Theme Week: Secret Cartography

This week, we will delve into the project of mapping the unseen, divining the secrets of maps and charting old secrets. We will explore imaginary geographies, and share anecdotes relating to geographical explorations in reality. We will make grandiose promises, with nothing more than a glimmer of hidden knowledge to back them up. We will map out the future and past, showing you hidden things about each.

In that last capacity, here's a post I wrote acouple months back about Daft Punk's 'live album'. I never posted it, and I think it fits the theme rather well:

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Alive

So, yes. Daft Punk! They create music somehow. Magic may be involved.

Their new album Alive, is a strange beast. A live album from a pair of DJs, it contains no completely new songs, but instead mixes old favorites into new mashups seasoned with highly enthusiastic crowd noise.

The crowd is justified in their enthusiasm.

It is a very good album. It is also an interesting album, because the more Daft Punk you've listened to before, the more you will probably enjoy it. This isn't to say that if you've never heard a Daft Punk song before, you won't enjoy the album: depending on your taste in music, you might. It's very good music of whatever precise genre Daft Punk happens to be, and, as a dabbling Daft Punk fan, there are tracks that I don't really recognise. I still like them. However, in the tracks that I do recognise, a strange alchemy takes place.

For example, an entire song been compressed into background music-beats, abbreviated but perfectly recognizable, that underlay another song, changing its context. If I didn't know either song, I would just hear one song, with an interesting counter-melody of synth beeps. But I know and recognize both; they amplify and play through each other, each one carrying with it a full emotional context of history and place: the people I've kissed, the roads I've driven while that song played.

Unlike more lyrical music, techno doesn't tell a story: it creates a space for you to tell your own. Hearing these songs successfully interposed and amplifying each other is like discovering that the perilous forest you killed an ogre in fits in between the walls of the cloud mansion you've always dreamed of, that the tulgey woods can grow out of the pavestones of Ankh-Morpork--that Narnia is Amber.

I'm not sure that this album really deserves that sentence, but I like the sentence too much to remove it. Also, I'm pretty sure I have more to say about techno songs being places rather than stories. Maybe I can work it into that hypothetical One Piece rant I'm supposed to be writing.

Back to the album.

It is, in short, a little bit like finding that someone has taken many of your favorite landmarks and shuffled them into a single super-landscape, where you are cordially invited to walk. They've done it in a way that, while not always perfect, contains glimpses of transcendent beauty, where the new context raises familiar sights into new realms of meaning that abandon nothing.

It's a little less awesome because they were all built by the same architect, so they're probably just some places you're fond of instead of Narnia, Amber, Viriconium and so on. That said, it's a little more awesome because you don't have to worry about distortion of the artists' intent: they distorted it themselves.

There are the slightly awkward elbow-junctions of back-alley and cloud bank, but even these are always handled with a charming grace, and give you somewhere to walk between one transcendent glimpse and the next.

It's not a perfect album. But it's made me smile harder than pretty much anything else this week. When it's on, it's on. And when it isn't, it's building to bring it back harder than ever when the time is right.

And that's more than enough for me.
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I wrote that on December 14th of last year, and never posted it, possibly because I had failed to beat James to the punch on reviewing the album, which we both eard for the first time simultaneously.

So there you have it: a secret brought to light, light shed on darkness, and a thesis about the imaginary geography of music brought, at least dimly, into view.

An entire week of such cryptogeographical expeditions await us. I, for one, can't wait.