Paul Giger - Schattenwelt

How do i end this project? Well, in some ways it will never end. The idea was to pick up an album and interact with it; connect it to real life, try to figure out why it exists, what value it might have right now, what story it might tell.

A lot has happened since last September, but the overwhelming ethos is negative and horrible. As far as public discourse goes, we've reached the entitlement stage. By that i mean, everyone is turning to blame and shame in a desperate attempt to "return to normal." Surely by now you know that i think that's a ridiculously childish mentality.

By complete coincidence, i read a book called The Ethical Assassin by David Liss yesterday. It's a good book because the core sentiment is that we are inescapably ideological creatures. The hard to accept truth is that this country, and the American ethos in general is mean, lazy, and extremely unethical. The climax of the book is the realization that our society has a place for thieves and rapists and murderers, but it does not have a place for the sick, the timid, the marginalized, the revolutionary. So, it takes any challenging idea and criminalizes it. We live in the all encompassing spirit of Punishment, and we foolishly pretend that it is a natural and obvious way to live.

So what have my themes been over this last most of a year? War, death, absurdity, unethical corporate logic, lawsuits, finding good in the atrocious, being skeptical of assumed excellence, and the exploitation and hobbification of life itself.

My dad was alive on Sunday, and died on Monday. That became a part of these essays without my even noticing. Vietnam and WWII and Desert Storm were happening inside the minds of all this music and we've been publicly recycling all those troubled ideas for the last few months. All of the things you point to as great advancements and marvels of modern life were built and are still built under the mentality that slavery and class hierarchy are justifiable and that it's acceptable to hide them from our vision and say "how dare you not appreciate all these marvelous toys!?" All these systems are failing, not because their product is without some value, but because the real cost of maintaining them is the freedom to live and the freedom to die. One cannot truly understand one without first accepting the other.

So let us for 1 day step across that threshold into the shadow world with perhaps the most obscure album in my entire collection, Schattenwelt by Paul Giger.

Giger is a Swiss Avant Garde violinist. Quite amusingly, Schattenwelt is his 3rd album (you may or may not realize that i am the 3rd and last Paul Tompkins with no middle name. Built of extremes, tee hee). You won't find this album on youtube, and i seriously doubt that i could squeeze it past youtube's slapdash "make the problem of copyright disappear" deal with the major labels and performing rights unions, but you can go find lots of things from Giger's catalogue and get a sense of how out there it is.

The core of the album is the Seven Scenes from Labyrinthos, with two separate pieces as bookends. I think of this as less an album of music and more an exploration of the essence of what it means to play the violin. It is extreme. It lives in the shadows at the edge of existence, it is utterly beautiful in its unashamedly alien nature, and i can't think of a better way to end this Year in the Life of Bottle the Curmudgeon. So, until we meet again (there are no goodbyes, only pulses in the stream of existence), cheers and enjoy.

Next