The Nocturnal Review: October 1924

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The current vogue for subconscious recording has reached a point of tedious saturation. One cannot attend a cocktail party in the Village without some debutante claiming she has 'experienced' the latest angst from the Berlin school. It is all very tiresome. Take, for instance, 'The Descent of the Father', the latest Nightmare-Opera by Julian Thorne. It is a dreadfully clumsy piece of work. Thorne treats the subconscious as a stage play, filling the recording with the most pedestrian Freudian tropes: oversized keys, ticking clocks, and a recurring image of a weeping mother. It is less a dream and more a textbook illustration for a freshman psychology course. The transition from the second to the third movement is particularly jarring; the needle nearly jumped due to a clumsy edit in the psychic flux. One expects a certain level of craftsmanship when paying five dollars for a wax disc. In contrast, the 'Aether-Silence' by Madame Valeska is a revelation. It is a Lucid-Symphony of the most daring sort. Valeska has the courage to utilize void-space, providing the listener with three minutes of absolute, shimmering nothingness. It is not the silence of a dead room, but the silence of a mind that has finally stopped talking to itself. It is the only piece this season that manages to be truly exclusive, as the sheer lack of content renders it inaccessible to the unimaginative. I suspect we shall see a flood of these 'empty' discs by Christmas. It happened with the minimalist poetry craze of 1921, and the result was a deluge of blank pages sold as high art. I shall keep my Valeska, if only to remind myself what it feels like to be bored in a sophisticated manner.