My Love Affair With Sufjan Stevens

So there's been a lot of activity on the Sufjan front. He's touring a bit, and he has two new releases but no new material. It's ironic to me that his two releases are so...retrospective.

Run Rabbit Run is a string version of his strange and wonderful Enjoy Your Rabbit, 14 electronic instrumental songs filled with rhythmic weirdness and fascinating rhythms (for a sample, check Year of the Boar segueing into Year of the Tiger). I think he's referenced a zodiac-themed album as a sort of stepping stone: his use of the names of the zodiac represent his own inability to find names for songs, to define and encapsulate a song in a title. A Sun Came! is weird and very experimental in a sometimes good, sometimes bad way. Despite his maturity in Enjoy Your Rabbit, there was more to do before he could become the "Titles longer than the song itself" master. To have Osso redo the album is to re-recognize that stage in his career: the experimentation, the difficulty to name and to encapsulate, the density and difficult of his works.

Ironically, Michigan and Illinois (I don't know seven swans that well, so I won't talk about it) are all about encapsulation. Using long titles, and a whole state as a concept, subjects filled with both researched and experienced feelings and events. The Michigan project got him going into this vein, and he was so enthusiastic to contain everything in song that he took 3 discs, two from Illinois and one from the Avalanche, to paint everything he could. He wanted to paint the entire fifty states, using his inquisitive and emotional outlook to take everything in, everything. He wanted to put true experience into his melodic, often sparse, often acoustic, often plaintive and simple style: the exact opposite of his early career.

The BQE is a mix of the two. Exploring the subject of the Bronx-Queens Expressway, Sufjan is again trying to contain an abstract in song. But he's not picking such a large subject as New York (he had mentioned New York as the next possible state subject, at one point), but rather something a bit more managable. He is using a mostly acoustic medium to try to contain all of his spirit, but he uses electronic sounds and eschews vocals. He divides things into names, but also relies on classical format and divison: Prelude, interlude, movement. It's less an album than an orchestral suite, a huge undertaking no longer limited by his own skill at his 5+ instruments.

Maybe this was always the fate of his music. One of the most striking things about Michigan to me was the use of electric hums between songs, and the fleeting, highly distorted guitar solos. Illinois ended with a nonvocal track, and had all sorts of nonvocal interludes, with a bit of electronic styling in it. Avalanche was a bit heavier in that respect. He threw in a track on Dark Was the Night that was all electronic...I dunno, seems to me like he's been itching to get back into the instrumental suite style. But will it work? Returning from his highly popular, melodic and environmentally evocative music, will it work?

FUCK YES. It works brilliantly. Unlike perhaps some of his other albums, you really have to devote energy to actively listening, otherwise you might say: "Absolutely nothing happens in this album until Movement 4 when the crazy electronics come in." I'm only halfway through the album and I am seriously in love with it.

The Prelude on the Esplanade is a sonic gem, a tone exploration of shouting cars and difficulties, flitting around tonalities of sort of major keys, enticing us onward and crescendoing, brought onward and onward and onward until this brilliantly tonal fanfare. At first, I was disappointed with the fanfare when compared to, say, The Black Hawk War [yadda], but I'm getting more into it. The chords arc up over the tonal center, and fall back down. He tells us: getting on trains is awesome, yo, but you gotta get somewhere too. Feelings of movement are given a real tonal, and not just crazy noise, center. The horn work is phenomenal.

So we're on the train now, I guess? And we get very quiet and artful pieces. Invaders stands out very strongly against the others, in that those three notes at the end of each phrase are like a horn, or a siren. Throughout the piece, horns and woodwinds take and let go of that carrying call, and the drums stop pausing behind it and time itself seems to stretch a bit. It's a fantastic piece of work, beautiful sense of growth in it. The first few songs I remember less well, but they're in the same vein: melodically genius, sonically enthralling, quiet and exciting.

But hell, Movement III into Movement IV is probably my favorite thing to come out of speakers ever. Seriously. Horns in III take their sweet times, using the space and uncertain time signature to create a sense of...I dunno, a clearing filling with trees that slowly grow and intertwine. You figure out it's in 7/8, certain horns take that little embellishment at the end of a phrase, but there is still so much growth and tension. Those embellishments don't fall on the beat, and it's hard to tell how many horns are playing at the time. Unlike a lot of his Michigan music, the complexity doesn't come from the interlocking of simple, melodic lines; everything is dense as fuck. You get a sense of buoyancy from it, though, a sense of rising to something; those embellishments become a symbol of clarity, those 7/8 phrases get a bit more clear. We're rising, drums and more bass sounds come in, instruments shift to maybe create a hole in those dense interlocking branches, and suddenly, suddenly HOLY SHIT WE'RE GOING LIGHTSPEED. It's like Rainbow Road in Mario Kart or something. It's a totally different sonic texture, choppy and hyperactive, and just like in the best parts of Enjoy your Rabbit, oboes and beats mix really well. I imagine myself speeding down a highway at like 125 km/hr dancing and running and rolling and all sorts of things. It's a huge climax, but strangely he's not afraid to put on the breaks and take away density. He understands that the sounds themselves make the tension here; so he'll through in off-color notes and bits of strange tonality that create excitement and direction, and POOF it'll go back to that part with the oboes. Incredible stuff.

I'll post more when I have a greater opinion. I got inspired to listen to Sufie because of a road trip through Illinois and Michigan.

Also: NEW FUCK BUTTONS ALBUM, MY DEAR GLORIOUS CLOUDS YES.