Anthony Braxton's For Alto and the Objective Signal of Unconscious Recall

24th of September, 2020

This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic. I was reviewing For Alto, an album by Anthony Braxton.

In his stand up comedy show The Impotent Fury of The Privileged, Daniel Kitson includes a short section on how beautiful our thoughts are and how ugly our speech can be when it tries to express those thoughts:

"Thought and speech are very different mediums. Thought is a capricious flighty transient bumblebee of a thing, ever fluctuating, ever changing, smoke on the wind, sunlight through rain, sand through your fingers. Speech is a fat footed monkey tossing itself off into a dirty bucket. Trying to capture the complexity and nuance of thought in the lumpen stone prose of speech is like trying to convince that monkey to put his bucket down, just wash his hands for heaven's sake, pick up a fishing rod and catch the sky."

One of the most stressful two day periods of my life just elapsed. One of my closest friends was terrifyingly close to dying by overdose on pain killers, I rushed out to the hospital at 5am on Sunday morning and skipped work, I got next to no sleep in the intervening ~45 hours since, and after working my Monday shift today, deliriously tired, I calmly and carefully placed my own laptop in the bin. As I stared down at it and slowly the different regions of my brain all decided that it didn't belong there, and as I wiped off the oily bin residue after retrieving it, I mainly thought about two things:

The first was an examination: why did I do that? I was holding it while walking around for a reason that I realised I never knew, and then while in the kitchen (also for no reason, there is no food in there) I just put my second most expensive worldly possession in the bin, and I don't know why.

The second was For Alto. I haven't listened to it for a few months, but in the whirling woolly network of half thoughts of fear and oily kitchen towels and my computer and guilt was the small and intrusive honking of To Composer John Cage and stilton's use of the description "teeth-itchingly painful".

Sometimes, when less absurd things happen to me, I think of other albums. The other day I saw a car painted the most hideous shade of green and it made me think of Paracletus, and it would have been an insulting and confusing comparison if I had used that story as the basis for a review of that album. Nevertheless we need to accept that there must be some reason why these thoughts spill out the way they do. In some way, and perhaps it's insulting or confusing to put it like this, the fact that this album entered my thoughts at that moment is an objective signal about the place this music occupies in my head. Since this piece of writing is ostensibly a piece of music criticism, I could use that signal to construe some sort of appraisal of its worth, if I so chose.