Category Archives: Books

Paul Griffiths: let me tell you

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Paul Griffiths
let me tell you
Hastings, East Sussex: Reality Street Editions, 2008

She is like the rest of us; we all have no more than the words that come to us in the play. We go on with these words. We have to.

So the king prefaces let me tell you, an ode to Ophelia, whose limited vocabulary as Shakespeare allots her in Hamlet—481 distinct words—forms the toolkit for Paul Griffiths’s autobiographical exercise. Avid ECM listeners will have caught a glimpse of this language via there is still time, wherein his own recitations of similarly restricted poetry are the moon to cellist Frances-Marie Uitti’s sun and prove that the conceit is not a restriction at all, but rather a microscope’s mirror throwing light on that which might otherwise be left to inference. Ophelia’s brother, Laertes, and her father, Polonius, are the main specimens on her slide, and Shakespeare himself the dye that imparts context.

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The story begins with a concession to concessions. Ophelia speaks, and speaks of speaking. Her call to speech is musical: like music, an act in the fullest sense, moving to rhythm of grass and herb.

This is like being one of my own observers, but with no powers over what is observed.

She remembers her birth, but muses upon the art of memory as gift bestown over keep earned. She sees, or rather hears, her father in the cadence of his anticipation, connecting sole to stone as amniotic darkness readies itself to break light around her.

False memory may speak, I find, as well as true. I have to know the difference.

The sounds are immaterial, as true in origin as lies. Father’s feet fade into alliteration, his face alive with death. As it is, we come to realize that it is not her birth after all, but her brother’s—pulled from in to out by the dimples of Achilles. The maid sings of tears and roses, equates tears and roses with glass, and frets them to the consistency of wet paper. The maid sounds herself only through singing. Otherwise,

She would look down at us and say nothing—say nothing but look and look, harsh with love.

The face as medium: it knows of love beyond the bounds of her charge, carries it through the yeast of her other half, percolating through the dough of secret passion until it crackles like a finely browned crust that all but burns eager hands. She is a character of vocal shadows. The young siblings take this challenge as a game, and spin from it a fiber they can only hope will survive the distance she puts between herself and them as she follows her nose to a kitchen beyond the mountain.

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The flowers come and go, but leave a trail of their scent. With the mark of a pansy, the pollen and blood of it smeared across the hands, it changes from solid to liquid in the blink of a written eye. The iris materializes on her arm, a curiosity in relief, a sisterly longing temporarily branded.

And there is the sun, and there is the mountain: all where we are is in an ecstasy of expectation.

From this fragile experience, the winds of which linger in curls from a photo tinter’s brush, she knows the value of intimacy within bounds, the buzz of the almost-was. And in fact, beauty is never an indulgence here. It flits in and out of touch, floats in musings on music, and comports itself loosely in the presence of bodies and minds.

Here all is still, still as night. We do not have the joy of music.

Thus the melody of language, inherent as crickets to midnight, also reveals a dream: the wish for something to give up, for the choice to do so. The father looms, bearded but not, lavishing brother and sister with warm breath. In them pools reflect the stories of his travels, and they too tremble and distort those memories with every telling. Words come verily, jumping gaps shallow and deep. It is the battler’s tale, wrapped in water and set adrift, farther to sea than any memory might have been.

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Here is an Ophelia whose childhood resembles a stained glass window. Each section is its own color. Some are uniform and almost transparent, others milky and swirled, but they cohere at once-molten boundaries. Anxieties surround the maid who spent so much of her time with the siblings. Her absence is fraught. She is home, lost to the whim of another relationship in an empty life. But the maid returns with something dour, her actions choreographed to royal step. In them are mirrors for the end-aware glance of a sick girl.

But do I long for death and not know it? Is this what my words tell me?

A play within a play, performance at Polonius’s beck and call. Behind its curtain stretches the actor of death, the rise and fall of death. Ophelia questions her remembrance of the stage, but in the asking answers the conundrum that is the root of her. She knows quietude equals harmony.

The after reads into the before. This she admits. Drawing a name from the play and the fortress, she twists a mock fiber of reality from the shavings of fiction and holds to her bosom the flowers that will end her.

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We discover her need for flowers, a trip over the mountain by a path startlingly seen. She meets the maid’s daughter, whose animosities are at once vague and clear. This daughter becomes an anti-Ophelia, a mirror-Ophelia, an other-Ophelia in one. She glares and resists, pushes the girl into our capture, from which the only escape is a dip.

