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Six Methods of Approaching
Damon & Naomi with Ghost
by Byron Coley
Who are Damon & Naomi? If this once we
were to rely on previous reviews of their music, then perhaps
everything would amount to knowing which writers they "haunt."
We must admit that this last word is irritating, tending to establish
between certain listeners and the band relations that are stranger,
more inescapable, more disturbing than intended. Such a word means
much more than it says, makes Damon & Naomi, still very much alive,
still very much Massachusetts-based, play a ghostly part, evidently
referring to what they must have ceased to be in order to be who
they are. Hardly distorted in this sense, the word suggests that
what we regard as the objective, more or less deliberate recordings
of their career are merely the premises, within the limits of
this career, of activities whose true extent is quite unknown
to us. Our image of the "ghost" is mutable, in this instance,
including everything conventional about its appearance as well
as its blind submission to certain contingencies of time and place,
and is particularly significant for us as the finite representation
of a Japanese cult whose sound may be that of eternity. Perhaps
the music on this album is nothing but an image of this kind;
perhaps it is the syncretic coalescence between a certain type
of American intelligence and a certain type of Japanese instinctual
creation; perhaps we are doomed to retrace its steps under the
illusion that we are exploring, doomed to try and learn what we
should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what they
have forgotten.
We envy (in a manner of speaking) any musician
who has the time to prepare something as giftedly worldly as Damon
& Naomi with Ghost and who, having reached its end, finds the
means to be interested in its fate or in the fate which, after
all, it creates. If only the musicians would let us! Damon & Naomi
(& Ghost) have disregarded the chance, and we might hope they
would do us the honor of saying why. What we might be tempted
to undertake in the long run will all too certainly make us unworthy
of life as we prefer it and as it offers itself: a life out of
the running.
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