Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Crater Speak) (studio album)
by Slauson Malone

From ForegroundNoise 01/19/2021 21:13 | #264692

The Germans are often ridiculed for their habit of constructing obscenely long compound words. As Mark Twain once quipped: “Some German words are so long that they have a perspective”. Theirs might not be the most elegant solution, yet I’ve always been envious of how their individual words can convey complex emotion where English has to scrabble for a concessive clause or conjunction. The closest my mother tongue can compare, is when it artificially constructs them from other languages. ‘Nostalgia’ – from the Greek words nostos (a homecoming) and algos (pain) – is a good example; originally coined by a 17th century Swiss doctor to describe traumatised homesick soldiers, it now evokes all the nuance we associate with memory, comfort, longing, regret.

The title of Jasper Marsalis’ second EP as Slauson Malone encompasses all this and more. The collision of two German words ‘die Vergangenheit’ (the past) and ‘die Bewältigung’ (coping with) first came into use as a post-WWII theoretical term to describe the nation’s reckoning with its immediate history, though it has since been used to describe similar cultural processes elsewhere.

Marsalis’ use here isn’t monumental, it’s personal. Having split from sound art collective Standing on the Corner (see above entry), last year he released his solo debut A Quiet Farwell, 2016–2018, a feverish half hour of experimental hip hop and ambient plunderphonics marked by a brooding air of apocalypse plain even in its opening line: “The world is coming to an end”.

On the artwork for Vergangen…, the fiery black sun from A Quiet…’s cover has been shrunk down to a tattoo on Marsalis’ forearm. Vergangen… isn’t interested in cataclysm, it examines how each of us are shaped by our own immediate pasts, our individual traumas. It’s a motif made literal by the samples and lyrics from A Quiet… reopened here like old wounds, by the nagging question that refuses to stay forgotten: “Are you scared?”. To someone in the eye of their own storm, the devastation might as well be world-ending.