It’s cold. My eyes weep.

Those same eyes see profundity incarnate, wrapped in glass and splashed through the atlas of openness that is her heart. A visitation, a spark and a candle, fearful and awed. Her memory unfolds one morpheme at a time, a hand-game shielded by paper pyramids and children’s scrawl. Her memory looks back to the shadows. It pulls the oxcart of the present, heavier with distance and jangling with a litany of bells.

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She grows into an awareness that constricts her, even as it opens those eyes beyond where light may reach. Hers is the desire for visions and valences. The unkempt window, cobwebbed and secure, frames it all in quadrants. Music waits like fatality, a game played only once and which leaves a trail of mimics until the temptation to lose overcomes. Strategies are windows of a different sort. They facilitate emotional insight, forming bonds that would never have been without competition.

With music, thank God, you cannot speak.

Behind the façade of affection beats the drum of fate, and Laertes follows his along a divergent path. This, Ophelia would seem to know—if not then, then ever more. She was the one who let go of his hand, that it might transcend the arras of his brokenness. It is written on her skin.

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I wish he had been well more of the time, says Ophelia of her father, whose letters adhere to her. She remembers the words as if they were her own (as of course they are). Not only are his eyes weak, but also his denials. Yet she remembers his time in uniform during a time that was not uniform. Since then his speech has become his synecdoche. I do not know what I would do without him.

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Her mother: the italicized she. Notorious indifference and depravity of the one who neither listens nor reads, yet has no compunctions in letting the children know what goes on in her chambers. Mother shares these details, imposes them upon daughter, to ensure that power and separation are one and the same. And the suitors don’t stop there. They have eyes for the younger.

She had made it so that I could not believe my own memory.

Sharing is a double-edged blade: one side run with the blood of the unavoidable turn, the other licked clean by bedroom trysts. She must hide these things. Her father cannot know, though his eyes implore. In his absence, mother calls her close and opens the floodgates of illogic. The vessel of that deluge is as quiet as her motive, and sands away the grit of intangible things.

She was a length of hell.

But then she is gone. The sister bids good riddance. The brother inquires.

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Hamlet appears pronominally, as nature and nurture wrapped into one. His presence has long since faded, though abstractly it flickers in and out of sense. Ophelia fishes his limpid brain, but comes up short every time. Into her chamber the boy steals and, along with her brother, ganders what he cannot ever have. There is a lack of affection in Hamlet’s past that speaks to the dwindling nature of her own. The cloak of yearning frays at last when Hamlet takes an education. Words hang from his tongue like raindrops at the tips of leaves.

Without music it means nothing. Without music it could make me fear.

Polonius wanders into the background, but ties a string to Ophelia’s finger ere exeunt. In light of this, she hopes the hearts of both men will see her silhouette and marvel. And when the young man swoons as if in the plays he attends, she closes the light around herself and wonders what brought her here.

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The play is not still: it becomes something.

She is aware of the theater. Loves the theater, insofar as she knows her lines. And so we jump into a mise-en-abyme…only it’s not, for we have the ending already in grasp. The trio—father and children—takes a comedic bow.

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Praying to a God she knows to be absent, she supplicates a mountain away from the kingdom, calculates in her heart the mathematics of foretelling. How can she not doubt the music of life, when all it amounts to is silence?

Now there is no eye on us, and the night goes on without end.

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Yet silence can be an act of kindness, of a love so deep it cannot be defined—as when Laertes throws himself into manhood at the arm of a pretty young thing or two. Unlike their mother, he locks his tingling away from the girl, who wonders still about what is over. When she confronts him on it, the answer is morbid, final.

There is a change in the brother. His person shines.

In this erotic turn, speech becomes excitement, contact, and self-realization.

In my heart as in yours there is no doubt:
What reason then, my love, not to come out?

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Night,
A letter to the curtain, behind which the body thrums. A time when mouths open—not to speak but to sing.
day:
Sun burns away the flesh of pretense, leaving skeletons of passion to rest on the hills. Glass weeps with light.
there is no difference for me.
The difference is love: they make the night as the night makes them. Togetherness blossoms like those pansies by the path, now overgrown beyond recognition. The weeds are quills in the playwright’s hand, flung one after another until the inkwell runs dry. The hand will open, say nothing, and drop. It cracks a door to tragedy.

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Last night I made up my mind: I must go.

