Crud Meridian

In my years of institutional music education I learned two things about what is more: First, that less is more, because craft benefits from cutting away anything that is not essential. Second, that more is more, because x must equal x. Let’s start with less.

In 2006, Liars releases Drum’s Not Dead. The album features a song called It Fit When I Was A Kid, which will heretofore be referred to as IFWIWAK. IFWIWAK has, for the majority of the song, 4 pitches, virtually no rhythmic variation, and a drum beat that could best be described less as a groove than as an indentation leftover from a bike accident. It is one of the scariest pieces of music I have ever heard. I will try to explain why.

First, let me offer this: Music has a kind of on-again-off-again relationship with the Fourth Wall. While many forms of music employ some kind of narrative and even outright drama, there is also a crucial element of music that is intensely present. Music does not necessarily refer to some Other Thing, depicting events not currently occurring – music is happening right now. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why concerts can be so affecting – the music is right here, it’s right now. What that means, however, is more complicated. The immediacy of music as a content doesn’t necessarily translate to sort of raw-nerve vulnerability of its subject matter. There are lots of ways in which music can structure some distance between the listener and the work. The mere human presence of the musician as craftsman presenting something may be enough to allay our anxieties. The edge of the stage, sheet music on stands, and the bored look on the bassist’s face as she trundles through Beethoven 5 yet again. Even the joy of improvisers surprising each other in play might put a little emotional barrier between the listener and the work. This is not necessarily a bad thing – there is a profound happiness in being invited in to play, and music is not so monolithic a thing as to demand a unified purpose. But what it can mean is that craft can betray itself. When I see the intricacy of the work on display, I am often reminded that it is work.

IFWIWAK performs a simple trick: eliminate the tangible display of craft and you can hide the human presence behind the work. The bass tone is a bizarre DI fuzz, the vocals are charmlessly detuned, and the drum seems to be one sample dragged across every beat in the DAW. There is no sense of human presence, but there is, crucially, also no refinement. By making something neither machinelike in precision nor warm enough to be human, you make instead a third thing – an alien thing. I can’t speculate as to the performance practice on display, or what the recording session must have looked like. Nor do the lyrics offer any kind of warmth. Virtually tuneless, and abstract without any sense of play, they describe both a cosmic loneliness and a brutal home invasion, but the narrative on display doesn’t offer any way in to the singer’s mind. It’s Not There.

Let’s look at what actually happens in this music.

1. A bass guitar plays the note A four times every other bar.
2. What I believe is a Floor Tom plays 8^th notes on every beat almost all of the time.
3. The vocals travel back and forth between G, A, B, and C. Call it a 7 1 2 and 3 of A minor if you’re feeling fancy.
4. Every now and then, everything stops. The first moment this happens, around 0:48 into the song, is horrifying. There are no reverb trails, nothing to indicate that People In A Space have stopped An Activity. Just a few bars of darkness.
5. Around 2:00, the key changes and a tremolo-y organ kicks in. Now we’re in some sort of modal Bb minor¹, and the organ, in combination with the vocals, actually comes close to outlining a bVI – V… thing. The vocals jump up an octave, but keep using the same scale degrees.
6. The drums come back
7. Right around 3:18 we get a fifth and sixth note – with a leap up to an F, we get scale degrees 5 and 4. Amazing. No more notes will be added.
8. The drums go away.
9. The organ goes away
10. The song goes away.

Okay, there’s your roadmap. Hardly does it justice. Want to see more? Here’s a transcription. It doesn’t matter. Looking behind the curtain will not explain it – the trick is in doing so little that you do not invite the curiosity of looking.

It Fit When I Was A Kid is an open cave in the woods, blood smeared across the entrance. We know just enough to not go looking for more. Leave it where it is and run.

1. If you want to fight me about whether this is a bVI-v in Bb minor or VI-iii in Db Major, please don’t. There’s obviously no functional harmony on display here and even applying numeral chords to this feels wrong. ↩︎