9781441152732.pdf by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

MURMUR

The lower hemisphere of the album cover makes sense

as an electron microscope photo, and not much else—a

crawling, hyper-real jumble of polarized fibers. It could

be a photograph, or its negative. The intricate contrast

of dark and light is like a Surrealist’s rayograph of steel

wool, a conspiracy between everyday things in a dark-

room. When the lights are turned on, what’s left is an

optical illusion of scale, a frozen surface like “a mass of

brown strings / like the wires of a gigantic switchboard”

(from James Dickey’s “Kudzu”), the opposite of the or-

dered circuitry on the cover of A Flock of Seagulls’ Listen.

The roiling quilt of kudzu begins to unravel about

two-thirds of the way up, giving way to a darkish blur

that only then starts to imply the depth of a natural space,

micro giving way to macro. It’s a snapshot through a

time-lapse kaleidoscope where some facets click by in

milliseconds and others in millennia. Nearby is a dark

ruin of plant mass that looks like judgment from the

shadow of an imploding cathedral. Without reference to

the solid Georgia soil beneath, it could either be the

remnants of a whole farmhouse or just the overgrown

gravestones of its former tenants.

Beyond the ruins, the fibrillar dance of the foreground

slows, stratifying into weird sepia tendrils that stretch

beyond the top margin. Burnished out like the ghost

subjects of a Gerhard Richter painting, the tendrils dema-

terialize into the colorless sky beyond it, or maybe emerge

from it. The words R.E.M. and Murmur are superimposed in the top left corner in lettering that’s the sublime blue-gray of a summer evening’s dying light.

It’s an utterly static image, with a gnawing subtext of

movement and drama. Are the fibers eating the forest,

• 63 •

J. NIIMI

or merely providing cover for an unnamed darkness that’s

about to engulf the entire tableau? Where is nature in

all of this, and what is the observer’s relationship to it?

We clearly see a haunted forest, except it’s still alive.

Maybe you’re the one haunting it.

In the South, kudzu haunts everything. Initially brought

to the US from Japan in May of 1876 for the Philadelphia

Centennial Exposition, Pueraria lobata (or kuzu to the Japanese) enchanted the fairground’s visitors with its fra-grant purple flowers and ivy-like deciduous leaves. The

vine had already occupied the imagination of the Japanese

for centuries; kudzu figures prominently in the epic eighth

century Manyoshu poems as a symbol of autumn. But

beyond its aesthetic beauty and Oriental exoticness, P.

lobata displayed another unusual quality that was particularly intriguing to its new American audience: the plant’s

astonishing growth rate, which wasn’t so much an inert

quality as it was a full-on botanical sideshow. You can

experience the plant’s perfumed charms as the morning

sun evaporates the dew from its violet flowers, then split

to grab some lunch and a nap, and by the time you get

back a few hours later, the vines have become longer,

visibly longer. At the height of the summer season, a

kudzu vine can grow up to a foot and a half a day. One

could build a porch trellis in the spring, plant some kudzu

under it, and by the end of the summer enjoy the shade

of a fifty- to one-hundred-foot growth of vine around

the front of the house.

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