The young lord has left her to the darkness. Death is no longer the correct term. If only there was remembrance to tell her father and brother what they cannot know, they might respond. Their tears will tell enough.

Ophelia in the castle, hands on knotted ore, seeks the king and in him lays the infant of her choice.

There’ll be no remembrance of you here. It will be as if you had never been. The effect of O.

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“O” is all that I am. Through the portal, a ring on a finger left in the forge’s keep. The knob turns at my touch. For as long as the snow powders the earth like the face of another, I will linger here, a trace and a scent. If crowds should gather and resurrect me a million times, only to throw me and my vocabulary into the abyss of plot development, so be it. I have said my piece, and the piece has said me.

If there is anything to be found in these images, it is a version of ourselves. The pathos of life is clearest when the means are limited. They express changes in light. The text begins to take on an anatomy: shoulders, hearts, tongues, and arms all fit together in changing combinations. Quotidian essentials like food and children’s games become a linguistic game to best capture the essence of nonexistent fare. Words become names, and names objects. The color green is at once generative, sinful, and divine.

To be sure, these parameters are fascinating but in the end imply something greater than the sum, if not also the subtraction, of their parts. Just as we can forever impose shapes on the water vapor we call “cloud,” also infinite is the potential of the graph we call “letter.”

By the time we have read this Ophelia, she has already read us.

(Paul Griffiths is a music writer, novelist, poet, and librettist whose liner notes can often be found gracing ECM New Series booklets. To read excerpts from let me tell you, click here.)

Book review: Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin by Patrick Donnelly

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Patrick Donnelly
Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin
Tribeca: Four Way Books, 2012

Nine years after the publication of The Charge (Ausable Press), Massachusetts-based poet and teacher Patrick Donnelly returns from a long and winding road bearing a satchel filled with leaflets for the soul. “When in the uterine empyrean they told me” opens the collection with something of a mission statement—or, more precisely, with the lack of one. It sets a Buddhist tone for the considerations that follow, harking to the blood—both wet and dried—of attachments in a sparkling and sharply focused elegy to myriad past selves. Yet if we are to ascribe to any doctrinal underpinning, it is the folded shape of indiscretion, which finds purchase in every flavorful syllable.

The shock
not from bleeding, but from being caught
not knowing I’d have to kneel
on stones in front of strangers.

In “On the lungs, the liver, and the blood,” a favorite of the collection, Patrick spews foreignness not as the armchair colonialist, but rather from the heart of one who has loved, lost, and loved again. Its tender evocations step out from the snapshot frame and into the shadows of living ghosts, hair tethered to unseen ideals. Like the cell phone screen at which a woman gazes “as one might gaze / at one’s own face in a mirror,” it is a flat portal to the multi-dimensional inside.

Me, I expect catastrophe,
so I police my levees,
disconnect delicate devices
at first threat of thunder.

Patrick’s is an audible world where the cracking of a book spine sounds more loudly than a deluge of tongues. Even the silence is deafening, as when he implores to a past self—now blown to the winds of passage yet still trembling cobweb-like in the vestry of his thoughts—to twist the lipstick barrel of his desire, for it will someday drop his bucket down the well that shrouds his angelic charge with private joy. It is a space where pictures sniff and boys run across porcelain pasture.

This street I love
could come apart that fast,
like bread in water.

Prayers of unworthiness strike windows in the absence of storms. Feelings of adoration mix with urban sweep in tincture. He breathes, “no kind of singing can bring back the dead,” and in so conceding forces the stage to draw its curtains and weep in solitude. Music flounders at the wayside, left to ponder its incidental nature. There is beauty in every threat, the promise of a million temples crumbling into one. Its name is smoke, blown and broken.

If later
you called, a phone would ring and ring
somewhere in the wrong dark.

A highway stretches its back and links vertebrae with spilled admonitions: to the waste, to the waster, to the wasted. Like a broken denture rattling in the gut, it breeds a fear that crawls as quietly as sunrise and leaves students to their own devices. That same architecture haunts the shower, the thickness of a ruffled bed, the numerical values of ruin. Thus the title sequence glows, shuffling love and commerce into a yellowed pack—of cards, of cigarettes, of lies. Here the Prophet smokes, you see, and swaps words for the glitter of interior decoration. Deck the halls, He seems to say, before they fester. They are a maze. Neither intestinal nor scientific, but institutional. Don’t let the red light fool you; this is the stuff dreams are made of.

