【搬运】【译】Pitchfork评FKA twigs 2019年专辑《Magdalene》

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：Jayleen Zhao

校对：Ryan-Chopin

排版：Ryan-Chopin

With limitlessly innovative songwriting and production, the cinema of twigs’ music has never been more affecting. MAGDALENE is not just on the vanguard of pop, it’s in a breathtaking class of its own. 

凭借无限创新的歌曲作词和制作，FKA twigs的视觉型音乐情感丰富而感人至深。《MAGDALENE》不仅是流行音乐的先锋，她也自我突破进入了一个新的台阶。

From her first video, 2012’s mesmerizing “Hide,” the singular focus of her vision was apparent, a holistic project that rendered FKA twigs’ operatic approach to club beats inextricable from her astounding art direction. In the seven years since, she has made her art into a kind of theatrical multimedia experience, crafting elaborate shows and videos that intertwine and smudge the lines of classicism and the avant-garde. She is astonishing, ambitious, and seemingly good at everything, singing over her own ticker-tape beats, self-directing wildly conceptual videos, and ravenously hoovering up dance disciplines (apparently up to and including Chinese sword fighting) until she masters them.

从她2012年的第一个视频“Hide”中可以看出，她视角的独特性是显而易见的，这一整体展现，使得FKA twigs的歌剧表达与前卫电子乐相结合，这些完美呈现也要归功于她令人惊叹的艺术指导力。从那以后的七年里，她把自己的艺术变成了一种戏剧化的多媒体体验，精心制作的表演和视频交织在一起，模糊了古典主义和前卫主义的界限。她令人惊讶，看起来雄心勃勃，似乎什么事都做的很好，twigs唱着自己的节奏，自导疯狂的概念化视频，疯狂地吸收舞蹈学科(显然也包括中国剑术)，直到自己掌握它们。

Yet in spite of twigs’ distinctive soprano (spectral and often papery) and her experimental production (stunning and often bellicose), her music has resonated best as a part of a whole, a piece that propels her full-blown artistry but does not totally comprise it. Chalk this up to twigs’ innovation in the Eyeballs Epoch, but even 2015’s incredible M3LL155X EP—a brooding and serrated read on genres like industrial, ballroom house, and triple-time rap—centered adventurousness over melody. It let the fullness of her art bring the beats along with it—weird bangers meant to challenge patrons of the most interesting nightclubs—but was probably best experienced while watching French artist and polymath Michèle Lamy rendered as a deep-sea anglerfish. The gesamtkunstwerk of twigs sometimes overshadowed the music itself, in part because so much of twigs’ presence is her world-class athleticism as a dancer. She imbues voguing and lyrical ballet with such grace and sensuality that the emotion of her music emanates directly from her body.

然而，尽管twigs有独特的女高音(声音幽灵般的，通常听起来薄而干)和她的实验性作品(作品令人震惊，通常是有攻击性的)，这些作为她音乐整体的一部分在她的作品中得到了最好的共鸣，这是一个使她完全将自己的艺术技巧提高并充分展现的创作，但其艺术高度也不止于此。这要归因于twigs在视觉时代的创新，2015年她发行了一张令人难以置信的EP《M3LL155X》——一部幽怨的，锯齿般的作品，融合了工业音乐，地下舞会音乐，和 triple-time节奏饶舌，也包含了对旋律的冒险精神。这让她丰富的艺术作品，表达出与之适应的节拍——怪异的砰砰声旨在挑战那些最有意思的夜总会的老主顾们的耳蜗了——但在观看法国艺术家和博学多才的Michèle Lamy 装扮成深海鱼时，配上她的音乐才是最佳体验。有时候，twigs的整体艺术使音乐本身变的黯淡，部分原因在于她作为一名舞蹈家有着世界级的肢体律动。她给折手舞和抒情芭蕾注入了优雅和感性，并将她的音乐情感直接用肢体释放。

MAGDALENE, then, is a fucking revelation. FKA twigs’ first album in four years, and her best work by far, is as introspective as anything she’s written, but more obviously centers her voice as a conduit for plain emotion. Written during a publicly scrutinized relationship with a famously reluctant vampire, as well as a more private recovery from the removal of fibroids from her uterus, she has said she found solace and inspiration in the story of Mary Magdalene, among the New Testament’s most reviled and misunderstood character, whose complexities were rewritten by centuries of chauvinist churchmen into a fallen-woman side note in Jesus’ story. By locating herself in Magdalene’s lineage, twigs, a Catholic school alumnus, explores the ways deeply conservative expectations trammel women; in doing so, she locates a version of herself within these ancient and oppressive archetypes, upending and transcending them through the power of her songwriting and the sheer magnetic pull of her presence.

