Portrait of a band: Cornelius and the Crystalline Obscenities
Consider, if you will, St. George’s Cross in Glasgow, Scotland’s most populous city. When you stand here at the confluence of a city in the throes of economic and artistic turmoil, you have a few choices available to you. To the west is the Great Western Road, a seemingly infinite stretch of pseudo-suburban posturing and fashionable mediocrity. To the east is the city centre, and its melting pot of popular clubs, drunken or insane buskers, and other auditory curiosities. Sauchiehall Street is the scene of the now fallen Blue Arrow jazz club. To the south is Finnieston, with options for both traditional and jazz connoisseurs. To the north are the barrens of Port Dundas and Maryhill. Everywhere, the music scene is coloured by the desperate outflow of financially doomed talent from the Conservatoire.
As I stand here amid the crumbling relics of old townhouses, the broken windows and the stench of faltering sewage pipelines, weighing my options for the evening, I do not see the town of Glasgow. I see instead the crossroads that our species stands at on its musical adventure.
On the one hand, there are those that embrace the creative decline of our generation, taking increasingly copious amounts of drugs to enjoy the aggressive banalities of the popular consensus. On the other, there are those that venture into the minefields of microtonality and the trenches of timbre, hoping to uncover some sort of treasure from the so-called frontlines of musical progress, to pull meaning out of obscure theoretical depths and neurotic tinkering. Ultimately, all of these experiments are doomed to failure.
When people talk of the formalities of music in abstract terms, I hear only the pedantry and semantics of a lot of linguists discussing a spoken language, with all the engagement of astronomers observing a dying star in some distant corner of space. The vast majority of musicians rely on these detached points of theoretical discussion because, tragically, they cannot express meaning with their music. They are experts in form, and babes in the woods when it comes to content. Their music is the yearning, mournful wail of a Neanderthal, overcome by some excruciating and inarticulate emotion at the visage of a glorious and horrifying cosmos beyond the horizon of an unfathomable ocean.
Imagine a language full of beautiful, florid words, endowing aesthetic appeal but communicating no information, constructing the appeal of a grand and beautiful tautology, but signifying nothing. This is what music has been, and will continue to be, for the vast majority of its spiritually oppressed deacons, so long as the strait-jacket of the popular musical consensus is worn with all the deference of servants to a cruelly powerful, idiotically violent, and crumbling empire.
Not so for Cornelius and the Crystalline Obscenities.
I have been called a singer-songwriter; our music has been described as jazz-rock. However, such words are needlessly reductive and belittling. My voice may be a powerful and commanding presence, but to me it is merely another instrument in our repertoire, just as the more lucid insights of the jazz canon are some of the generic weapons with which we assault the seemingly unassailable fortress of banality which is the popular musical consensus.
If forced to describe myself in terms sympathetic to the backwards state of things, I would say that I am a pan-instrumentalist. In other words, I do not see any distinction between the individual instruments as such. The focus on the instrument as a seperate thing of beauty in and of itself, this fetishisation and commodification of the surface appearance, is an indicator of our culture’s general sickness, the reason that bands could appear on Top of the Pops waving around fake instruments like so many giant inflatable dildos, and be considered credible cultural representatives of an advanced human civilisation. This is not music: it is pornography, a sadistic dream for the insatiable lust of our brain-dead media, mere background noise for the Western circus thrusting forward into the beginning of history like a wheezing, slobbering, poorly-bred dog which has been startled into the path of a masturbating Uber Eats drunk driver.
That being said, I do not disregard the value of instruments or of live musicianship. The music of the cosmos may be beautiful, but it is only the call — and as any appreciator of jazz knows, the call without the response is but the seed of an idea. To flourish, music must become a dialogue in the truest sense. Hence, we must be willing to compromise with the material necessities of the human condition. This is why I formed my quintet, Cornelius and the Crystalline Obscenities, which is largely organised around trained players of specific instruments in the traditional mould.
My keyboardist is a pathetic fool, incapable of making even the most basic of life decisions without collapsing, and as a result I am constantly put in the ridiculous position of enabler to his daily soliloquies on the crumbling state of his personal reality. Almost every other week, he has had his puny heart broken by some promiscuous feminist or literature-studying harlot. I could not care less about anything he has to say on these topics, and yet I am compelled to make these sacrifices for our music, for when it comes to knowledge of the aforementioned formalities and abstractions of theory — specifically in the field of harmony, he is a useful asset.
My guitarist is a bumbling oaf with hands like frying pans. It is a constant wonder to me that he is capable of producing a coherent string of notes from his instrument. I also suspect that his IQ may be below 90. That is why I am not worried about him reading any of this, for I doubt that he has read more than two sentences a day since he was finally forced out of school for being too old. Nonetheless, he has a stage presence that women find appealing for some inexplicable reason, and he also has an intuitive grasp of improvisation despite his lack of any theoretical foundation whatsoever.
My bassist is a sauntering, beret-wearing imbecile from the west-end. He has never worked a day in his life and I suspect that he never will, for he comes from significant amounts of money. I loathe him with all my heart, but he holds down a solid groove with our drummer, who, by contrast, is a painfully severe alcoholic with no money or prospects to speak of. I have never seen him interact with a female, or find joy in any aspect of life. It is a wonder to me that he is still alive, and I cannot honestly describe him as anything other than a doomed soul. I suspect he will be reincarnated as a worm after he drinks himself to death.
Together, we have been constructing new horizons in musical potentiality. Each member has an unspoken respect for my encompassing vision which enables us to communicate seamlessly on the musical plane, despite our more superficial differences of personality. We have been quietly rehearsing and recording for almost a year now, and any bouts of restlessness that have developed over this time have always been quelled by some new breakthrough — the day of reckoning with the banal culture which is both our oppressor and our muse is delayed further, and we are once again satisfied to wait until the end of the necessary period of artistic gestation before finally unveiling the fruits of our considerable labour.
However, I suspect that the aforementioned period is now coming to an end, that the day of reckoning is close at hand. That is why I have written this preamble, for as much as our music will stand in its own right, it is always necessary, in any field, to contextualise the works of the master for the ears of the student. Anyone who recognises a significant meaning in these words, who has ever yearned for that sonic truth beyond the sky, will be a fitting disciple for the new musical order which it is our mission to establish, and as such should be prepared for our first release.
We promise you nothing less than absolute liberation.
Peace.
- Cornelius, of the Jazz-Rock Abyss
