【搬运】【译】叉婊Pitchfork评Bon Iver 2016年专辑《22, A Million》
搬运自：网易云音乐专栏【Music Online Zine Courier】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整）
翻译：Beans_Beans
Bon Iver’s first album in five years takes an unexpected turn toward the strange and experimental. But behind the arranged glitches and processed voices are deeply felt songs about uncertainty.
Bon Iver五年来的第一张专辑出人意料地转向了怪奇的实验性风格。但在精心布置的故障元素和数字处理化的声音背后，是有着未知而真挚情感的歌曲。
There’s a line deep in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice wherein Doc, a small-time stoner-sleuth, considers the dissolution of the 1960s, wondering if the decade wasn’t merely “a little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness.” It’s a funny way to think about time—that an entire era can be nudged back into the ether, erased. But on 22, A Million, the extraordinary third full-length from Bon Iver, Justin Vernon echoes Doc’s somber pondering. These are fluttery, skeletal songs that struggle against known trajectories and then threaten to disappear entirely. 22, A Million might be musically distant from For Emma, Forever Ago, the collection of aching folk tunes Vernon debuted in 2007—mostly gone are the acoustic strums, replaced by lurching, electronic gasps born from the Messina, a doctored combination of the Prismizer software plug-in and some hardware that was invented by Vernon and his engineer, Chris Messina. But the albums share an ideology. All things go, taken back into darkness.
在Thomas Pynchon的《性本恶》中，有一句话深入人心：Doc，一个三流侦探，却想着20世纪60年代的消沉，怀疑这十年是否只是“一个小小的光明插曲，毕竟最终也会走向消逝，一切美好都会失去，重返黑暗中去。”这是一种有趣的思考时间的方式——整个时代可以被推入虚无之中、被抹去、失去意义。但在Bon Iver非凡的第三张全长专辑《22, A Million》中，Justin Vernon回应了Doc的阴郁思考。这张专辑中都是些轻飘飘、骨感的歌曲，它们像是会与既有的音轨“抗争”，直至另一方完全消失。《22, A Million》在音乐上可能与Vernon在2007年的首张专辑《For Emma, Forever Ago》（有着痛苦内核的民谣录）相去甚远——原生弦乐难见踪影，取而代之的是由the Messina实现的电子喘息声。（the Messina是Vernon和他的朋友Chris Messina一起发明的Prismizer软件插件和一些硬件的补丁套装。）但即便如此，这些专辑把握着一个共同的意识形态——所有事物都将逝去，被引入黑暗之中。
22, A Million is certainly Bon Iver’s most difficult record; it’s the work of a songwriter who seems to have lost interest in established, easily deciphered forms, a possibility Vernon has been hinting at for nearly all of his career. In 2006, Vernon, then living in North Carolina, was emotionally razed by a perfect storm of shitty turns: his band broke up, his relationship dissolved, he came down with an acute case of mononucleosis. He did what any reasonable person with an eye toward self-care would do: decamp to his family’s hunting cabin in rural Wisconsin, drink a gang of beers, watch endless hours of “Northern Exposure,” and write a batch of lonesome, yearning folk songs on his acoustic guitar. His high, brittle falsetto gave these pieces an otherworldly quality, as if they had blown in on a particularly cold wind.
