#insofar as they are Constant Adding New Family Members

[thisisallthehattersfault]

Excerpt from my Wei Wixuan Descended From Hualian Fic

"Xingan," Wei Chaoxiang says, aggrieved. "The boy is sixteen. Sixteen, for heaven's sake! And he carries himself like he's been carved out of stone!"

Cao Yinuo purses her lips and presses her fingertips together the way she does when she's trying not to show that she's upset. "We cannot go around adopting the children of random sect leaders, most especially while those sect leaders are still alive," she says, but Wei Chaoxiang knows his wife and hears the reluctance in her voice.

"That's an easy fix." She looks at him like he's an utter fool, which, fair. But still! "Look at that child and tell me he has ever in his life experienced a shred of parental affection."

"... Jin Furen is--"

"Bah!" Wei Chaoxiang does not make a habit of interrupting his wife, and to do it now highlights how fired up he is. "That woman happily betrothed her son to a girl he despised for most of their acquaintance, the fact that he came around in the end means nothing. Even had he not, she would have forced them to marry and damn either of their chances at a happy future."

Cao Yinuo hesitates. Picks uncertainly at her nails.

Wei Chaoxiang pushes onward. "Jiang Fengmian's disgraceful neglect of his children is shameful enough, but at least he doesn't have Jin Guangshan's reputation, which Jin Furen seems entirely too passive about exposing Yanli to. What must it have been like for Zixuan, growing up under that shadow? And more to the point -- we are a reflection of the company we keep! What does it say about Jin Furen's character, that she counts a woman like Yu Ziyuan as her closest friend! She may not take a whip to her own son, but she would surely to someone else's, and that's another weight the boy has to shoulder. At sixteen! He's hardly out of his milkteeth!"

"Our own boy is only a few years older," Cao Yunuo says, though her stony defiance is melting.

"Exactly! They're babies, the both of them! And Zixuan looked ready to burst into tears when I told him he'd done well last night."

His perfect, wonderful, brilliant, ever-loving wife sighs with all the exhaustion of an immortal grown weary with the passage of time, and fixes him with a Look. "So, after so many years of avoiding the Sects entirely, we're now going to just show up and adopt all of their children?"

"... Maybe not all of them."

"Husband."

"Well -- oh, but that Nie Mingjue is hardly into his twenties isn't he? And already carrying so much responsibility. And Xichen, of course, if we're to have Wangji then we simply must have his brother, and it's not like he couldn't do with a kinder hand than Lan Qiren seems willing to give. And of course Wanyin and Yanli, if Jiang Fengmian didn't want me to steal his children from him then he shouldn't have kidnapped my nephew, and they're a-Ying's siblings, we can't just abandon them... Hm."

"The Wen boys."

"The Wen boys! Yes, I'm not fond of the Wen boys, and I'm afraid it's too late for an intervention to matter there. Unfortunate, but that's the way these things turn out some times. So it's not all of the children. Just the ones who need us."

Cao Yinuo looks up at the statue of Granduncle like she's hoping he'll come and rescue her from her foolish husband, but she doesn't actually call out to him. She only raises a hand to rest gentle fingers on the red silk thread, dangling from the statue's own outstretched hand. "... I suppose," she says, softly, "That the family may have -- may have been too distant, since Changze died. Clearly things have gotten out of control without us around to keep watch. If they want to -- if they want to, Chaoxiang, you cannot actually steal these children -- if they want to, then it's not like we don't have space at the table."

"Yes!" Says Wei Chaoxiang, and wraps his arms around his perfect, wonderful, brilliant, ever-loving wife to dip her into a kiss to show his gratitude.

#mdzs #the untamed #Wei Wuxian #not present but tagged for visibility #OCs #WWX's uncle and his wife are like Morticia and Gomez #insofar as they are Constant Adding New Family Members #A child cannot Sniffle within ten meters of them without getting adopted #normally Cao Yinuo is fully on board #its only the sect politics that give her pause

[passionate-reply]

This time on Great Albums, I talk about an album that actually isn’t older than I am for a change! Enter the spooky, haunted forest of The Knife with me, and find out why it was Pitchfork’s Album of the Year in 2006! Full transcript after the break.

