Music Arcades: David Thomas and Two Pale Boys: Erewhon

I was intrigued to come back to this, the first album by David Thomas and the 2 PBs, eleven years after it came out. For I bought it when it came out, and I've devoured just about everything the ensemble has done since, including the budget price Official Bootleg downloads you can get from hearpen.com, and which I recommend even though I know you don't really give a toss. But I haven't listened to this one for a long, long time, and I wasn't sure what I'd think of it.

To begin with it sounds like the three men are skirting round each other, deciding on the right time and angle to attack, and seeking to reconcile themselves to their shared fate. But they pretty quickly hit their straps, and in my quick listen this afternoon — only briefly interrupted by a crying infant — it seemed that Fire, Morbid Sky and Kathleen are the songs that deliver the payload. (I remember Kathleen being a live favourite the first couple of times I saw them.)

I'm so short of time I thought I might not be able to explore the CD-ROM part of this release, since it's one of those 1990s multimedia blobs that requires me to fire up my old iMac since no computer made after 2004 will run it any more. But I'm glad I opted to lose even more sleep and check it out, because it's a rivetingly odd ragbag of non-linear words and animations that hints at an alternative history where CD-ROM multimedia wasn't a cul-de-sac after all. Thomas approaches interactivity askance, as you can tell from this explanatory note:

The Sacred Cow of Multimedia is that the end user makes creative decisions. This is absurd & insulting. Why endure the despair & tedium required by the record making process if the end result means so little that you enable a stranger to mess with it? `Art is not a series of interchangeable options in which any choice is as good as any other choice. Interactivity is a cruel scam.

The interface to the multimedia pieces is a postcard from the Blue Hole of Castalia, and the digipack CD cover includes the lyrics to Brunswick Parking Lot, which is odd since that track — which provides a modicum of context for the Blue Hole — didn't appear until two albums and about seven years later on 18 Monkeys…. Follow these links and, well, it still won't exactly make sense but it will thicken like a soup that both nourishes and appetises.