{"id":258,"date":"2012-06-21T11:15:17","date_gmt":"2012-06-21T10:15:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/douglascowie.com\/?p=258"},"modified":"2012-06-21T11:15:29","modified_gmt":"2012-06-21T10:15:29","slug":"music-review-man-forever-pansophical-cataract","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.douglascowie.net\/?p=258","title":{"rendered":"Music Review: Man Forever “Pansophical Cataract”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Man Forever<\/a> Pansophical Cataract <\/em>Thrill Jockey<\/a><\/p>\n

Two dudes, one drum: and so what are the sonic possibilities of two percussionists playing single stroke drum rolls on the same snare drum for half an hour?\u00a0 Surprisingly many, as it turns out.\u00a0 There\u2019s no way around the fact that Pansophical Cataract<\/em> is a difficult listen.\u00a0 I\u2019d go so far as to say it\u2019s close to impossible\u2014if not impossible\u2014to listen to it with full concentration from start to finish.\u00a0 But I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s the point here, anyway.\u00a0 There are other sounds besides the drum, but that drum and those drummers are the key thing: it focuses\/they focus your ears while the guitars, organ, bass, and whatever else fill up your brain and keep you from straying.\u00a0 The patterns are intriguing: the drum strokes sometimes seem to separate, so you can hear each individual thwack, but also blur into a wash of sound.\u00a0 Across the opening minutes of \u201cUr Eternity\u201d you begin to listen less to the stick hitting the skin and more to the weird vibrations of that skin in the space between strokes.\u00a0 It\u2019s pretty much undescribable, but also of an undeniable force and intensity.\u00a0 Listening to it might even make you a\u00a0 smarter listener, like it\u2019s training camp for music fans: by forcing you to listen closely, the music allows you to start hearing things you wouldn\u2019t normally notice; you can do this with any recording you like, and soon you\u2019re listening to songs and sounds in whole new ways.<\/p>\n

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