“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, September 15, 2008

Richard Wright

Pioneer of far away intimate spaces Richard Wright is gone.

Music of afternoons.
The wide open streets of children smaller than I am now. The sound of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” oozing loud through hi fi speakers from an open window at the top of my uncle's next door neighbor's house in Norwich, UK. High summer. The synthesizers and found sounds grinding like a cosmic hurdy gurdy.

Childhood memories of playing in eternal sunday afternoon. Wet Richmond afternoons with Syd.

The unspeakable beauty of “The Great Gig in the Sky.”

That penultimate chord of the opening riff of “Breathe.”

“Us and Them,” with the unexpected shocker “Black—and blue / And who knows which is which, and who is who.”

The first ambient music. Strange, so strange, keyboard solos in “Welcome to the Machine” and “Dogs” (and the light but intense work on side 1 of The Wall) will haunt me until my grave. Penetrating, ghostly, shuddering. Coming from far future and far past, far inside the body, far outside. Simultaneously.

The suburban London melancholy of haunted railway lines arcing away into the trees, the green lights looking at us as we stood on top of the bridge.

Richard Wright's music was always already the sound of grief.


No comments: