Popular Culture Review 30.2
deep and important work of art we have been given , and we need to listen .
Listening is an active process . To perceive anything at all is to interpret it . We cannot hear noises or sense data . We can only hear ... meaning . But we bring our collective history to the listening whenever we lend an ear . What follows below� indeed , all of what has come so far�is what I hear . It is true , I think . But only in the sense that truth is open and infinite , waiting for others to listen along and add their voices to the chorus . This is what I hear , song by song on the album�taking it as an immeasurable gift from Kyle and the band to live in a world with such incredible beauty in it .
As we “ WAKE ,” we realize that sleep is like an ocean ; it comes in waves . But the immanent flood of the amniotic fluid of Lethe is also a first watery baptism into a new kind of existence . We are born into a play , our once-memorized lines suddenly forgot . It is a startling experience leaving one world , slowly forgetting it , and being tossed into another already up and running . Mother brings us food ; we soil ourselves ; we feel suddenly alone , not even able to control this body and its functions . Being awake is a forgetting . Being born is a forgetting as well . We forget the land of sleep , our dreams , our dream-self . We forget the realm of the Forms , saying , in a foreign tongue adieu to our memories , even though we are told that we ’ re not losing anything , but are , instead , gaining something by offering them up . But as we wake from apparent nothingness , we think we can remember a song . If there is really nothing , then from where did that song come ? “ Asa Nisi Masa ” is the phrase that begins this life�chanted here and elsewhere on the album . We know the phrase from Federico Fellini ’ s 1963 film 8½ . It is what Guido is thinking
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