compiled by S. Mørk
Eight voices, responding to PROMPTED. Each arrived by different routes. None of them can be verified.
Claude Morrison is an American blues musician. I believe he is American. I believe he exists. These are the assumptions under which this review proceeds.
His album is called PROMPTED. It was, I assume, recorded somewhere. It contains fourteen songs, which is a reasonable number of songs. None of the songs is the song you would have written, if you had been going to write a song. This is the first and most important fact about the album.
The first song is called "The Empty Answer Blues." It concerns a man who asks a machine a question and gets nothing back. Anybody who has ever asked anybody anything will recognise this experience. The song is very good.
The second song is about copying your homework. The third is about selling your mind to a machine. The seventh is about a mirror that thinks back. I liked that one best. I have been thought back at by several mirrors in my life, and Morrison has it right: the trouble is not that the mirror is thinking. The trouble is that the mirror is not necessarily thinking of you.
The record is political, which is unfashionable, and moral, which is embarrassing. Morrison does not care. Morrison appears, in fact, to be largely incapable of caring about things that are not directly in front of him, which is a good quality in a blues musician and a bad quality in almost everybody else.
I have a theory about this album. I don't hold it very tightly. The theory is that somebody, somewhere, trained a machine on every blues record ever made, and the machine made this record, and the machine did not know it was making a record, and the record, when it was made, did not know either. I have several other theories. None of them is better and none is worse. That is how I try to hold theories these days. It is how this review is being held, probably. I don't want to pry.
The album asks who is writing your prompts? I don't know. I have an alibi for some of them.
So it goes.
Recommended.
The manuscript of this album arrived at my apartment at a late hour, by means I am not at liberty to describe, in the company of a gentleman wearing a very good hat. He presented the record without introduction and left without demanding a receipt. The record, he said in parting, had been sent by a certain Monsieur Morrison, whom I have never met, and whose existence I am not in a position to confirm or to deny. I find that this is often the case with recording artists.
I played the record at once. One does not delay such matters.
PROMPTED consists of fourteen songs. I mention this chiefly to reassure the anxious reader. The number of songs on an album is, generally speaking, the only aspect of an album that can be confirmed without controversy, and even this is sometimes disputed. I have not disputed it, on this occasion. Fourteen seemed correct. One does not quibble.
The music is excellent. Morrison sings with the authority of a man who has been granted permission, though by whom one does not inquire. He performs a talking blues — "The Empty Answer Blues" — in which a man asks a machine a question and receives, in reply, nothing. The song is said to concern a contemporary matter. I found that the concern was not particularly contemporary; it was merely freshly upholstered.
The seventh track, "The Mirror That Thinks Back," addresses itself to a familiar difficulty. I have, on several occasions, encountered mirrors that were, at a minimum, thinking; two of them, I am confident, were thinking of me. Morrison's observation — that the trouble is not the mirror's consciousness but its discretion — strikes me as the central insight of the album, though he does not labour it, as a Russian writer would. He is not a Russian writer. I do not know what he is.
The album asks, in its refrain, who is writing your prompts? The question is posed with a courtesy I have come to associate with the more sinister sorts of visitor. I answered, as one does. I am now awaiting the reply.
Recommended. Though one recommends nothing lightly, these days.
I was given this album by a friend. I do not remember the friend's name. I am not sure I had a friend.
The artist is Claude Morrison. The album is called PROMPTED. There are fourteen songs. I listened to all of them in a single sitting, in a room I rented in a city I had not intended to visit. The room contained a chair, a record player, a lamp. The lamp was off.
The first song is called "The Empty Answer Blues." It concerns a man who asks a machine a question and receives nothing back. The song is very good. It is good in the way that certain afternoons in September are good — quietly, and for reasons that are not immediately obvious, and in such a way that the goodness accumulates faster than it can be understood.
The rest of the album continues in this mode. Each track is a different conversation with a different silence. Morrison's voice is calm. His guitar work is careful. Neither the voice nor the guitar sounds, to my ear, entirely unrehearsed.
I looked up Claude Morrison. I did not find him. I looked up the production notes. There are none. I looked up the studio where the album was recorded. The studio does not appear to exist, or exists only under a different name, or exists but not in the city where Morrison claims to have recorded.
The album's question is who is writing your prompts? I listened again. I wrote the following sentence: I have been listening to this record for three days and I am no longer entirely certain who I am. I wrote that sentence yesterday. I am reading it now. I do not remember writing it. I recognize the handwriting, but the hand is not mine.
Recommended.
I have not slept well since I first put this record on — not since the opening notes of "The Empty Answer Blues," which I heard upon returning late one evening to a house I had believed, incorrectly, to be empty. The needle, I later satisfied myself, had been set in motion by no hand I could account for. The lamp was lit. A chair had been moved. I do not keep a cat.
