An Exercise In Good Taste?
In the modern art of high-brow sonics
prepared machines meet crafted wood
in a fine-artistic ungodly embrace
of toungues and tines and bowed whistles,
splayed like stripped nerves in their search of the outlandish weird.
But what their strange minstrels forget
are familiar limits; they do not transcend.
They assume they are already there.
They could take six small sine waves,
the simplest of sounds,
and weave them and throw them and twist them through time,
and add in six more, and then twelve more again,
so that when they are done
an ethereal flute, yet breathlessly real,
flickers like lightning in nebulous fade through a rumble of elegant thunder.
The thunder folds back like a mist off the sea.
The sea is melodic, harmonic and mystic;
the wavering depths, the enchantment of sirens,
the wonder of whales and the spin of the spray
are caught in their essence in one single sound.
But they aren't.
These minstrels tinker with abstracted parts
of what they can find in a moment.
This fractured sense of timelessness
may open the mind, for a moment;
but it rings hollow,
drops a clangour,
like a poltergeist in a clock shop.
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