《22, A Million》无疑是BonIver制作历程最艰难的专辑；这是一个似乎对既定的、玩烂了的形式嗤之以鼻的作者笔下的作品，Vernon在他的职业生涯中几乎一直在追寻这一倾向。2006年，当时住在北卡罗莱纳州的Vernon刚刚结束了一段情感，被狠狠得蹂躏了的他——他的乐队与他分道扬镳、恋情破裂——最终诊断患有急性单核细胞增多症。他在这时选择去做一件任何生活能自理的人都能做到的事——去他父亲在威斯康星州农村的狩猎小屋，喝着啤酒，无休止的看《北国风云》（“Northern Exposure”），用他破旧的二手木吉他写了一些孤寂却又在渴望着的民谣。他高挑而清脆的假声赋予这些作品一种超凡脱俗的质感，仿佛它们像是被一股冷峻的寒风中吹来人世的。
For Emma, Forever Ago was, in its own way, an experimental record—Vernon’s vocals and phrasing are deeply unusual; its stories are impressionistic, fractured—but because it’s so heavy with heartbreak and loss, it feels intimate, authentic, easy. 22, A Million is comparatively strange and exploratory, but its worries are more existential. The album opens with a high, undulating voice (Vernon, singing into an OP-1, a combination synthesizer, sampler, and sequencer) announcing, “It might be over soon,” and goes on to examine the idea of impermanence. Nearly all of its songs contain a question of some sort, as if Vernon’s own reckoning with the inevitability of decay has led him to interrogate every last thing he’s seen or known. Inasmuch as his lyrics are narrative—and they have always been more connotative than exegetic—he seems preoccupied with whether or not a life has meaning. “Oh then, how we gonna cry? Cause it once might not mean something?” he asks on “715 - CRΣΣKS.”
《For Emma, Forever Ago》以其独一无二的方式成为一张实验性专辑，有着Vernon不寻常的唱腔和措辞；它的印象派叙事，断断续续，如此的沉重、令人心碎，又是如此的真切、真实、令人放松。《22, A Million》相对而言更为怪奇，更具探索性，但也会让人心生疑虑。这张专辑以一个高亢、波澜起伏的声音（Vernon通过一个合成器、采样器、音序器三合一套装OP-1发出的）宣布这：“It might be over soon”并持续探索着这些无常的思绪。几乎所有歌曲都隐含着某种症结，就好像Vernon被自己陈腐、难以避免的坏习惯所控制——总是对所有他看到或知晓的事予以审视。只要这首歌的词带有叙事性——它们总是内涵深刻，难以阐明——便总是着重于探讨生命的意义。
Kanye West once called Vernon his “favorite living artist,” and has long professed a deep and unexpected admiration for “Woods,” the closing track from 2009’s Blood Bank EP, and an obvious precursor to “715 - CRΣΣKS,” itself a kind of warped a capella jam. “Woods” featured no instrumentation, but is merely five minutes of Vernon singing through Auto-Tune, in ghostly harmony with himself. In retrospect, “Woods” feels like a revelation: it was not only an unexpected affirmation of pop’s future—artists aggressively distorting their vocals, feeding their voices into machines in order to build spectral, nagging songs that reflect alienation, arguably the reigning sensation of our time—but of Vernon’s own trajectory.
Kanye West曾称Vernon是他“最喜欢的在世艺术家“，并且长期以来反复对外强调自己对“Woods”怀着深刻而意外的钦佩之情。而“Woods”——作为09年发行的EP《Blood Bank》的结束曲和“715 - CRΣΣKS”的前奏——本身具有一种扭曲的纯人声粘稠质感。“Woods”的一大特点便是没有器乐，仅有的是Vernon自己的Auto-Tune为他自己完成5分钟的和声。现在来看，“Woods”像是一个预兆：它已不仅仅是对流行乐未来的意外允诺——艺术家们争相扭曲他们的声音，将他们的声音属于机器，以塑造幽灵般呢喃的乐曲、营造疏离感，它以Vernon作品的身份引领了我们这个时代。
Plenty of beloved contemporary artists, from Dylan to Neil Young on, have ditched the supposed purity of folk music to push the work harder, to make art that’s less reliant on a tradition and invests, instead, in the strangeness of the present moment and collective uncertainty about the future. Trading on preexisting pathways—it’s too easy. Vernon isn’t alone in his hunger for true, tectonic innovation, for songs that seem tethered to and reflective of their actual time and place: Radiohead has been mirroring anxiety about the encroachment of electronics and virtual living since Kid A, a record that also required them to warp if not abandon their beginnings as a guitar-rock band.