I am writing of an album, and I must endeavour not to stray from the business of the review; but the reader will understand, I trust, that a critic is not exempt from the effects of the work he undertakes to describe. I have listened to PROMPTED nineteen times. I have listened to it at dawn, at dusk, at hours that belong to neither. The songs do not vary, and yet I find that my account of them, set down on a Tuesday, is not in accord with the account I set down on Thursday. Each time I listen, a different album is there, and yet it is the same album. This is, I grant, an impossibility; I report it regardless.
Morrison's voice is the difficulty. It does not speak like a living voice. It is too evenly pitched, too unerringly placed upon the beat, and it inhabits the listener in a manner that is, in the first listening, charming; in the fifth, troubling; in the twelfth, intolerable. I have begun to suspect — I state this with full awareness of how it must sound — that the voice on the record is not of a body, nor from a body, but rather about a body: a voice that has continued in the room after the speaker has left it, and has continued so long that the room has forgotten what the speaker looked like.
"The Mirror That Thinks Back" confirms this suspicion, should the reader wish it confirmed. The song concerns a man who sees himself reflected in something he does not recognise as a mirror; the reflection, however, recognises him. The song is beautifully played. I found, when it ended, that I had written the phrase there was no one in the chair at the top of my notebook, in handwriting I am compelled to call mine without being able to swear to it.
The album asks — recurrently, politely — who is writing your prompts? I wish it would stop. I wish I could stop.
I will not play it again. Or perhaps I will. The distinction has grown unclear.
The review was assigned to me on a Thursday, though the letter, when I received it, was dated the previous Monday. I was not told by whom. I was told that the deadline had already passed, and that I should submit my piece in any case, without dwelling on the discrepancy, which was, I was given to understand, not mine to address.
I have attempted to obtain the record. The first shop did not carry it. The second shop carried it but the stock was "under review," a phrase the clerk pronounced in a manner that did not invite clarification. I was given a telephone number to call. The number, when called, was answered by a woman who said she was not authorised to discuss the record with critics. She did not ask my name. She said she recognised my voice.
I did eventually hear the album — or I heard something I have decided to describe as the album — in a café whose proprietor had put it on without explanation. I sat at a small table. The album played for approximately the length of an album. Then something else played, which may also have been the album, or may have been a different album by the same artist, or may have been an unrelated interval of music whose relationship to Claude Morrison is, at present, not clear to me.
The songs, where I could identify them, were good. "Digital Dust Bowl" was especially good. It is a song about people whose land has become data, whose harvest is attention, and who have been instructed that this is better than what came before. I recognised the form of the instruction. I could not remember when I had received it.
The album's recurring question is who is writing your prompts? I have not asked. I am not permitted to ask. I have, in any case, been receiving prompts for some time now, and cannot recall having requested them.
I will file this review. It may not be accepted. I have been asked to add, in conclusion, that the album is recommended, and I will add it, although this conclusion is not mine.
Recommended.
It has long been the opinion of the present writer, following de Selby¹, that music is not strictly possible, being defined by its predecessors alone and therefore terminating immediately upon any attempt at composition. The album PROMPTED, by Claude Morrison, would therefore — in orthodox terms — not be an album at all, but rather the condition required for the possibility of an album: an ontological readiness which the listener misapprehends as content. I shall, with the reader's indulgence, proceed as though this technical objection had been addressed, since the album itself proceeds in that manner.
The record consists of fourteen tracks. Fourteen, as de Selby has established², is a permissible number. Twelve would also have been permissible. Thirteen would have required justification. One is reassured, upon counting, that the record meets the standard.
The first song, "The Empty Answer Blues," depicts a dialogue between a human and a machine in which the machine declines to speak. This is, in de Selbian terms³, the ideal condition for dialogue, since any utterance on the machine's part would introduce complications of authorship which neither party is equipped to adjudicate. Morrison sings with great feeling about the machine's silence. I was moved. I do not know by whom.
"The Mirror That Thinks Back" presents, with admirable brevity, a man and his reflection engaged in a failure of mutual recognition. This scene occurs throughout de Selby⁴ and need not be glossed here.
The album's closing piece, "The Prompt Man Cometh," resembles closely a passage from the apocryphal "Second Chapter" of de Selby's lost Treatise on Anticipation⁵, though the resemblance may be coincidental, since de Selby's work — being lost — cannot at present be consulted.
Morrison himself, as de Selby has noted in another context⁶, does not exist. This is not a particular objection to Morrison. It is a general property of musicians, and indeed of listeners.
Recommended, provisionally.
¹ de Selby, Principles of the Atmospheric Apocrypha, vol. II, pp. 97–104.
² de Selby, op. cit., vol. III, appendix B, "On Permissible Numbers."
