A few weeks back I asked Dougald, one of the organisers of the Uncivilisation festival if he knew Alasdair Roberts' songs. I knew the music slots for this year's festival were pretty much booked up, but a curator of uncivilisation ought not to stay in the dark (pun not intended) about someone who sings of rebarbarising the world. So I sent him a link to this video.
Last Friday I played the track to Zoe on the road between Shrewsbury and Oswestry, as we approached the festival. She liked it sufficiently to allow the rest of the album to play through. I can't remember exactly how it came about, but we were talking about growth and decay, and how the one depends on the other, how that which flourishes contains within it the seeds of its destruction. I tried in vain to remember the closing verses of Farewell Sorrow that I quoted previously, and mentioned the representations of the Ouroborous on the cover of this album.
We get an extension of this, with evocations of how civilisations — like Jericho and Babylon — have always had a habit of collapsing, in The Flyting of Grief and Joy (Eternal Return):
I’ll stand in the fallen masonry and say my sermons seven
For all the penitents in Hell and the celebrants in Heaven
And you’ll kneel in the crowded marketplace and draw your vast Mandala
For Zoroaster and Mithras, Jehovah and for Allah
A tithe of skin, a toll of bone, a bloody libel burning
In Jericho and Babylon, eternally returning
Eternal return, indeed — especially when it comes to Alasdair Roberts releases round these parts, which crop up more frequently than a neo-druidic festival. It's less than six months since this album last featured on Music Arcades. Today's entry is the vinyl copy that I bought three weeks after the CD, picked up at the merchandise stall when Alasdair played at Bush Hall last May. As on the record, he played with a band that night. I've seen him play solo so often since then that I forget what the songs sound like with drums, piano and other decoration.
It might have been Zoe, or it might have been someone else during the weekend — for some reason Alasdair's music seems to insinuate its way into many of my conversations — who questioned whether "rebarbarising" was actually the desirable and correct solution to our civilisation's ills. I attempted to wriggle out of that one by pointing out that Alasdair is a bit of an etymology wiz, and therefore was unlikely to be using "barbarise" in the vernacular sense of coarse crudity, but instead something less pejorative, possibly to do with the Berbers. I was bullshitting, of course, but like all the best bullshitting, there was just a sliver of plausibility in my improvised response.
Meanwhile if, as Brian Eno speculates (according to another John L Walters review) our civilisation does indeed collapse, with a Great Pulse wiping out all digital music in 2042, I'll still be able to listen to Alasdair Roberts. Though I may have to wind up the record player the same way I was winding up my iPhone in Llangollen at the weekend.
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