《MAGDALENE》极具启示性。这是FKA twigs四年来的第一张专辑，也是她迄今为止最好的作品，和她写的其他作品一样发人深省，但这张专辑更明显地将她的声音作为表达情感的渠道。这张专辑写于她与著名男友Robert Pattinson——扮演了《暮光之城》的吸血鬼之一——在公众注视之下的恋情中,以及写于一个更私人的过程中——她做手术切除了子宫肌瘤,她说她在Mary Magdalene的故事中获得慰藉和灵感,Mary Magdalene是《新约》中被诟病最多和误解最深的人物,其复杂的故事，被几个世纪的沙文主义教会人士重写成耶稣故事中的堕落女人边注。身为天主教学校一员的twigs，通过将自己定位在Magdalene的世系中，探索了极度保守的期望和对女性的束缚;在这样的创作过程中，她从这些古老而压抑的原型里找到了自己的一个版本，并通过她歌曲创作的力量和她纯粹的吸引力，颠覆且超越了这些原型。

“thousand eyes” opens MAGDALENE with twigs singing in the austere polyphony of Medieval church music, a meditation on the moment before a permanent departure (“If I walk out the door it starts our last goodbye”) that, with repetition, reveals itself as a hymn. It’s a prologue for an album whose songs are produced like narratives, with a beginning, climax, and denouement. She grapples with survival—psychic and physical survival—the way a woman who lives to move might respond to being laid out by tumors on an organ that facilitates birth. She is furious in parts, attacking tracks like the sweet “home with you” and snarling standout “fallen alien” with virility and self-preservation. Even if shit went south, she refuses to saddle herself with the burden: “I’m a fallen alien, I never thought that you would be the one to tie me down,” she seethes. “But you did in this age of Satan/I’m searching for a light to take me home and guide me out.”

歌曲 “thousand eyes”开启了这张专辑，twigs用中世纪教堂音乐中朴素的复调歌唱着,这是对永久分离(“If I walk out the door it starts our last goodbye”，“若我走出门，我们的最后一次告别就这样开始了”) 那一刻的沉思，这句歌词的不断反复让这首歌像一首赞美诗。这是这张专辑的序幕，专辑的歌曲像在叙事，有开始，高潮和结局。她努力地生存(心理和生理上的生存)，即活下来的妇女可能会因子宫肌瘤而成为摆设。她有时候会生气，比如专辑第二首歌曲，甜美的 “home with you” ，和充满强劲气概及自我保护，并以咆哮的方式表达的 “fallen alien”。不论如何，她也拒绝给自己负担:“I’m a fallen alien, I never thought that you would be the one to tie me down,” ，“我是坠入大气的外星人，从未想过你会是那个将我牢牢束缚与地球之上的人，但你让我无法再离开，”她强压怒火。“But you did in this age of Satan/I’m searching for a light to take me home and guide me out/但你让我无法再离开，在撒旦的纪元里/我寻找着一束光，能够引领我回家，助我出逃。”

MAGDALENE is visceral and direct, but despite featuring a trunk-thumping Future collaboration (“holy terrain”), this is not a play to make pop music in the charts-humping sense. It’s a document of twigs’ marked achievements in songwriting and musicality as she elucidates her melodies without sacrificing her viewpoint. “sad day,” one of MAGDALENE’s most astonishing tracks, finds twigs properly genuflecting at the altar of Kate Bush, clearly having learned from her ability to translate inner sanctum into cinematic, Shelleyan alt-pop. The production by twigs, Nicolas Jaar, Skrillex, and benny blanco is utterly sublime: Skittering toms build onto an oscillating space-synth, the beats a proscenium for twigs’ voice and, especially, her lover’s desperation. Even if “sad day” doesn’t tell an explicit narrative in its lyrics, its production and twigs’ delivery tell an emotional one, that of the last desperate grasps at love in a power imbalance; we’re at the center where the story turns, teetering towards its inevitable end.