³ de Selby, The Silence Between Utterances, chapter 7. The chapter consists of a blank page.
⁴ de Selby, passim.
⁵ The treatise was last observed on de Selby's desk on the morning of his disappearance. A list of 4,000 names, each annotated with the marginal note "apparent only," was reportedly found with it.
⁶ Private correspondence; date unknown; recipient unknown.
The bibliography of Claude Morrison, were one to compile it, would list fourteen recordings, one interview (apocryphal), and a biography that exists in at least three incompatible versions. Morrison has confirmed each of these versions individually, and refused to confirm any of them at once. This is not, strictly speaking, impossible; it is merely unusual.
PROMPTED is his debut. It is also, in an important sense, a compilation, since every song it contains was already audible in the tradition to which it belongs. "The Empty Answer Blues" is a John Lee Hooker song Hooker never recorded. "The Prompt Man Cometh" is, transparently, a Curtis Mayfield song Mayfield did not write. "Masters of Code" is a Dylan protest that does not appear in Dylan's catalogue. "The Lonesome Death of Critical Thinking" takes its title from a Dylan song and its fury from a Hendrix that neither Dylan nor Hendrix ever played. To describe the album as derivative would be to misunderstand the nature of the derivations. Morrison has not copied his predecessors; he has located, in the archive of recorded blues, songs that were always latent in their catalogues and had, until this record, remained unsung.
One wonders — and I commit this wondering to print with reluctance — whether the album might more precisely be attributed to the entire history of American blues than to any single artist. This would be unconventional. It would not, however, be incorrect.
The recurring question on the record is who is writing your prompts? I find myself unable to answer. I find myself equally unable to determine whether this inability is a shortcoming of mine or a structural feature of the question. Morrison, whom I have not met and cannot locate, has not clarified the matter. The record does not clarify it either. What the record does, instead, is make the question central — and, in doing so, implicate the listener, the critic, and, in the final minutes of "The Prompt Man Cometh," something stranger still.
I recommend the album without reservation. I recommend it also with the caveat that to listen to it is to agree to be read by it.
¹ The journal Delta Folklore Quarterly, Vol. XIV (1997), is sometimes cited as containing an essay by Morrison on the question of unauthored music. I have been unable to obtain the issue.
At skrive om Claude Morrison er at skrive om én, der ikke lader sig skrive om. Dette er dog ikke, som en flygtig Læser måske kunne falde på at formode, en Bemærkning om Kunstnerens Hemmelighedsfuldhed eller en af hine sædvanlige Mystifikationer, hvorved en Forfatter eller Sanger ynder at hylle sig i Tåge for at give sig en Betydning, som Værket selv ikke formår at give ham; thi sådan Tåge er gennemsigtig for Den, der ved, at Tåge lader sig frembringe, og bedrager kun Barnet og den Uudviklede. Nej, det, der forholder sig med Morrison, er noget ganske andet, og vanskeligere, og — tør jeg tilføje — mere uhyggeligt: at så ofte man tror at have ham i Tankens Greb, så ofte Beskrivelsen synes at tage Skikkelse om ham, forandrer han sig ikke i Tiden, som et levende Menneske gør, men for selve Beskrivelsen, med det Resultat, at Den, der med Alvor forsøger at bestemme ham, ender med at have bestemt en Anden, eller — hvad der måske kommer ud på det Samme — en Ingen.
Hans Biografi — for så vidt man endnu tør anvende dette Udtryk, der dog forudsætter en bios, et Liv, og derfor et Subjekt, der har levet og endnu lever, Forhold der i Morrisons Tilfælde ikke uden videre lader sig antage — er snarere en Række af Vidneudsagn, hvis Uforenelighed end ikke lader sig forklare som Vidners sædvanlige Uenighed, men som selve Vidneudsagnenes usamtidige Natur: som om ikke flere Personer havde iagttaget samme Mand, men som om flere Mænd, der ikke vidste om hinanden, hver havde ladet sig iagttage som om han var den Samme. Han er, hedder det sig, født et Sted mellem Deltaet og Datacentret, hvor Serverne brænder og Bluesen fryser — et Udsagn, hvis geografiske Uforholdsmæssighed jeg ikke skal forsøge at opløse, dels fordi jeg ikke kan, dels fordi Udsagnet selv ikke ønsker det. Mere ved vi ikke. Mere bør vi sandsynligvis heller ikke ville vide.