“Invocation” is another writhing flower, evoking schools of fish with an etcher’s commitment to the stroke. “Come to my cressets,” the poet implores, “gather / and assume a shape.” So begins a deeply biological assessment, wriggling and true. Ice and fire: the caduceus of procreation that makes steam of us. Drinking gall as if it were nectar, his lips part for nourishment and adoration. In the ashen pallor of twilight, he finds duty in practice: not to flesh, but to skin squared and bound. And yet words do not befriend him from all angles. He puts his face to them, inhales their insectile residue, and swallows until the taste has been assimilated. Still, they leave him for the blind. Voices prevail in the church down the street even as bodies fragment across the pond.

In the ears. That’s where these writings reside, releasing tufts of hair cells and sliding along the whorl of cochlea like children. At its end, a field of poppies.

Knowing Patrick and his husband Stephen D. Miller as I do from my time under the latter’s tutelage at the University of Massachusetts, I cannot help but read tears into the ink of poems like “Link,” in which the silhouettes of professionalism creep up the steps of personal mansions and leave their garments to dry in the rafters. But in the click of its final lines, in its avowal of death, there is a hope that shines and turns those tears to crystal. The burnished rings on their fingers speak a deeper tenure, and I have been fortunate enough to hear the snap of its fasteners.

The assortment of Japanese verses, translated with Stephen, peppered throughout the book also speaks to their synchronicity of thought and action. Thus permeated, words fly with the lilt of an autumn leaf from its branch: which is to say, at the whim of wind and dried to brittle perfection. Debts to maternal figures wax autobiographically. Conflagrations fool the romantic mind with their tendrils, ripe and translucent. The moon peeks in, not a voyeur but a doctor behind the otoscope. He sees the rake of age and its impossible scratches. Hair whitens, but its message only darkens. The journey cannot be spurred to completion, for its steps have yet to dot the earth. The moon returns in its stead, flowing through garments with the celerity of passion and melting with a snowflake’s turgid wetness. It is the body trembling on water’s surface.

In all of these are dire things indeed, yet also treasured things. From the sadness of a globe splashed with ruin to the pathways folding in on themselves, we see our body parts strewn in shards of history and obsidian. Would that we might sleep in our burning houses.

(Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin is available on Amazon.)

A Digital Workflow for Classical Music and Opera: eBook review

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“In the digital world, portability is everything,” writes David Wank in the introduction to his latest eBook, A Digital Workflow for Classical Music and Opera. I’ve been following David’s informative blog, Classical Weekly, for some months now and was fortunate enough to receive a review copy from him of said eBook. Being a full-time grad student, portability is indeed music to my ears. As regular readers of this blog may know, I do most of my reviewing on the go, listening to albums daily on my iPod while dictating my thoughts and impressions into a digital voice recorder. These I transcribe later and polish as time allows into the finished posts you see here on between sound and space.

For this reason and more, having a clear and accessible archive of my music collection is key. For popular music, this has rarely been a problem. With the exception of compilations, CDs imported into iTunes are easily designated under band names, song titles, and genres. When importing and archiving classical CDs, however, things sometimes get tricky. Should I archive by composer name or performer? If the latter, which performer? Conductor, soloist, ensemble, or orchestra? How will I be able to access exactly the piece I am looking for without confusion? What if two or more composers or performer configurations are represented on the same album? Such are the questions confronting the classical archivist, and this eBook provides cogent and practical advice on how to negotiate these and more. I have worked my way around such issues through much trial and error over the years. I only wish I’d had something like David’s methods on hand from day one.

Most classical enthusiasts will tell you that, outside of attending live performances of course, CDs offer the best listening experience, and neither David nor I would contest this. But in our increasingly hectic culture we tend to do much of our listening through headphones and car speakers. In addition, CDs are not permanent resources. Regardless of how well one cares for them, accidents can and do happen, and with the technology widely available to the common consumer to create digital archives, there’s no reason why one shouldn’t take advantage. That being said, this book is less about meta-tagging (I, for example, have all of my 1000+ ECM albums archived in iTunes under the genre “ECM” rather than as jazz, classical, world, fusion, folk, etc.) and more about the creation and organization of a high-fidelity classical and opera library at near-CD quality without compromising too much in the way of valuable hard drive space. Still, there is plenty of tagging advice sprinkled throughout that will be of use to anyone.

Computer knowledge requirements are minimal: if you can create, rename, and move folders, you’re golden, and for those still intimidated David offers 30-day personalized support to all purchasers of the eBook. And while the methods outlined therein are geared toward iTunes and iPod users, one can certainly use any preferred combination of player and management software.

