: : (Four Dots) / Words That Don't Rhyme

This is what the full bore overflow pipe of modern music production should facilitate: those grandest of grand follies that dizzy and defy the listener comforts of genre gutters and the expectations of reasonable folk partly because they can and partly because they must. Art that flees not only fashion but the age itself by the primary means of not giving it a second thought.

: : (four dots if you really have to utter it) are two people, David Fair (Half Japanese, Coo Coo Rockin Time) and Swedish experimental artist Sara Ohm. The impulse on 'Words That Don't Rhyme' is that of a thought experiment made into music because there would be no other way to behold it if the artist did not make it. The idea is sound and simple enough - pair lots of non-rhyming (mostly concrete) nouns in a long inventory and set to music. That even makes the concept sound low but the effect of the whole is a mind-furring act of pure revelation. For over forty minutes and what feels like hundreds of pairings, the brisk and initially graspable inventory, transmogrifies into a pulmonary gasp of prosody and a thick weave of resonant poetry. Sara Ohm's delivery of the words & phrases is unwavering and unmannered without being inhuman. Stresses wander on and off meter or the meter corrects and drags itself. There is a non-native speaker energy in Ohm's probably novel encounters with couplings like "ankle bracelet and parrot cage", "newsprint and sun dial", "micro-management" and "dangling participle" that adds another layer of pleasure. There is no inherent momentum in her delivery even though I sometimes projected surges and peaks. There is no deliberate dampening down of the expressive intonation like John S Hall, or any adoption of a speech music lilt 'n' roll of Robert Ashley or Harry Partch even though both came to mind. The music is a fabulous, maddening maze of puce muzak, sickly and comic in its surfaces of shiny washes, brassless parping and synthetic birdsong, progressed by a brilliantly daft/deft and arresting (in both senses) rhythm that helps make the whole hover somewhere between the mall and museum, the Residents and Raymond Scott, but wholly within the singular vision of David Fair. The sum is hard to describe. There is a first tier conscious listen where you can revel in your favourite couplings ("bagpipes and lipgloss". "mistaken identity and shoehorn")....and even laugh out loud....which gives way to the tier 2 listen where totems from the subconscious conspire to make connections without your consent ("postcards from China and a snake shedding its skin") and then, there is tier 3 where the whole congeals into a vocal/music blancmange where meaning cannot be attended to, like an aria in a foreign tongue, and a hypnotic property takes hold and, before you know it, forty minutes have gone by and the piece has started playing again. I think...."conga drums and flossing"...."sugar bowl and prescription lenses"...."blueberry muffin and hello my name is blank sticker"....did I hear that?