I suspect I sent the following email to myself, when I was shitfaced a few years ago. I can't imagine who else it came from.

*****

Still obsessed with the coda to “Rainbow” by Battles. Speaking impressionistically, it’s uncanny but still sensuous. Spacious, heavy, ensconcing. A pure joy to listen to for me. Transporting. G*d, let me be anywhere and anyone else.

The lyrics irk me tho, but only for my interpretation of one stanza therein. Likely, I only see in it what I bring to it. Likely, the problem is within me, it started within me, is influenced by and influences nothing outside of me. There are no products of circumstance, just good people and bad ideas. Anyway, the troublesome stanza runs like so:

“Why / would some / echo / out race? / Statement so vague…”

It’s just as likely that “Why would some echo out race” is the statement so vague. But I always read the lyric as a sort of ham-fisted, rhetorical, racial-political question. It is the echoing out race the is the statement so vague. Something that could be restated as something to the effect of “why would anyone be fixated on something so vague as race?” A post-racial sentiment, a love-one-another sentiment that sets my blood on fire. Of course Tyondai is a mixt kid too lol. Maybe that’s the grain of my projections. He’s the m-l-tt- I always wanted to be but never could. Seriously, he’s an excellent composer-performer.

“MIXT KING music” is a map toward an escape from obsession. I reused (and severely mangled) a sample of “Rainbow” that appears at the end of M-RES’s “instrumental,” the last track off of BLACK JUCHE. Then, I used it to launch into a new rap, but one that starts with a stanza reused from the start of “positionality statement,” the first track off of BLACK JUCHE. So the end and the beginning of that last work meet again here, in “MIXT KING music.”

So the escape fails, or the map was wrong, or I failed to follow the map. We’re back to where I started. Instead, the new rap gives way to the final passage of “instrumental,” itself an arrangement and reharmonization of “Rainbow.” The final split-second of that arrangement repeats indefinitely (well, for too long, at least) to conclude “instrumental,” as if this residue of “Rainbow” is suspended in mid-air, maybe toward making that residue its own self-impelled sound object, as it insists upon itself so much for so long. But, in that sound object’s reappearance in “MIXT KING music,” that sound object crescendos toward grizzly digital distortion, to return us to “Rainbow,” or yet another arrangement and reharmonization. This time, a sort of decadent but stilted (and poorly mixed) post-rock joint.

And the final moments of this second arrangement and reharmonization lead us to the next event, just as the sample from “instrumental” did, via crescendo and clipping, distortion. And this second gesture, this final gesture, leads the listener to me, accompanied only by passing cars and the creaking of my bones. Me, smoking a cig round about 4 or 6 am, 12/01/2020, singing the final stanza of “Rainbow” to myself, hopefully quietly enough to not wake my housemates:

“…as / ‘Once, / one time, / I was / amazed. / I was amazed.’”

Which is different from the first stanza, which runs like so:

“Once, / one time, / I was / amazed. / I was amazed.”