That the album stands alone is not to say the totality of her vision is truncated; twigs has already released three videos to accompany its nine songs. The first, “cellophane,” set the tone for the project, showcasing her pole-dancing skills to a dissonantly sorrowful ballad. (That she apparently finds it funny is a testament to her character—serious artists who can’t laugh at themselves are the worst.) The armchair interpretation of “cellophane” is as a meditation on the virulent racism that disgusting British tabloids and the worst of Twilight stans lobbed at twigs during her relationship with Robert Pattinson, but it’s equally a mournful reflection on the insecurities that dog any inequitable relationship. The imagery twigs has associated with “cellophane”—pole dancing, a feat of physical strength set perpendicular to the emotional strength she sings about lacking—calls up the idea of performing for others’ pleasure. It’s a sad solo dance by someone both fully present in herself and aware that she's toeing the line between agency and subjugation. As the final track on this deeply thought, deeply felt album, “cellophane” acts as a rejoinder to “thousand eyes”—how sickening it must be, a woman artist constantly watched by bigoted tabloids interested in tearing you down from the man you love, how they did Mary M. and Jesus—and underscores the sorrow woven through MAGDALENE. The fact that sorrow spurred a musical growth this formidable, though, is evidence enough that twigs will always find her way back home.

《MAGDALENE》是本能的呼唤和最直接的表达，但除了与说唱歌手Future合作的“holy terrain"，这首偏向流行的歌曲似乎与专辑的进程感有些不符。但其实，这是twigs在歌曲创作和提高音乐性方面，既不牺牲自己观点又能兼顾旋律性的证明。《MAGDALENE》最令人惊讶的曲目之一要属“sad day”，twigs在著名英国女歌手Kate Bush的圣坛前屈膝，显然，她已经学会了将自己内心的圣所转化成电影一般的、雪莱浪漫主义风格的另类流行。这张结合了twigs, Nicolas Jaar, Skrillex, 和Benny Blanco等多位优秀音乐制作人的专辑无疑是值得被赞叹:飞舞的音色建立在振荡的空间合成器上，节奏完美结合了twigs的声音，尤其表达了爱人的绝望感。即使“sad day”的歌词并没有表达出明确的叙述，但其制作和twigs的演唱却传达出一种情感，即最后的绝望是发生在力量失衡中抓住了爱情的时候。我们处于故事转折点的中心，步履蹒跚地走向了必然的结局。

我们说这张专辑是孤立的，并不是指她的眼光不够长远。twigs已经发布了三段视频，以配合专辑中的九首歌曲。首先，"cellophane”， 为专辑定下基调，用一首极度悲伤的抒情曲展现了她的钢管舞技巧。(她显然觉得这很有趣，这也是她性格的表现——不能自嘲的严肃的艺术家是最糟糕的。）"cellophane”中看似脱离实际的表演，其实是对英国小报和《暮光之城》的糟糕痴迷者——在她与Robert Pattinson 的恋情中大肆抨击的那些恶毒种族歧视者的沉思，但这同时也是对任何不平等关系所带来的不安全感的反思。twigs将这些用钢管舞与歌曲"cellophane”联系起来，钢管舞——一种充满力量的舞蹈来搭配她所缺失的情感，唤起了她为他人的快乐而表演的想法。这是一个悲伤的独舞，既充分展现自己的内心，又让人意识到她正在努力解决被征服与征服之间的矛盾。作为这张深思熟虑的专辑的最后一曲， "cellophane”与 “thousand eyes”交相辉映——作为一位女性艺术家，经常被那些偏执的小报关注着，并有意将你与你爱的男人拆散，这多么糟心啊！这些就像Mary Magdalene和耶稣经历的那样，她由此编织了悲伤的《MAGDALENE》。尽管如此，悲伤刺激了音乐的发展，这一事实足以证明，twigs总能找到属于自己的路。