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! Today, I’ll be tackling an album that’s more recent than anything I’ve done on Great Albums before, but it’s still old enough to start being considered a classic: The Knife’s Silent Shout, released in 2006, and hence seeing its fifteenth birthday in 2021. Silent Shout is a bit special to me, insofar as it was an album I loved as a teenager, back when it was still pretty new, and it was probably the first album I really fell in love with that wasn’t significantly older than I was. I was quite surprised when I eventually learned just how beloved Silent Shout is among music aficionados. This album has been lauded in critical circles, recommended as a “patrician” essential, and even considered one of the greatest electronic albums of all time! So, what’s the fuss about?

Before Silent Shout, The Knife were significantly closer to a conventional electronic pop duo. Their biggest claim to fame was the track “Heartbeats,” which scored some exposure after a cover of it was featured in a TV ad.

Music: “Heartbeats”

I like to think that “Heartbeats” contains the seeds of what’s great about Silent Shout, with its grinding synth backing and vocalist Karin Dreijer’s affecting wail. But its indie-pop brightness is something distinctively absent from their follow-up. Contrary to what might’ve been expected from an up-and-coming pop act, the sibling duo hunkered down in the studio and set about making something stranger and more exotic. On the technical front, they stripped the production down to its bare essentials, using just digital rhythms and two synthesisers to achieve everything we hear on the album. Stylistically, they took their sound into moody, atmospheric territory, imbuing it with this eerie, claustrophobic ambiance. It’s the musical equivalent of Frankenstein emerging from Mary Shelley’s mind, while the dreary “Year Without a Summer” had poisoned the world around her.

Music: “Silent Shout”

The title track here is also the opener, and introduces us to the frightful world of Silent Shout without mercy. This track is dominated by a powerful contrast of sound: low, thrumming bass, and these quick, but delicate and meandering synth arpeggios, carrying a distinctively Scandinavian flair. This bewitching synthesis of musical ideas makes sense in light of the diverse influences of the two siblings who made up The Knife: Instrumentalist Olaf Dreijer was strongly influenced by dance styles like house, trance, and progressive techno, as well as ambient electronic music, whereas vocalist Karin Dreijer was interested in guitar-based popular music, as well as the distinctive folk traditions of their native Sweden. Not unlike the Pet Shop Boys, they’ve got a wide gap between their influences, but that only serves to intensify the uniqueness of their work, which strikes listeners in a way the constituent musical parts of its heritage never could. Perhaps the most significant sonic feature of the album, though, is the extreme electronic distortions of Karin Dreijer’s voice.

Music: “One Hit”

If raw and everymannish vocals make music feel more in line with our everyday reality, the shocking and monstrous ones on *Silent Shout* render it a truly otherworldly work of art. While many people are quick to decry the “fakeness” of electronically mediated vocals--despite the fact that all art is, of course, artificial--I think Silent Shout proves, more boldly than anything else, just how uniquely powerful this musical tool can be in the right hands. Once you get past the sheer sonic force of the vocals, and their peculiar, skin-crawling timbres, you’ll find that most of the lyrical subject matter is actually painfully quotidian. “One Hit,” for instance, is told from the perspective of an all-too-normal “monster”: a domestic abuser, extracting and enforcing femininity and domestic servitude through the force of violence, dealing in “one hit, one kiss.” Sex, gender, and exploitation based upon them are among the album’s most central themes, and expressed harrowingly on tracks like “Na Na Na”:

Music: “Na Na Na”

Perhaps moreso than any other track on the album, “Na Na Na” is rendered borderline incomprehensible by vocal treatment--a trait magnified by its obviously meaningless title and chorus. But “Na Na Na” does have real lyrics, which tell the story of a life mediated by reproductive anatomy, defined by the rhythm of menstruation, coming from within, and the constant fear of sexual violence from without. It’s a tale of hidden anxiety, and experiences that go unseen and unspoken despite how common they are, making the haze of inscrutability laid over them all the more poignant. It’s clear that these issues are of high importance to Karin Dreijer, who has publicly described themself as “genderqueer,” despite both members of the band being remarkably sparing with all personal details. In another of the most striking vocal performances on the album, “We Share Our Mother’s Health,” Dreijer even gets to sing a duet with themself, and embody two distinct characters at once.

