Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2008 

MUSIC

Rock After Auschwitz

FORCE OF LIGHT by Dan Kaufman/Barbez Tzadik Records, 2007

Review by Charlie Bertsch

IF YOU LISTENED TO FORCE OF LIGHT without reading anything about it, you might think it a somber update of the sort of psychedelic experiments that proliferated in the late 1960s, with its coupling of spare yet trippy sounds, and spoken-word passages that call to mind the pretense of that era's alternative poetry scene. Or you might think it a blurred-edge take on the sort of music made by acts like Tortoise in the 1990s, a subgenre labeled "post-rock." Or you might just be struggling to figure out a proper response to the record, which manages to be simultaneously airy and grave, pretentious and earnest. None of these possibilities are meant as a criticism, either, for Dan Kaufman and his band-mates in Barbez have crafted an album that has the potential to appeal to a wide range of people on its substantial musical merits.

The thing is, the kind of listening that formulation supposes—hearing something on its own terms, without the frame provided by both professional and amateur commentary—has become as antiquated as powering a train with a steam engine. These days, it's second nature for even casual music fans to turn to the Internet for context whenever they come upon something new. If artists use the accessibility of information to their advantage, they can find an eager audience for even the most difficult, obscure work. And they can count on a good percentage of those listeners to comprehend its complexity.

That's why records like Force of Light seem both more frequent and more popular than ever before. The capacity to discover, in a few seconds at the keyboard, that an album is "a three-year long labor of love" that pays "searing homage to Holocaust survivor and poet Paul Celan," redefines our sense of the music it contains. It puts us in a position, not just to listen, but to listen for, hearing the album with a specific purpose in mind. For the most part, this is a salutary development, particularly when a record is as interesting as Force of Light is. But it also puts added pressure on artists, since they are more likely to be held to their own statements about what they were trying to do and why.

In the case of Force of Light, for example, someone listening carefully for the way in which it provides musical accompaniment for Celan's words might wonder why Kaufman opted to pair them with a style that might be described as "cabaret rock." While that particular aesthetic, most famously implemented by Tom Waits and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, works wonderfully for over-the-top storytelling that channels the dark hedonism of the Weimar Republic, it's an odd fit with the emptiness of Celan's work. Leaving aside the fact that Celan, who was raised in Romania, was both too young and too far from cosmopolitan life to have experienced the fragile decadence of that world directly, there is also the problem that many of his poems play offliterary influences antithetical to the messy Modernism of the Expressionists or their politically engaged successors.

In Celan's German, the words in songs like "Aspen Tree" or "Count the Almonds" resonate because they turn the beauty of the classic poetry of German Romanticism, with its belief in the purity of nature, inside out. From this perspective, the most obvious way to set his work to music would be to expand on what composers like Schonberg undertook with their "New Music," reexamining the Lieder tradition of Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms through the tint-free glasses of the avant-garde. In a rock idiom, this might mean composing spare, dissonant music in the singer-songwriter vein.

Force of Light takes a very different path, one which threatens to conceal the fact that Celan was first and foremost a lyric poet, one who repeatedly demonstrated that Theodor Adorno's oft-cited injunction against writing poetry "after Auschwitz" is best interpreted, not as a ban on the literary form itself, but an insistence that poets always feel the presence of the Holocaust instead of consigning it to the past. But it is for precisely this reason that the record may do a better job of provoking listeners to ruminate on Celan's oeuvre than an overtly "appropriate" treatment would have. In a sense, the fact that Force of Light does not seem to fit his poetry makes it a fitting tribute to the themes of failure and loss that course through it.

Charlie Bertsch (cbertsch@gmail.com) currently teaches American literature, cultural theory and new media at the University of Arizona.

Bertsch, Charlie. 2008. Rock after Auschwitz. Tikkun 23(2):75.