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Philip Jeck — “Fanfares” — Sand

It would take a short treatise by Alex Ross to do this gem justice (and if you haven’t read The Rest Is Noise yet, what are you waiting for?) but in the face of his silence on the topic, I’ll have to do my best.  The central horn figure is appropriated from a recording of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare For The Common Man,” and undergoes a slow, devastating disintegration in three stages on Jeck’s mystical tenth album.  This is the first of those stages, with the theme locked a loop and already sounding more like a Pyrrhic victory than polished triumph. Misting static passes through, corrosively, makes me see grooves in vinyl etched by acid.  Surely there’s a historical resonance too, in dissolving this particular theme by Copland, who had to defend himself from charges of Communism, basically for being too patriotic and admiring farmers.  Maybe the idea is that there’s no such thing as apolitical artistic commentary on country: those works will always wilt in the glare of institutional scrutiny, because they don’t call for it and aren’t built to withstand dissection.  In the end, Copland’s greatest crime was borrowing subversive technique to tell irreducibly simple stories, and Jeck extends him no mercy here, stripping the fanfare down to its untenable core, a strip of seaweed wavering in the gray chop until riptides pull it up by the root.     

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