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Komorous’s music leaves his motivations profoundly unknowable. Komorous’s music is not about wonder; it allows wonder. At this point it would make sense to explore in more detail how this wonder manifests itself in specific compositions by Rudolf Komorous. However, such an exploration would open itself to specialized technical considerations that require a certain kind of musical training, for Komorous’s “wonderful” inhabits a margin at the edge of European aristocratic /bourgeois composition. However, there are edges to every recognizable musical practice. For example, the Reveries are a group of Toronto-based musicians who work in a margin they have located between lounge jazz, psychedelia, and post-rock. The Reveries are Eric Chenaux (guitar, harmonica, voice and mouth speaker), Ryan Driver (thumb reeds, quasi-ruler bass, voice and mouth speaker), and Doug Tielli (guitar, nose flute, bowed saw, voice and mouth speaker). The Reveries sing and play jazz standards. Some are well known (“Cry Me a River”) and some are more obscure (“There’s a Lull in My Life”). They have even started to compose their own. They only perform slow and languid ballads. Each member of the group usually does two or even three things at once. To keep their hands free, Chenaux’s harmonica is set in a neck holder (the kind Bob Dylan uses) and Tielli’s nose flute (a plastic toy instrument that changes pitch through varying the air pressure and shape of one’s nasal cavity) is strapped to his face with a contraption that recalls Lector’s mask in Silence of the Lambs (Tielli somehow manages to sing with this apparatus on). The group plays many fragile and ungainly instruments with a strange virtuosity. The bowed saw, the thumb reeds (strips of balloon rubber stretched between the thumbs and blown in a way one would a blade of grass), and the quasi-ruler bass (a strip of metal held on a table with one hand and plucked with the other, as one would pluck one’s ruler while holding one end tight to one’s desk) are all very hard to play stable pitches on. All three musicians have sweet, pop voices and sing consummate three-part harmonies. However, they sing with small speakers, taken from the earpieces of cellular phones, stuck inside their mouths. Every instrument has a contact microphone on it: Eric’s guitar is heard coming out of the speaker in Doug’s mouth; Doug’s guitar or saw is heard coming out of the speaker in Ryan’s mouth; everything Ryan does is heard coming out of the speaker in Eric’s mouth. Because each Reverie always uses his mouth (either to sing or play an instrument), the speaker signal is filtered in a wild array of wah-wah effects caused by the changing shape of their mouth cavity.34 The sound of their singing is further distorted by the fact that they have waterproof audio cable (attached to the speaker) hanging out of the sides of their mouths. The effect of this is that their singing is reminiscent, both in the way it sounds 318 (Dis)Locating Language and looks (drool and all), of someone trying to talk when she/he has a dentist ’s irrigation tube hanging from her/his mouth. All of these activities are picked up by air microphones and amplified through a small home stereo. The Reveries’ music is incredibly strange/unknowably wonderful. It is dreamy and caustic at the same time. Experiencing it is like encountering delicate ultra-lounge psychedelia picked up from afar on a static-ridden short-wave radio. For all of its bizarre accoutrements, Reveries’ music does not seem like theatre. The viscerality of the tasks they set themselves and their labour intensity makes it evident that they are not representing anything (as actors or Classical musicians do when they are performing their parts). Because they use all of their available energy to execute their tasks, there is none left over to strategically manipulate the audience’s perception of their music through theatricality. Furthermore, the labour intensity of their activities is especially disorienting given the mellow, lymphatic slackness of the music’s flow. Many listeners find humour in this music, but there are no jokes being told. As with Deleuze, for the Reveries , “art…is never a matter of ‘communication.’” They work too hard to say a thing. There is no narrative. The experimental listener needs to come to the music and work through the aural morass...

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