【搬运译】Pitchfork评Thom Yorke 2019年专辑ANIMA

搬运自：微信公众号【评论搬一堆】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整）

翻译：Lynn Liu

校对：Emma.Zhang

排版：Peter D

Earlier this month, a strange advertisement for ANIMA Technologies appeared inside London’s Tube. The company purported to have built something called a “Dream Camera,” a device capable of capturing the world of the unconscious: “Just call or text the number and we’ll get your dreams back,” the copy promised. But curious callers were treated to a cryptic voice message, a jumble of stilted legalese read in a thin, unctuous voice, that apparently rendered the Dream Camera’s promise moot: something about a cease and desist from the High Court, an admission of “serious and flagrant unlawful activities.”

本月早些时候，伦敦地铁内出现了一则奇怪的ANIMA Technologies广告。该公司声称已经制造出了一个叫做“梦想相机（Dream Camera）”的设备，它能够捕捉到无意识的世界，广告承诺道：“只要拨打或是发短信给这个号码，我们就会把你的梦想带回给你”。但好奇的来电者却听到了一条含糊不清的语音消息。它由一串生硬的法律措辞混杂在一起，听起来声音微弱、油腔滑调，这显然让Dream Camera的承诺变得毫无意义:高等法院(High Court)宣布不再受理此事，承认这是一个“严重且明目张胆的非法活动”。

There were only ever two things this ad could be: Some exhausting promo for the worst “Black Mirror” episode yet or an oblique tease of Thom Yorke’s third solo album, ANIMA. Dreams and a healthy distrust of a techno-dystopia have long been pillars of Radiohead and Yorke’s songwriting. The wires of the brain and the wires of the world are forever being crossed: Fake plastic trees, paranoid androids, mobiles chirping, low-flying panic attacks. So of course the man who has sung about the narcotized rhythms of urban life would want to snap commuters out of their reveries with a once-in-a-lifetime promise. Dreams, nightmares, and sleepwalking haunt the songs of ANIMA, Yorke’s most ambitious and assured solo album yet. It is the darkest and tenderest music he has released outside of Radiohead, floating uneasily through the space between societal turmoil and internal monologue.

这则广告只有两种可能:要么是为迄今最糟糕的一集 “黑镜”做的一些无力宣传，要么就是对Thom Yorke的第三张个人专辑《ANIMA》一种拐弯抹角的调侃。长期以来，梦想以及对科技反乌托邦的不信任一直是Radiohead和Yorke歌曲创作的灵感来源。大脑和世界的线条永远交织在一起：塑料假树、偏执的机器人、嗡嗡作响的手机、低空飞行恐慌症。这位歌手已经唱过关于城市生活麻木节奏的歌曲，因此，他自然想要用一个一生只有一次的承诺，把通勤者从幻想中唤醒。ANIMA这张专辑的歌曲中萦绕着梦想、噩梦和梦游，这是Yorke迄今为止最有野心、也是最自信的一张个人专辑。这是他在Radiohead之外发布的最黑暗、最温柔的音乐，不安地在社会动荡和内心独白之间的夹缝中漂浮着。

ANIMA is the product of what Yorke has described as an extended period of anxiety, and it sounds like it, full of wraithlike frequencies and fibrillating pulses. That’s not a huge surprise: Yorke’s solo material has always sounded anxious, sometimes to its detriment. Where The Eraser, his solo debut, largely succeeded in channeling the decade’s post-millennium tension into compellingly moody electronic abstractions, 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes too often felt claustrophobic, morose, enervated. In contrast, ANIMA’s tone throughout is meaty, full-blooded, often a little menacing. Yorke’s melancholy has grown teeth.

Yorke说《ANIMA》是长时间焦虑的产物，这张专辑听起来像是里面满是幽灵般的频率和颤动的脉冲。这并不令人感到很意外:Yorke的歌曲总是听起来焦虑不安，有时甚至听起来没那么抓耳。他的个人首张专辑《The Eraser》在很大程度上成功地将这十年的后千禧年紧张情绪转化到令人难以抗拒的情绪化电子抽象作品之中，而2014年的《Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes》却常常让人感到幽闭、孤僻和无力。相比之下，《ANIMA》的音调自始至终都给人一种充实、饱含活力，且带有些许威胁性的感觉。Yorke的忧郁在不断地生根发芽。

Yorke has long been a fan of left-of-center dance music; remixes commissioned for The Eraser and The King of Limbs constituted a who’s who of the European club vanguard. But this is the first of his own productions where it feels like he and longtime production partner Nigel Godrich really get it, where their beatmaking strides beyond contemporary fashion. The influence of James Holden and his Border Community label, an avant-techno touchstone, is all over ANIMA’s burly bass synths and jabbing pulses. Syncopated, spring-loaded grooves are reminiscent of Four Tet and Floating Points; the blippy “Not the News” channels Zomby and Actress. Yet for all the music’s heavy electronic bent, it isn’t obviously mapped to a rhythmic grid: It slips and slides all over the place, wheezy synths surging in waves, feeling restless and hungry. Yorke treats climaxes with a boxer’s strategy—feinting, falling back, changing the angle of his attack.

