Various Artists - "Post-Asiatic: Lost War Dream Music"

Bill Horist - Nukeru Oto (For Tiffany) (Urck Recordings 2007)

Various Artists - Post-Asiatic: Lost War Dream Music / Urck Recordings

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. I'm glad Ronnie broke with convention and posted his Devotion column last Thursday in preparation for the new season of "The Wire" (which I have just now started). The praise for that show has reached critical mass and it's almost impossible not to find someone you know intimately acquainted with the HBO series. His take was both well-timed and a perfect segue for the album being written about herein.

As this Salon article shows outright, "The Wire" has gained such a loyal following mostly through its dense, slowly constructed plotlines that take all of the excitement right out of the immediacy of contemporaries like [Pick whatever sub-par spinoff of "Law & Order" or abominable version of "CSI" is on now]. Each episode eschews conventions of a Freytag diagram and instead chooses to play the long-ball. Out for over a month now and something I've been meaning to get to for at least as long, Post-Asiatic: Lost War Dream Music is of a similar mold. At two mammoth CDs spanning 27 songs and 156 minutes, stretching the legs of groups like Muslimgauze and Kamilsky, there is no shortage of material and no definitive conclusion.

And it's certainly true that you could listen to just one song from this collection of Asian and Eastern-influenced avant-garde artistry. But like jumping into Finnegans Wake or "The Wire" or any other engrossing work of art, it is best to set the CD player from Disc 1 and let the music take you from there. The surprises, the tapestries being woven here, are part of a grander picture of painting the East not with colors and visuals (The cover is, after all, in black and white) but with a tape player at a Burmese puppet show or an incessant, hypnotic rhythm strummed to stretch time beyond conventional means. It could go on forever. This album could go on forever.

Sometimes it feels like it does. If you're one of those people that tries desperately to focus on every nuanced section of every song on an album, this double-disc set is not for you. You will wear out long before it does. Ideally, the way to hear an album of this length and variety is to simply start it and sit back. Relax. Enjoy. Enjoy the epic "Happy New Year, Sibanjar" from Amps for Christ, who are arguably the most well-known artists represented. That doesn't mean they're the best. There is no best. They are all equally good and, surprisingly, all equally necessary.

It's not that jumping into the middle of this album will ruin it for you. There are no plot arcs, there is nothing that informs Refrigerator Mothers that doesn't later inform Sikhara that you need to be aware of before diving in. You just dive. Anywhere. Like the fictional Baltimore "The Wire" seeks to create, jumping into Post-Asiatic is like jumping into an alternate universe existing without you, an "other Asia" even, and it's full of vitality and creativity and a ton of names you wouldn't ordinarily hear coming from all corners of our known universe. And some from a few corners we probably don't know about yet.

The best part is that you can hear them all, right now. So generous are the people behind Urck that they have offered up this album for you to discover of your own volition. There you will find other reviews similar to this one that all offer the same opinion using the same adjectives to evoke the same emotions from you that should lead you to the same conclusion as them. I won't disagree except to add another personal note: This album sounds like what happens when you stop reviewing for a month and then that month passes and people start to ask you what you've been doing. In future instances, this album is what I will tell them. I hope you understand.

This album helps to explain why so many things require patience. It helps to explain why the most rewarding show on television at the moment has taken all of its five seasons to gain the momentum that will make it the most sought-after DVD set two years from now when it's off the air. It helps to explain why there are still scholars out there with the money and the time to write books, but the helpless devotion to decoding one of the great novels of the 20th century (they think). It helps to explain why we bother blogging, why we keep coming back at the mercy of the great Google, wondering where? Where is our next post? Where is the wire that will stretch across the buildings that build our reputations? Where will our fresh material come from? Where will we go from here? There's where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the

Chicago
2007-2008.