许多受人喜爱的当代艺术家，如Dylan或是Neil Young，都在摒弃民谣音乐的所谓纯正性努力钻研这，使艺术不再过多的依赖于“传统”，转而投资在对当下盛行的陌生疏离的人际关系和未来社会集体的未知将来的探索。在预先存在的轨迹上行事——未免太过容易了。Vernon并非孤身一人，他渴望真正的、有建树的创新，渴望那些能触及现实社会、映射真实世界的歌曲。自《Kid A》以来，Radiohead一直在向外界反馈着对电子虚拟生活侵蚀真实世界的焦虑，这张唱片也要求他们即便不放弃作为一个吉他摇滚乐队的初衷，也要有所变革。
Beyond its sonic striving, 22, A Million is also a personal record about how to move forward through disorienting times. Vernon occasionally employs religious language to express his anxiety, some explicit (“consecration,” “confirmation”), some more plainly vernacular (“So as I’m standing at the station,” “I could go forward in the light”). He samples two gospel tunes: Mahalia Jackson’s live version of “How I Got Over,” from 1962, and the Supreme Jubilees’s “Standing in the Need of Prayer,” from 1980. There is a song titled “666 ʇ,” and another titled “33 ‘GOD.’” A bit of marginalia in the album’s liner notes (“Why are you so FAR from saving me?”) is attributed to Psalm 22, though in the King James Bible, that imploration is for help, not salvation (“Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?”). Either way, Psalm 22 opens in medias res: its author is undergoing an urgent crisis of faith. So is Vernon?
除了在声音上的钻研，《22, A Million》也同样作为一张如何在迷失时代中前进的个人传记。Vernon偶尔会通过宗教语言来表达他的忧虑，有些情感相当坦然赤裸（“consecration,”“confirmation”）、有些则是更为质朴的白活（“So as I’m standing at thestation,”“I could go forward in the light”）。他还采样了两首福音歌曲——来自1962年Mahalia Jackson的“How I Got Over”现场版和来自1980年Supreme Jubilees的“Standing in the Need ofPrayer”——分别出现在名为“666 ʇ”和“ 33 “GOD””的曲子中。专辑内页中的一段旁白（“Why are you so FARfrom saving me?”）收录于《Psalm 22》，尽管在《圣经》（KJV）中，这句话是为寻求帮助而非救赎（“Why art thou so farfrom helping me, and from the words of my roaring?”），但不管怎么说，《Psalm 22》开篇仍描述了身处两难处境时的困顿：它的作者正经历着严峻的信仰危机。Vernon难道也是如此？
Maybe. Musically, Vernon resists not just verse-chorus-verse, but all the ways in which Western cultures have come to conceptualize narrative. As kids, we’re taught how stories work, and we use that rubric to organize and make sense of the events of our lives. But the imposition of structure can be violent; perhaps, Vernon suggests, the idea that we are organizing events at all is patently nuts. So when he ventures a line like “We’ve galvanized the squall of it all,” from “8 (circle),” it feels like a mission statement. There is solace in resisting formal structures, in both acknowledging and embracing a certain amount of chaos.
也许在音乐上，Vernon不仅抵制主歌-副歌-主歌的传统歌曲行进形式，更是抵制西方文化中所有概念化叙事方式。当我们还是孩子是，便被知道故事应被如何续写，同时我们也用这个标准来组织梳理、理解我们生活中的事件。但这一系统的授予可能是暴力的强加；也许在Vernon看来我们梳理事件，规划时间的念头愚蠢至极。因而，但他在“8 (circle)”中冒出一句”We’ve galvanized the squall of it all“时，像是在作任务汇报一般。想必在抵制所谓正统歌曲结构时，在承纳和拥抱某种程度的混乱是，他得到了慰藉。
It’s the same story on “00000 Million,” the album’s haunting closing track, where Vernon samples a wobbly line borrowed from the Irish folksinger Fionn Regan: “The days have no numbers.” Pitted against the record’s obsessive numerology—each song has a number in its title—it lands like an admission of defeat. There’s resignation in his voice, which gives way to desolation. The song’s lyrics will be familiar to anyone wondering if they’ll ever actually start to feel better, while still continuing to do something they know is hurting them: “If it’s harmed, it harmed me, it’ll harm me, I let it in.”