David’s process involves three basic steps: 1) ripping the original CDs as high-quality files and importing these into a designated holding directory, 2) editing the filenames and folders as needed, and 3) moving the finished archive into iTunes. While Step 1 will require (free) external software, there is in this Third Edition an iTunes-only workflow which can be performed entirely “in house.” While the latter option, even at 320kBit/s, will not give you quite the same quality, it will save a step or two. As someone who has ripped all of his CDs over the years for archiving purposes, I found this method to be the most applicable.

One cannot simply follow my summation above, however, and expect stellar results. The key is in David’s well-thought-out subtleties and ease of explanation. David has clearly spent countless hours refining his process and the eBook is an ideal tool for those whose audio collections seem to grow, like mine, of their own accord. He walks you through the steps of working with the appropriate third-party software, getting the most out of your tagging and folder options, and working with either pre-existing or to-be-ripped archives.

I feel obligated to reiterate his advice about backing up everything before attempting such a feat of organization. This is a tedious and time-consuming process that, in the rare instance of a skipped step or two, can backfire, but if followed to the letter the results will be more than worth the effort.

You may purchase a copy of David’s eBook here for $5.95.

Sleeves of Desire

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The seasons have changed
And the light
And the weather
And the hour.
But it is the same land.
And I begin to know the map
And to get my bearings.
–Dag Hammarskjøld

I once had a wooden train set. Its tracks dovetailed together like puzzle pieces and each car fit neatly into their grooves, linked by magnets at either end. Said magnets were weak and separated when the lead locomotive was pulled with too much force. So, too, do our changing notions of modernity. Though they may seem linked, each is held by a connection that would just as easily turn into repellence were its nodes reversed. As we open our arms to all things hypermodern, our trains are derailing, our allegiance to space is atrophying, and the desolation of post-apocalyptic landscapes is becoming the new norm by which all others are judged; an epoch in which space becomes its own territory and imbues emptiness with a gravid beauty all its own. This is the liminal scrapbook in which ECM has been quietly pasting its covers for over 40 years. In doing so, it has engendered distinct spatial coordinates through which the physical and the sonic are one and the same.

Search among the rubble and you may be fortunate enough to stumble across Sleeves of Desire: A Cover Story. Published in 1996, this first collection of ECM cover art is notoriously out of print (I am indebted to Columbia University for providing a library copy for this review) and now fetches exorbitant prices on the used book market. It seems rather counterintuitive that the lucky few should be able to profit by releasing this tome from ownership. Either way, it remains a unique archive of a label that has become known to enthusiasts as much by its clothing as by its underlying physique. Along with label brainchild Manfred Eicher and his design team, Lars Müller Publishers has created a profound, if now elusive, archive of an unmistakable journey.

Lifted from their covers like contact lenses, these images offer clearest insight into themselves, which is precisely how I choose to view them here. They do not merely constitute a “visual poem” that is complementary to the music they adorn. They are also auditory poems in and of themselves. Each sings to us. Take, for instance, the tactile crinkles of The Music Improvisation Company’s self-titled record from 1970 (ECM 1005):

No image would seem to capture the essence of its attendant production more explicitly. Each random line, when viewed from afar, emerges as part of a vaster web of order. But not all ECM covers are so illustrative. Most are, in fact, starting points for deeper contemplation. Another early example is Paul Bley’s label debut (ECM 1003) with Gary Peacock of the same year, only this time we are confounded by a square of tattered canvas in sepia gradations:

Such enigmatic touches would seem to be de rigueur at ECM, but are a far cry from the gimmickry of others who might enslave themselves to an aesthetic without forethought (or, for that matter, afterthought). Just as there is no such definitive thing as the “ECM sound,” neither is there an “ECM look.” Even the briefest perusal of the catalogue spreads in the back of the book is enough to confirm the label’s rather colorful history.

To be sure, the austere black-and-whites of recent decades, such as this iconic shot from Jim Bengston that adorns David Darling’s 1995 Dark Wood (ECM 1519),

and those of many New Series efforts

make their referential albums easily identifiable. Furthermore, Eicher’s monochromatic preferences have come to be reflected in CD reissues, many of which recast old color covers in black and white, if not dispense with them completely in favor of suspended text, as in the Old & New Masters series. Even so, we must reconcile these with the often-scarred collages of photographer Dieter Rehm:

And who can forget Wolfgang Dauner’s infamous Output (ECM 1006, released 1970), courtesy of F + R Grindler:

Even more “illuminating” is the rarely seen back cover,

(Photo by John Hubbard)

where we find ourselves wired to the outside world.

