Aube Pages From the Book E + J Recordings There's a terrific short story by Jorge Luis Borges called "The Book of Sand" in which the protagonist gets his hands a magical Bible that is infinite; every time he tries to bookmark a page, it disappears and is replaced by a number of others. It's a book that's constantly in flux and can never be pinned down. In the end, the complexities of the book takes over the man's life and he is forced to get rid of it. It's a great parable for our complicated and ever-changing relationship to the Bible, a book subject to endless interpretation and reinterpretation. I think Aube, a Japanese composer who limits himself to one sound source per release, must have been thinking of "The Book of Sand" when he wrote Pages from the Book, in which all sounds are sourced from the Bible. In strictly formal terms, the composition is based on the sounds that paper makes when it is rubbed, crumpled or torn. Aube subjects these various processes to contact mics and then manipulates them to create quiet echoey tapestries that bear a certain resemblance to minimalism. Tears are repeated over and over until they sound like mechanical engines; paper is crumbled and then played back over itself to form glorious crinkled waltzes. Beats are added by the composer beating his hands on the book.The results reflect the materials used--it's a very warm record. It's not uncommon for paper to be used as a source in music, by the way. The Fluxus artist Alison Knowles for many years has used paper in her performances to create a certain type of music as did John Cage, who would determine a composition by the dents and tears on a found piece of paper. Donald Knaack on his recent CD Body Music used paper as percussion and the Dutch composer Paul Panhuysen hooked up contact mics to a bunch of dot matrix printers and recorded the mesmerizing sounds that the machines made while printing. The difference in Pages from the Book is the poetry invoked by Aube's claiming that he used the Bible, instead of plain paper, as his source material. In doing so, he extends the parabolic and transubantiative references in the Bible into sound, giving the project both the weight and depth it would have otherwise lacked. Many of the sounds that one might simply dismiss as "ambient" or "incidental" suddenly acquire meaning when you know their source. Aube's gesture is Duchampian; once you have this essential piece of knowledge, your disbelief is suspended and the world of speculation opens up. It's hard to listen to this disc lightly. The parameters are so ambiguous, and yet at the same time so specific that you could lose yourself in trying to interpret Pages From the Book. Everyone will have a different interpretation according to their relationship to the Bible. I could imagine this disc becoming a cult item among kabbalists and a piece of blasphemy to born-agains--or vice versa. Like Borge's "Book of Sand", it's a disc so infinite in its possibilities that its hard to imagine a piece of music better reflecting the complexities of our relationship to a very complex book. New York Press, 1998 home