Yorke一直以来都是非主流舞曲的粉丝;他为《The Eraser》和《The King of Limbs》重新混音，组成了欧洲俱乐部先锋的名人录。但这是他自己制作的第一张专辑，与他长期合作的伙伴Nigel Godrich能真正get到他的点，所以他们合作的歌曲超越了当代时尚。James Holden和他Border Community的标签(一个avant-techno风格的试金石)的影响，遍布《ANIMA》的重低音合成器和跳动的节奏之中。切分、弹性的节奏让人想起了Four Tet和Floating Points;活泼的“Not the News”则模仿了Zomby和Actress。然而，尽管所有的音乐都带有强烈的电子曲风，但它并没有明显地映射到一个节奏网中:它到处滑动、移动，喘息的合成器在波浪中涌动，让人感到不安和渴望。Yorke用拳击手的策略来处理曲子的高潮——佯攻、后退、改变进攻角度。

Critics have sometimes complained—understandably, if not always correctly—that Yorke’s solo work has felt incomplete. As frontman and linchpin of one of the world’s most dynamic rock bands, Yorke has had to work doubly hard to convince listeners that his late nights in front of a laptop are equally worthy of their attention. But ANIMA proves how much he and Godrich are capable of on their own. His bandmates’ influence colored The Eraser; on the more unmoored Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, their absence loomed large. But here he and Godrich have perfected a sound of their own, one that doesn’t take Radiohead’s achievements as its primary unit of measurement.

评论家们有时会抱怨Yorke的个人作品感觉不完整。尽管这些评论并非总是正确，但还是可以理解的。Yorke作为世界上最有活力的摇滚乐队之一的主唱和灵魂人物，他不得不加倍努力让听众相信，他在笔记本电脑前熬夜所创作出来的音乐同样值得他们关注。但《ANIMA》证明了他和Godrich仅凭一己之力就能做出这样的音乐。他乐队成员的影响改变了《The Eraser》，也改变了《Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes》，乐队成员的缺席显得尤为突出。但在这里，他和Godrich完善了他们自己的声音——一个不把Radiohead的成就作为主要衡量单位的声音。

Track after track, Yorke proves the importance of stripping back. It’s remarkable how much he can make out of so little: The best songs here get by on the strength of just one or two synthesizer patches, a handful of electronic drum sounds—mostly just scraped white noise, plus the occasional booming kick drum—and his voice, processed and layered as often as is needed. “Impossible Knots” rides a propulsive electric bassline that lands somewhere between Afrobeat and Fugazi; the closing “Runwayaway” makes trance-like use of Tuareg-inspired desert blues guitar. There’s not much else. Every element practically dares you to so much as ask for any further accompaniment.

一曲接一曲，约克证明了精简的重要性。他能用如此少的元素就创作出这样的歌曲实在是太不可思议了:这里最好的歌曲的只依靠是一或两个合成器补丁来延续，曲子里包含了少量的电子鼓声——绝大部分都是刮白噪声，以及偶尔的出现的底鼓，而Yorke的声音通常需要进行分层和处理。单音bass贯穿“Impossible Knots”，最终止于非洲打击乐和Fugazi之间；最后迷幻电子风格的Runwayaway”使用了受图阿雷格启发的沙漠蓝调吉他。这张专辑没什么别的了，几乎每一种元素都让你敢于要求更丰富的伴奏。

There are a few outright topical songs—“The Axe” (“Goddamned machinery, why don’t you speak to me?/One day I am gonna take an axe to you”) will resonate with anyone who suspects technological progress is moving in the wrong direction—but for the most part, Yorke’s lyrics remain imagistic, non-specific, as intractable as eye floaters. Fragmentary lines play out like pages ripped from a journal on the nightstand. Sometimes he seems to be muttering to himself; elsewhere his voice is chopped into a jumble of words dangled teasingly near the outer limits of meaning. “Twist” ends with an incantation that might be straight from a horror film: “A boy on a bike who is running away/An empty car in the woods, the motor left running.” We’re whipped back into the hypnopompic logic of Yorke’s tangled thoughts, the fogged film of ANIMA’s Dream Camera.