One of the most satisfying consummations of the book’s titular desire is the rare privilege of seeing some of the images in their uncropped form, divorced from all typography, barcodes, and packaging constraints. One cannot help but marvel further at the work of Rehm, whose uncompromising commitment to imagistic immediacy is not unlike the melodic urgency of the musicians around which his art wraps. Rehm takes the familiar and obscures it organically, so that the promise of the open road becomes a Peter Tscherkassky-esque exercise in agitation

and the Statue of Liberty loses herself in nocturnal vertigo:

Many of ECM’s most striking covers, however, are strictly orthographic and provide no less potent stimulation for the senses through the skillful appliqué of resident designer Barbara Wojirsch.

Her handwriting has given a visual voice to many an artist, not least of all to bassist Dave Holland, as in these striking mock-ups for 1990’s Extensions (ECM 1410),

not to mention the ecstatic minimalism of Jan Garbarek’s I Took Up The Runes:

As valuable as Sleeves is as an art object, the weight of the images therein is matched word for stroke by the equally considered writings that accompany them. Peter Kemper sets the tone with a careful design of his own in the essay “Along the Margins of Murmuring.” Invoking philosopher Gernot Böhme, he lays out nature as a communicative network in which aesthetic impulses “translate” natural vocabularies even as they encrypt them. Where does a vision like that of ECM, we are led to wonder, fit into such dizzying arrays of retinal information? Yet rather than succumb to postmodern melancholy in his attempts to engage this query, Kemper makes a convincing case for the as yet indestructible efficacy of the visual—asserting that, “in the steady rising flood of images, pictures must still leave something to be desired. Art does not culminate in a virtuoso display of information; on the contrary, art begins where information ends.” Thus do we come full circle to the idea of image as stepping-stone, each incarnation a bubble of surface tension at the lip of sign and signal.

ECM’s visuality sustains what Kemper calls a “poetry of proportions,” and nowhere so vividly as through the work of Wojirsch, who has carried on since the death of her husband, Burkhart, Eicher’s friend and collaborator from day one. Wojirsch’s approach is an alchemy on its own, distilling from the sensorial tides that saturate our lives a most potent ocular tincture. If it results in only a single drop rather than a full vial’s worth, all the better for us at the level of deferential consumer. Each window—through its one of infinite possible intersections of framing, textual overlay, and resolution—is a portal through which boundaries are inexpressible except in the act of looking. It is “the sleeve as the semblance of sound,” the all-seeing ear of Gertrude Stein made manifest.

“Sounds originate in silence, but their goal is the reverberation and metamorphosis generated in listeners’ minds.” So writes Peter Rüedi in “The Audible Landscape,” and for whom ECM might as well stand for “Eicher’s Collected Memories.” Here, we get an even more lucid attempt to describe on the printed page what exists only in vibration. All art is animated by this atomic hum. “The singularity of ECM productions,” Rüedi notes further, “lies in the tension between a spiritual and a material dimension.” The same might be said for the book in which his words appear. On that note, Müller himself offers “It is the second sight that counts,” of which the title says all: There is something in these images that is beyond even the mind’s eye, a mystery far greater than the most windswept plain.

Steve Lake concludes with his comprehensive piece, “Looking at the Cover,” offering a more pragmatic view of the label as process (it also includes the wonderful poem epigraphed above). Lake dutifully reminds us that behind the ECM enigma there are human decisions, logistics, and labors at every turn. He also discusses the effect of titles on images, and vice versa, noting that the few exhibitions of ECM photography have sometimes jarred viewers by their very dissociation.

Eicher’s is a cinematic experience of music. We see this not only in his allegiance to such directors as Jean-Luc Godard

(Still from Godard’s Passion)

and Theo Angelopolous,

(Photos by Giorgos Arvanitis)

but also in the tale every cover tells. The characters may not always show their faces, but we are never in doubt of their voices. In this sense, Sleeves is more akin to a short story collection than a coffee table book. Within its pages lie countless diaries, travelogues, and enough intertextual details to keep one engaged for years. Each of those details is a treasure to be savored. Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that CDs are housed in “jewel cases,” for such is their harnessing of light in the darkening storm of the digital age.