I really liked Polly Harvey's last LP, a whalebone and sepia affair in which hexes and live burial and possession and all those Gothic staples figure more or less latently/metaphorically (as the cover pretty economically signals). One of the songs, 'The Piano,' is about how following the cues a musical score prescribes can compromise yr identity; by reprising the postures another, earlier piano player once assumed - occupying the same space and, if not the same time, the same rhythm they did - the protagonist's able to effect a symbiotic (re)union w/ them. To quote:
'My fingers sting / Where I feel your fingers have been / Ghostly fingers/ Moving my limbs.. Oh God I miss you.’
I was >>ing through Bladerunner in order to get to the bit where Deckard scans the photograph the other day (while trying not to smirk at the meta-ness of that scenario) & I was struck by how, immediately pre-scanning, there's a similar piano/intersubjectivity conjunction, whereby the sheet music on Deckard's piano (he falls asleep at it immediately pre-scanning) is juxtaposed w/ the photos by way of which the replicants are furnished w/ false or borrowed memories.
Like those good girls in days of yore whose facility with the spinet guaranteed their marriageability/tractability replicants aren't supposed to improvise.
ALSO did Polly Harvey crib her hair from Bladerunner era Sean Young??
(Pianola lithography + encoded Beet's 5th (that's what the dashes and lavender crescents are) from adclassix, sepia portrait from here, Peej + adorable redrawing of rock criticism's paradigms here, Rachel pensive at piano + her coiffure from leagueofmelbotis)
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