Indie Street Reads (and Listens) #3 • 04/10/09
Autumn in Halifax & The Leaves – Robert Frank & The Moon
Carbon Records
The Story: Taking notes from Raymond Carver and Proust in a distinctly contemporary sense, Robert Frank & The Moon uses a traffic accident as the centerpiece to thematically explore and concretize an Augustinian conception of time.
The Music: The soundtrack to Robert Frank & The Moon stands on its own right as a contemplative (primarily) guitar-based piece with a distinct interplay between both arpeggio rhythm and warm-sunset-drone, and structured song and ambiance.
The “Total Package”: There is an inherent problem of putting story to music in this fashion: timing. That is to say, should one read the story to the pace of the music, is the music composed to fit the average amount of time one takes to read the story, how closely aligned is the music to the story, etc.? I chose to simply read the story at my own pace accompanied by the music without worry of any sort of artistic intention of alignment. While I finished the story sometime in the third song of the “soundtrack,” it would be inaccurate to say that this juxtaposition doesn’t have any meaning. My reading often became one with the pervading rhythm or mood of the piece, mimicking the narrative’s complex, intersecting, and inextricably tangled rhythms of life.
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