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A.T
Sitting at his post on rue Carnot, J.C. calls out to me and explains how, these days, the mere evocation of Klaus Nomi's soaring flights inhabits him during his long hours of begging in the street.
Evocation, because in 2024 he has no means of listening to recorded music, still less access to unlimited music; he lives outdoors, in a thoroughly Diogenic form of asceticism. It is his memory that does the work, and his senses too.
Several weeks ago now, at my place, during that rainy, very rainy weekend in May, we had listened to Klaus Nomi. At his request.
Neither drink nor food: his only requests revolved around music.
Dead Can Dance and Front 242. Irritation, mounting tension.
Then, almost as a comparative listening, Bauhaus and Joy Division. Alternating ...
This music had literally soothed him.
To feel the differences between these two bands.
Bauhaus, stuffed with artistic and literary references, its darkness held at a distance by the pose.
Whereas Joy Division embodied that darkness with a concision free of effects.
Love Will Tear Us Apart moved him, then made him stand up in anger. The suicide of Curtis, as a young father, which overwhelms him. Again
Berthe Sylva
Then he asked me to put on..... Carnage Visors! A first complete listening, in fact: I had never had the cassette to hand!
A great deal of tension and contemplation, and a fair amount of boredom; it remains music for an experimental film... To continue with Treasure by the Cocteau Twins
The Eighties, still there
Then we followed on with Berthe Sylva
Which of the two of us had started the calculation that placed this much-lauded period equidistant between our own time and that of Sylva, Fréhel and Alibert?
I do not know, but it spared us from grumbling “It was better before!”