A Girl in Remindlessnessland

The Memory of a German Piano

As a neophyte in the world of music of The Church and Steve Kilbey, I must admit that the album Remindlessness was a hard nut to crack for me. What I heard at first was this male, pulsating machine, somewhat cold, guided by a very masculine sounding drive, which I could not immediately warm to. I needed a bit of time to get into this seemingly rather “primitive” and wilful, but brilliantly effective, vigorously storming urge. A force, feeling alien to me, even scary at times, completely overpowering. I could immediately empathise though with the woman counting up the days – in a sublime burned-out summer-heat myth of Man and Woman (which Stefan Horlitz turned into a wonderful piano ballad) -, she too a witness to this strange otherness which is hard to comprehend, a cause of friction, worry, pain and sadness. Steve Kilbey being, at times, very cynical about mankind, or manhood more in particular, about sexuality, – referring to the unsavoury appetites of le Marquis de Sade – in “Life’s Little luxuries”, in a somewhat brutally direct, straight-to-business kind of way, no time for romancing the impulses and instincts lying bare in a naked world; and then sometimes he is switching the roles in this perpetual game of attraction and repulsion, with a female predator as an irresistible, vampire-like creature making her appearance in a doomed death trap of exquisite poetry and the splintered sound of a song called “Liquid”. The history of life constantly boiling over with superfluous, overflowing energies, needing to get out. From elephants to amphibian creatures, all being moved by this never ending propelling beat… While I wanted to be seduced like Julie was, by her lover Saint-Preux, in long long letters of patience, beauty and ideas, as in the novel written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau…

This was all very primal, but pure and fascinating. I could sense it hid lots of essential insights though, which in the end turned this album for me too into an indispensable and addictive masterpiece. A music world governed by the same fundamentally vital, instrumental laws as our Lebenswelt, transformed from a natural habitat into a civilised alternative organisation of all sorts of sublimated powers. Remindlessness is like an indigenous ritual, driven by a percussive, initial beat which has taken over the command of all earth-bound forces, where humans just thrive on impulses which for ever thrust them forwards. I guess this was the first thing that struck me, the energy of this tsunami beat that engulfs everything, that gathers all the forces of the different instruments and sounds together like a magnet. Yes, in all its forgetfulness and remindlessness, this album became a very physical one, a physical force, almost palpable, beating in our temples, keeping us alert, on our guard, fully awake, ready to try to for ever dominate our world, with the confidence of an invincible warrior.

Enters a piano.

I like the idea that it is almost winter now in Australia, while here in Europe, summer’s on its way. I haven’t got a clue what winters are like near the metropolis of Sydney. I try to imagine it – I have always been more of a traveler in my mind anyway -, seeing this piece of the world lying there almost at the bottom of my old childhood globe. Steve Kilbey’s voice swiftly hovering over seas and oceans, Indian and Pacific, meeting the sound of Stefan’s piano somewhere halfway in between Coogee and a German town. Summers are quite warm here in Europe these days.

The Piano.

It looks around in this wholly familiar musical world. It recognises the scenes laid out. It sympathises with the impetus of what it hears. It sees and understands all the beauty that is bursting out with so much passion and it wants to play a part in it. It wants to make the secret, intimate dream of this beating, pulsating music – its fantasy of becoming liquid, clear and fluid like water – come true. The music can come down now from the cold and lonely, automated world stage where it had been displaying all its forceful beauty, to the private, inner sanctum of a very personal, picturesque vision on life’s troubling meanderings. Like a little glow worm, the piano smoothly penetrates the robust fortress of Remindlessness and infuses some tender inwardness and love into its thirsty soul. The piano brings Beethoven along to comfort Danielle, it assembles the cutest, finest, fairytale melodies that bare the music’s inner spirit and make it spring to life, like a little ebullient well, full of enthusiasm and bouncing buoyancy. The piano reflects on the sweetness of the sound of a songbird, a lark, and introduces it as another one of life’s little luxuries, its pure and fragile song flying away from the earth, aiming for the skies. Remindlessness inspires the piano to play some of the innermost and most profound melodies it overheard in its inquisitively adventurous existence. The piano touches and elates us; it embraces all that it remembers with lots of tender loving care. The instrumental “Remindlessness” flows into a musical history of ever returning sounds and words, where religion can no longer explain the birth and rebirth day after day of a temporary world so rich, but rapidly fleeting. The song quoted from The Church’s magnum opus Priest= Aura, “Kings”, makes the circle round, these earthly rulers’ worldly powers bleak against the bright, eternal glow of days, against the ever vibrating waves of the world’s song. This piano obviously knows what it is talking about. And then it delves into another ‘priestly’, divine song: “Gethsemane”, to end its inner voyage, it’s gotta be somewhere by Saturday…

The unspeakable intimate knowledge which music possesses about us and our world, is so revealing and pregnant with meaning, it needs to be repeated over and over again. That’s not my idea, but the great music lover, Schopenhauer’s.The numerous demands for repetition always notated on a music score are the truest proof of the fact that the same music needs to be played and listened to over and over again, and reinterpreted, at times… Maybe this was just a plea for such a repetition. “There’s some more poem left…”

Joke Roelandt, June 2020