Deaf Center Owl Splinters. Deaf Center are Norwegian. The same as Edvard Munch, Henrik Ibsen, Quisling...oh, sorry. The music is wordless and as such we are thus granted the freedom to attach any significance to the music that we would like. It could be a reaction against the diminishment of the power of the written word in America. Are there book burning still in America? I haven't been to one in ages. I do recall the emotional "power" of that scene in Footloose when the good people were burning all of the scandalous books--Are you there God? It's Me Margaret, How to Eat Fried Worms, The Push Cart War, etc...all aflame! And then John Lithgow, in his handsome phase, swooped in and saved the day but later he blushed when his daughter cursed in church. But now? Would they burn Sula or an EM Forster novel? They would be doing the children a great service if they would. And what happens when all school children are toting tablets and nooks and kindles and the like, will we burn books only metaphorically? Gather around a barrel of paper towels dipped in kerosene and chant Indonesian koans? But then there aren't many movies made now that have the societal impact of a Footloose and so without Kevin Bacon who will make that urgent call to action. We are the poorest that we have been in generations. Deaf Center would be ideal for movie soundtrack work. I am not familiar with Norwegian filmmaking at the moment. Should I be aware of any Norwegian filmmakers at the moment? The first track would soundtrack the scene where in Svalbard a depressed Norwegian laments the midnight sun and lingers over an application to the oil fund in Norway to fund his experimental re-pigmentation that can only be performed in North Korea. He is an albino but we only learn this as the second track begins and he removes the sombrero from the top of his head. The music could underscore the dexterity in which the protagonist places his periods and half-stops and the agony of font selection for his application. It would be sombreros and typewriters, marvelous, the scrapes and radio static would unite effortlessly with the scene. This is the excitement of wordless pretty things. The Oil Fund in Norway is a monster. 570 billion dollars. Do they accept tender pleas from Norwegians to fund emergency liposuctions or performance art pieces on the premise that 'the destiny of nations depends on how they nourish themselves'. perhaps not. I remember reading an article on summer homes in Norway and the outrage found nationwide when some louts were outfitting their homes with electricity and air conditioning. Apparently there are loads of old cars in Oslo because the entire nation is frugal. I am frugal. I could be Norwegian. i could write the Oil Fund and submit a grant application expressing my desire to study the differences between a pseudo-Canadian's frugalness versus an average Norwegian's frugalness. Will I succeed? I could send them a copy of my "novel" and ask them to publish it. Third track, started off with a bit of ominous urban soundscaping, then the piano arrives and it is a David Fincher movie, it is softer, and lovelier. It is not very Canadian. I was once Canadian. I have mentioned this in the past. But there is reason now. It was recently Dominion Day, sorry it was recently Canada Day, and I was displeased at my lack of options here in Westminster for celebrating this monumental occasion. In Detroit it was on Dominion Day that the major fireworks display occurred. We would travel as a family underneath the Detroit river and sit on the Windsor side of the river because there was less likelihood of being murdered in Canada than in the USA and watch the fireworks and have romantic visions of the Viscount Monck and Sir John dancing arm in arm after the establishment of Canada as a sovereign nation in 1867. It must have been romantic. Atom Egoyan could make a film of this, their torrid affair covered up by the history books and Conrad Bain as the Viscount. Conrad Bain could be deceased. Next track, the epic centerpiece of the album. It is ten minutes long. This is reminiscent of the Dustin O'Halloran record that I recently wrote incoherently about. it has less of a classical structure, it is looser, it would fall more soundly in the electronic camp than in the indie classical movement. The air is moved around the room by synthesizers and found sound rather than having a composer move delicately among the spaces in between the molecules. Electronic music even at its tenderest is still an aggressive form, there is little room separating the oscillations and waves and so it acts almost as a glacier would as it carves the landscape all things powerless to resist, mountains of granite, conifer forests, human civilization, all consumed in the frozen wake and similarly all human experience is overwhelmed by the impact of electronic dissonance. Not really, I became lost in metaphor. Instead of a glacier I should have compared it to isostatic rebound after the glaciers have receded. And suddenly the epic movement has ceased. This track begins with samples of a violin being abused? Lovingly. A cello? My ears. For someone with this deep seated attachment to music, it soundtracks everything I do whether it is present in the air or not, I have been blessed with miserable ears. The treated stringed instrument is manipulated forcefully and with grace in a very small space, it feels as if this song was recorded in a very tiny space and squeezed onto this album through some sort of semi-permeable surface to remove the excess filamentous accompaniments and all that is left is minimal brutality. So lovely. The first Deaf center album was also very lovely. It was also wordless. I am not sure that more music should be wordless but possibly more people should be. That is a cruel aside, my apologies. I make apologies to the shadows of former readers who become so disgusted with my lack of artfulness that they vow never to return to the Ron Powlus universe ever again. Has Ron Powlus ever visited this site? Surely he is one for ego-surfing. Would he be disappointed? I am not living up to the legend that he has established. he could be a massive Deaf Center fan. He could take cruises in the Norwegian midnight sun with Owl Splinters on his ipod and ear buds in his ears as he stares out across the deck and admires the beauty of the non-setting sun. Next track, minimal piano, I am fairly certain that I could play this piece. It is an assemblage of five or six notes repeated over and over. This could be soundtrack work, they could compose these records while watching television, this the soundtrack to a particularly dismal financial news report. But are there dismal financial reports in Norway? They have 570 billion dollars. They could retrofit a great number of summer homes with electricity for 570 billion dollars. We could not. My company is receiving stimulus money. We are spending it to alter the environment, to conduct a war on an insect, to pay our employees Davis-Bacon prevailing wages. Next track, samplers and samples of strings placed far out among the celestial objects on the posterior side of the horizon, among Gannyede and Ceres and Iapetus. This could be on the next Voyager mission. It sounds like space traveller music, if I was in a spacecraft hurtling at excessive speed towards another star I might listen to this. I might not. It would be a long journey and I might be alone and this is isolated music, this enhances the feeling of solitude with its elicitation of the womb and rain and our journey from the ocean depths to the tops of expansive mountain ranges. If I was a spaceman I might opt for some Bob Seger. I can't imagine Bob Seger would be a big fan of Deaf Center, I can't visualize him on his deck at his house on Orchard LAke in Michigan blasting the Deaf Center through his speakers that look like stones in the landscape. Last track, Hunted Twice. Refrigerator hummings in opposite channels. Are songs such as this constructed or are they accidentally discovered, as they are tuning up the piano do they simply twist knobs and depress keys and write unknown variances of source code and happen on a lovely bit of melancholy such as this? It seems that there are now manipulated strings in the mix as well, these sounds have a human origin. I am almost certain, again, my ears. There is a metronomic beat on piano keeping time in the foreground, the sound is unfocused and plaintive, pastoral, Norwegian. And then, just now, there is but the metronome and a soft tingling from keys and it gently dissipates into confessional tones.