有几首直接的热门歌曲——“The Axe” (“这该死的机器，你为什么不和我说话?总有一天我要用斧头把你劈了（Goddamned machinery, why don’t you speak to me?/One day I am gonna take an axe to you）”)能与任何怀疑科技进步正在误入歧途的人产生共鸣——但在大多数情况下，Yorke的歌词仍然带有意象主义色彩和不确定性，就像飞蚊症一样难以处理。零碎的台词就像从床头柜上撕下来的几页日记。有时他似乎在自言自语;在其他地方，他的声音被切成一堆杂乱的词语，在意义的边缘摇摆着，令人发笑。“Twist”以一句咒语结尾，这句咒语可能出自恐怖电影:“一个骑自行车的男孩跑开了/树林里有一辆空汽车，发动机还没熄火。（A boy on a bike who is running away/An empty car in the woods, the motor left running.）”我们又回到Yorke混乱思绪的半意识状态的逻辑，回到了《ANIMA》梦幻相机的模糊胶片。

A short film by Paul Thomas Anderson for Netflix accompanies the album, sequencing “Not the News,” “Traffic,” and “Dawn Chorus” into a single audiovisual suite. Its opening shots—a subway car full of commuters in drab colors, their exaggerated movements a herky-jerky pantomime of restless slumber—explicitly link back to those ANIMA Technologies subway ads, playfully smudging the edges of the album’s world and our own. Exquisitely choreographed by Damien Jalet, the film takes the form of a dream sequence, following Yorke as he follows a woman (played by his partner, Dajana Roncione) along a labyrinthine subterranean course.

Paul Thomas Anderson为Netflix制作了一部来配合这张专辑的短片，将“Not the News”、“Traffic”以及“Dawn Chorus”安排在一个单独的视频中。它的开场镜头——一截地铁车厢里坐满了肤色单调的通勤者，他们夸张的动作就像一出反复无常、没睡好的哑剧——明确地与ANIMA Technologies的地铁广告联系在一起，开玩笑地模糊了专辑中的世界与现实世界的边缘。这部电影由Damien Jalet精心编排，采用了梦境的形式，Yorke跟随一名女子(由他的搭档Dajana Roncione饰演)沿着迷宫般的地下路线行进。

Both the album and the film hinge upon “Dawn Chorus,” one of the simplest, most beautiful songs in Yorke’s catalog. It is a reverential song about loss, nostalgia, and regret; a farewell to the departed and a celebration of second chances. Over patient synthesizer harmonies, Yorke mulls over ghosts of a past life, shadows of what might have been: “If you could do it all again,” he muses, each line trailing off into non sequitur, each stanza a stack of stray puzzle pieces. At the song’s apex, the synthesizers pause and crescendo softly, modulating as Yorke sings, his voice hushed:

这张专辑和电影都依赖于“Dawn Chorus”，这是Yorke这张专辑中最简单、最美丽的歌曲之一。这是一首关于失去、怀旧和遗憾的虔诚歌曲——告别逝者，庆祝第二次机会。在耐心的合成器和声中，Yorke思考着过去生活的幽灵，思考着本可能出现的阴影:“如果你想再来一次，”他沉思着，每一行歌词都变成了不合逻辑的结尾，每一节都是一堆散乱的拼图。在歌曲的高潮，随着Yorke的演唱，合成器轻柔地暂停和渐强，他的声音变得低沉：

In the middle of the vortex
The wind picked up
Shook up the soot
From the chimney pot
Into spiral patterns
Of you my love

If there’s a more perfect image of absence than these ashes dancing in midair, I don’t know it. Anderson’s film ends with Yorke awakening on the train, his face bathed in the light of daybreak as “Dawn Chorus” winds down. A moment before, he and Roncione have been locked in an intimate embrace, but as he opens his eyes, it is clear that he is alone. The song’s title has been a part of Radiohead lore for years now; only they know what other forms it might have taken, other meanings it might have accrued. But here, on a song starkly unadorned, Yorke expands his already vast catalog with a perfect, unforgettable song, an elegy for the dreams that cannot be retrieved.

如果有比这些灰烬在半空中飞舞更完美的残缺画面，那我并未见过。Anderson的短片以Yorke在火车上醒来结束。伴随着“Dawn Chorus”的缓缓收尾，他的脸沐浴在黎明的阳光之下。就在刚才，他还和Roncione紧紧拥抱在一起，但当他睁开眼睛时，很明显他独自一人。多年来，这首歌的名字一直是Radiohead传说的一部分;只有他们自己知道这首歌可能采取的其他形式，或是它可能产生的其他含义。但在这首毫不修饰的歌曲中，Yorke用一首完美、难忘的歌曲扩充了他本已庞大的歌曲目录，这也是一首为无法挽回的梦想而作的挽歌。