Music: “We Share Our Mother’s Health”

“We Share Our Mother’s Health” can be read in the light of gender and sex dynamics, as well, particularly if you’re willing to read its twin narrators as representations of masculinity and femininity. Personally, though, I think that’s a bit too easy, and really, a bit too cisnormative. I think the album is more interesting if we embrace the fundamental uncertainty of identity, and the transgressive queerness of it all. That said, I prefer to think of “We Share Our Mother’s Health” as a piece about capitalism--the endless toiling and scrounging for more material comfort and security, and the emptiness left behind when that proves to be no pathway towards true happiness. Besides, it’s not like sexism and the class struggle don’t feed off of each other in the end. This track’s sense of cacophony, with voices nearly battling to drown each other out, shows its more strident, aggressive, and downright angry side, which it delivers as powerfully as it does those moody atmospheres.

Silent Shout is the perfect title for this album, given its emphasis on voicing internal and private laments that go unheard--and voicing them with this terrifying sense of primal scream catharsis. While I initially wasn’t overly fond of the album art, it’s grown on me a bit now that I’ve seen it blown up to a larger size. This central disc shape is certainly evocative of a record or a CD, and its industrial-looking lattice structure, with a mottled, grimey-looking texture, helps conjure the impression of machine-age ennui.

I think a lot of the enduring appeal of Silent Shout is its sense of mystery. A lot of that mystery is deliberately crafted iconoclasm, and part of the art--while promoting the album, The Knife were photographed wearing sinister, elaborate beaked “plague doctor” masks, and their live performances from this period shrouded the band in darkness to obfuscate their appearances. They’ve refused to accept awards for their music or attend award ceremonies, including one memorable incident in which they sent costumed representatives of feminist organisation Guerrilla Girls in their stead. After Silent Shout, the duo created an opera based on Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 2009, and released one more studio album in 2013: Shaking the Habitual.

Music: “A Tooth For an Eye”

Shaking the Habitual received mixed reviews, and so far, has proven to be the siblings’ final work together, though they remain active as musicians independently, with Karin Dreijer recording under the moniker “Fever Ray.” Part of the great myth of Silent Shout is the fact that nothing else in their discography really quite approaches its specific sound, and sharp precision of conceptual focus. It’s like the album is tailor made to stand perfectly alone, outside of context, perhaps even outside of genre.

For many of us, this great legend of lightning-in-a-bottle genius is infinitely alluring. But I’ve never really bought into it too thoroughly myself. I obviously adore Silent Shout, and I think it’s a Great Album. But, unlike many people who have showered it with praise, often claiming that they don’t enjoy “electronic music” overall, I’ve always been interested in a lot of heavy, angry, creepy synthesiser-based music, and so I never thought too much of listening to this and liking it. People praise Silent Shout for being unlike anything else, but I think it sounds like a lot of post-industrial dark wave, like Attrition or Chris & Cosey, and its themes of feminist rage feel like a strong parallel to that of more recent stars of noise music such as Pharmakon and Lingua Ignota. But that’s not to devalue what Silent Shout does achieve! I think it *is* a unique album...in the way that a bat is a unique animal. Much as bats are not the only creatures who fly, but stand out for having developed that ability despite their mammalian heritage, Silent Shout doesn’t actually take direct inspiration from the earlier music it sounds the most like. It ended up there through the aforementioned eldritch alchemy, combining trance and folk and Kate Bush to get something new. That’s still something worth celebrating! Silent Shout needn’t be a perfect enigma to be a stirring masterpiece of an album.

My overall top track on Silent Shout, which I bet will be a popular choice, is “Forest Families.” It’s equal parts bleak and strangely anthemic, defined by both the unease of adapting to a plainer and harsher existence, outside the bounds of society, as well as the release that music itself provides to so many of us as we seek comfort. Since music is so important to me, I’m a real sucker for music about the importance of music, and it feels particularly well-placed on an album that’s a cathartic listen in so many ways. That about wraps this one up; thank you for watching!

Music: “Forest Families”

#music #great albums #album review #album reviews #the knife #fever ray #silent shout