Song of the Day #692 – Ruins of Krüger
Imagine a desk. A desk full of promo CDs, thin glass cases and paper sleeves lined in tiny towers like a mini metropolitan sprawl.
Are you sitting at this desk? Good. Stand up. Now, with one arm (two if you’re a wimp), sweep off everything.
What is this clatter, reeling far away from the center? How can such music veer so wildly off path, yet steer so clearly to its mark?
C’mon, words. Don’t fail me now. This is quite the strange country we’re stranded in – green skies, gravelly ink-traced hills, a road of pink and red checkerboards, alternating to violent purples and muddy maroons. C’mon and help me out of this land.
We’re now in the Ruins of Krüger, a vast labyrinth of cobalt blue debris. Many of the halls remain intact – you can hear the mistress of this once fair abode echo fiercely as you wander. Fine columns of spiraling guitar chords support what’s left of the ceiling. Some remain upright, others fall and rise at their own whim. Still others fracture before your eyes – watch out!
Some reliefs remain on the walls – and remarkably, you can make out a few faded words. Fly Ashtray? Perhaps. Deerhoof? Maybe. Can? Come now, that’s a bit smudged. The Shaggs? Well, that’s smudged (a red crayon smudge, that is) too, but somehow the blur of the letters confirms your hunch. Meanwhile, from under your feet a steady pulse pounds…
…I used to write stuff like that all the time, y’know. During classes, after all the busy work had been hashed out, I’d pull out my notebook and scrawl away. Sometimes short stories, sometimes page-long comic strips populated with half-circle mice and stick figures. Always on adventures. But I loved the 2nd-person format in fiction – interactive fictions especially, which are written exclusively from “your” perspective. The best stories – I thought – were the ones that whisked you off to worlds full of nooks and crannies, like the huge houses my mum would clean for other people, but bigger and with juicier secrets.
The Ruins of Krüger remind me – well, not of any particular world really, but of that curiosity to seek such worlds. The restlessness, the peering through cabinets and pulling out drawers. And, upon finding an arcane new object, the wondering: “So what can I do with this?” Shake it, touch it, snap it in two? Or drop it down the dumbwaiter shaft and see if it’ll crack?”
Here. This is 30+ minutes long, angular as a woodcut cathedral, and ACE ACE ACE.
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