetheless are the echoes, or the aftershocks, of ferocious churnings deep below.
\nNothing really happens in this music, and nothing can<\/em> happen. Not because I am safe within these sounds, but precisely because I am absolutely unsafe, because the disaster has already happened. The music of Blonde Redhead confirms and registers this disaster; it is subdued only because it comes afterwards, when the storm has already done its worst. I look through the emotional wreckage, pick up the scattered fragments of my heart, and feel at peace: not the resolute peace of a determination to rebuild, but the peace of knowing that such a rebuilding will never take place, the assurance that I will never get back anything of all that I have lost.
\nAll this is gorgeous, rather than bleak. Melancholy has never been so seductive. Blonde Redhead’s music seduces me like a hot bath, a bath heated almost to the point of intolerable pain. I can barely force myself to get in, but once I am immersed, once I surrender myself, I am suffused by a kind of suffering that is indistinguishable from bliss.
\nMost of the reviews I have read of Misery is a Butterfly<\/em> have emphasized how different this album is from Blonde Redhead’s earlier work: the harsh dissonance on the guitar is gone, the rhythms are more straightforward, and the basic guitar\/drums\/vocals setup (no bass) is supplemented by keyboards, horns, and (I think) strings. But to my mind, these differences don’t amount to much. The production may be more conventional than in the earlier albums, but the mood or affect hasn’t been changed: it has only been deepened, intensified, metamorphosed more fully into itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}