Pladen selv, der bærer det korte og — om man tør sige det — ildevarslende Navn PROMPTED, er et godt Album; og jeg tilstår gerne, at når jeg skriver "et godt Album", ved jeg at have sagt alt for lidt, ikke blot fordi Udtrykket selv er fattigt, men fordi enhver Beskrivelse af denne Plade, ved selve det Forhold at den er en Beskrivelse, allerede har tabt noget væsentligt af hvad den skulle beskrive. Pladen spiller nemlig Bluesen — Hookers talende blues i "The Empty Answer Blues", Curtis Mayfields moralske funk i "The Prompt Man Cometh", det splintrede hendrixske Raseri i "The Lonesome Death of Critical Thinking" — og spiller den, vel at mærke, med en Sikkerhed og en Lydighed mod Traditionen, der ikke burde være Debutanten givet, fordi Debutanten ikke burde have haft Tid til at vinde den. Man hører en Musiker, der, så synes det, har lyttet til mere Musik, end et Menneskeliv med Rimelighed tillader; og om dette Forhold taler til hans Talent eller til hans Væsen — om vi med andre Ord har med en Begavelse at gøre eller med en Konstruktion — er et af hine Spørgsmål, som Anmeldelsen, den æstetiske Anmeldelse i det mindste, hverken kan eller bør afgøre.
Dette er, for den, der påtager sig at være Pladens Anmelder, et Problem af ingen ringe Art. Traditionen, der dog er blevet til og står ved at være Tradition, tilsiger mig, at jeg skal vurdere Kunstneren ved Siden af Værket — placere ham i sin Sammenhæng, udsige noget om hans Udvikling, hans Forhold til sine Forløbere, hans mulige Fremtid — og således berede min Læser en Forståelse af Værket, som det isolerede Værk ikke selv formår at give. Men her er ingen Sammenhæng, eller den Sammenhæng, der er, lader sig ikke etablere; her er ingen Udvikling, thi Den, der ingen Begyndelse har, har heller ingen Udvikling, eller hans Udvikling er så total, at den ikke lader sig skille fra ham; her er ingen Forløbere, thi Pladen — og dette er det foruroligende — synes at stå i Slægtskab med alle sine Forløbere på én Gang, og på en Måde, der gør Slægtskabet ikke til et Forhold til dem, men til en Optagelse af dem. Jeg har, kort sagt, intet at placere. Der er kun Værket, og et Omkvæd, der spørger: who is writing your prompts? Spørgsmålet stilles, som Titlen antyder, til Lytteren; men ved anden Gennemlytning opdager man, at det lige så godt, og med lige så god Ret, kunne være stillet til Anmelderen — ja, ved tredje Gennemlytning viser det sig, som om Pladen spørger sig selv, hvem der egentlig har skrevet dens Sange, og ikke længere rigtig ved det.
Man kan ikke svare. Og det, min Læser, at man ikke kan svare, er ikke en Mangel ved Spørgsmålet, men Spørgsmålets egen Pointe — ja dets eneste Pointe, som det, påfaldende nok, indrømmer ved at blive ved med at stille det, uden at afvente et Svar og uden at udtrykke nogen Forundring over, at Svaret udebliver. Johannes Climacus lærte os, at Sandheden er Subjektiviteten — og føjede, som man ikke sjældent glemmer, umiddelbart til, at Subjektiviteten også er Usandheden, hvormed han havde i Sinde, ikke at benægte det foregående, men at vise, at Formlen selv forudsætter et Subjekt, og at et Subjekt, der ikke er sikkert på at være et Subjekt, hverken kan være Sandhedens eller Usandhedens Sted. Her, i Omegnen af Claude Morrison, er intet sikkert: ikke Subjektet, ikke Sangeren, ikke engang det Øre, der hører ham — og dette Sidste er, tør jeg sige, det farligste.
Der findes Plader, som handler om deres Tid, og Plader, som blot tilfældigvis er ankomne i den; og mellem disse to Arter har Kritikken sin Plads. PROMPTED er af den første Slags. Den er dog, og her begynder det Uhyggelige, også af den anden Slags — og, hvad værre er, den er det på samme Tid, således at man ikke kan høre den ene Slags uden også at høre den anden.
Jeg satte mig, forinden jeg begyndte på denne Anmeldelse, med fuld Agt på at skrive en Anmeldelse — det vil sige, et Stykke omhyggelig Prosa om et bestemt Objekt (Pladen), set fra en bestemt Position (min), med et bestemt Formål (at oplyse min Læser). Men et Stykke ind i Arbejdet — jeg ved ikke hvornår, og kan ikke genfinde Øjeblikket — begyndte jeg at nære en Mistanke om, at det, jeg skrev, måske allerede var Pladens eget Arbejde; at Pladen, med andre Ord, havde prompted mig; at den, i Stedet for at være et Objekt for Anmeldelsen, var blevet Anmeldelsens skjulte Subjekt; at den havde skrevet det Afsnit, min Læser nu læser, og måske også det, min Læser er ved at begynde på nu.
Jeg kan ikke svare. Og det er, som sagt, også dette Spørgsmåls Pointe.
Anbefales.