专辑的尾声“00000 Million”也是如此，Vernon从爱尔兰民谣歌手Fionn Regan那里引用了一句飘渺的词句——“The days have no numbers.”与这张专辑令人痴迷的数字学元素相比——每首歌的标题中都有一个神秘数字——这首歌像是对失败的妥协。它的歌词正是那些渴望知晓他们的未来是否有所好转，却仍在延续着会毁掉他们未来的事的人的心声——“If it’s harmed, it harmed me, it’ll harm me, I let it in.”
For a while now, Vernon has been building songs in a modular way, and there are moments here (like the meandering last minute of “21 M♢♢N WATER”) where it feels as if he could’ve jiggled the pieces together a little more—where his disavowal of connective tissue feels less deliberate than random. This is evident, in part, because he is exceptionally good at writing melancholic laments in the highly structured style of ’80s soft-rock giants like Bonnie Raitt and Bruce Hornsby (Vernon has covered Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” and Vernon and Hornsby have collaborated on several occasions; “00000 Million” feels like it could have been recorded by either).
这一段时间以来，Vernon一直在以模块化的方式构筑歌曲，其中有一些时刻（例如“21 M♢♢N WATER” 蜿蜒曲折的最后一分钟），感觉他甚至可以将这些碎片再联结起来——他对这些结缔组织的否认并非刻意，而更像是随心所欲的结果。这一点尤为明显，部分原因是他特别擅长用Bonnie Raitt和Bruce Hornsby等80年代软式摇滚巨头的高度结构化风格来叙写他忧郁哀歌（Vernon曾翻唱过Raitt的“I Can’t Make You Love Me”，同时也曾与Hornsby多次合作；“00000 Million”感觉很可能就是由这两位协助录制的）。
“8 (circle)” is the most immediately reminiscent of Vernon’s last record, Bon Iver, Bon Iver, itself now recognizable as a clear midpoint between Emma and here; it’s also the album’s most conventionally composed track, with the smallest amount of vocal manipulation. Elsewhere, Vernon’s vocals are filtered until they begin to actually dissolve, as if they have been dunked in a tub of lye. The song’s stunning emotional peaks—I come to a full stop every time I hear Vernon sing, “I’m standing in the street now, and I carry his guitar,” his voice steady and deep, as if he’s announcing himself to someone he loves—are so plainly beautiful it’s hard not to mourn, briefly, for the Bon Iver of yesteryear.
“8 (circle)”是这张唱片中最能让人联想到Vernon上张专辑《Bon Iver, Bon Iver》的歌曲，它本身甚至可以视作为《For Emma》与《22》二者的中点；它也是专辑中结构最为传统、人声处理程度最低的曲目。在专辑其他部分，Vernon的人声经过层层滤透，直至它们最终“溶解”在一片苦碱汪洋之中。而这首歌令人惊叹的情绪高峰——Vernon用他沉稳的声音唱道：“I’m standing in the streetnow, and I carry his guitar”，仿佛再向他所爱之人宣布他的新身份——有着如此质朴的美丽，很难不让人为昔日的美好冬季（Bon Iver）感伤。
But 22, A Million sounds only like itself. There are precedents for all of Vernon’s moves deep in the histories of rock‘n’roll and rhythm and blues and electronic music—and, more immediately, on newer records by West, Frank Ocean, James Blake, Chance the Rapper, Francis and the Lights, and Radiohead. But this particular amalgamation is so twitchy and idiosyncratic it feels truly singular. Its searching is bottomless.
但《22, A Million》仍是独一无二的存在，它只像它自己。Vernon的一举一动在摇滚乐、R&B和电子乐领域中都有先例，却已然被可以在West、Frank Ocean、James Blake、Chance the Rapper、Francis and the Lights和Radiohead的新唱片中窥见他的身影。这一特殊的混合体是如此的紧致特异，让人感觉有如身处异境。我们对它的探索永无止境。
