SLSL 'Under the Rose' Bach

[jbor]

on 22/2/03 7:09 AM, prozak at anus.com at prozak at anus.com wrote:

> Note that if you take the latter album and play it through
> distortion, it sounds like Burzum or Atrocity.

    [...] Sure enough, it was Sir Alastair, booming away. It took the
    unmusical Porpentine some five minutes to come aware of the
    devastation he was wreaking on the keys and pedals. Music
    laced the interior of the tiny, Gothic house with certain intricate
    veinings, weird petal-shapes. But it was violent and somehow Southern
    foliage. Head and fingers uncontrollable for a neglect of his
    daughter's or any purity, for the music's own shape, for Bach -- was
    it Bach? -- himself? Foreign and a touch shabby, uncomprehending, how
    could Porpentine say. But was yet unable to pull away until the music
    stopped abruptly, leaving the church's cavity to reverberate. Only
    then did he withdraw unseen out into the sun, adjusting his neck-
    cloth as if it were all the difference between wholeness and
    disintegration. (128-9)

So, "Romantic" in the context of performance rather than Romantic in a
formal or musicological sense. Fair enough.

This description of Sir Alastair playing one of Bach's fugues makes me
suspect Pynchon read Gaddis's _The Recognitions_ pretty early on.

best