【搬运译】Pitchfork评Aldous Harding 2022年专辑《Warm Chris》

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：豆目豆科

The New Zealand songwriter returns with a sparse and oblique album whose gentle psychedelic folk and beguiling free association proudly resist interpretation.

这位新西兰的作曲家带着一张简朴而含蓄的专辑归来，其温和的迷幻民谣与诱人的自由联想坚决地拒绝庸杂的阐释。

Not everything has to come to a logical conclusion; not everything needs to be about something. In her lecture “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” the writer Garielle Lutz explains her fondness for language where “the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language.” By that, she means that language, for some, is at its best when it can be isolated, when it takes on a sort of synesthetic, acoustic resonance. You can apply this terminology to the songwriting of New Zealand’s Aldous Harding, who, for four albums, has made folk music with a conceptual weight that’s difficult to categorize or assign to any established narrative. Her latest album, Warm Chris, is a record of the portable solitude that Lutz writes about: It is opaque, surreal, and above all, lonely.

并非所有的事物都必须有一个逻辑结论；也不是所有东西都需要与什么相关。在她的演讲《The Sentence Is a Lonely Place》中，作家Garielle Lutz谈道“一个语句是语言所能实现的最精巧简练、同时也不失完整的‘便携式孤独’”，直言她对语言的热爱。这里的意思是，对某些人而言，当人们能将语言与实际情形疏离开，并使之呈现出某种联觉的声学共鸣时，便实现了语言的最佳状态。你完全可以将这一术语挪用于新西兰艺术家Aldous Harding的词曲创作中，她在她的四张专辑中制作出极具概念重量的民谣音乐，难以归类或分配给任何既定的叙事法则。她的最新专辑《Warm Chris》便是属于Lutz所写的“便携式孤独”的专辑。它晦涩难懂、远超现实，但最重要的是，它与孤独相拥。

At first blush, Warm Chris is almost a discouraging listen. Its soft, slightly psychedelic folk pop is deceptively thorny and dense. You have to learn how to listen to it, kind of like how you have to teach yourself how to read Samuel Beckett or Renata Adler. It is less accessible than 2019’s Designer: Most of the pop hooks and acoustic bass drops are gone. It moves slowly, and the music flourishes where you least expect it. A song like “Ennui” builds in waves, with an arrangement that snakes from strident pianos to squeezes of baritone sax. Harding’s voice sounds plucked from a dream, growing more awake as the song progresses. “No one look/And a canny fucking fill/Don’t lie to me!” she sings in one moment. It doesn’t really make sense, but it’s not supposed to: Harding wants you to find your own logic. “I just want everyone to feel like a philosopher. You put on a record, and that record belongs to you,” she said in a recent Pitchfork interview.

乍一听，《Warm Chris》几乎是一个令人沮丧的体验。它柔软、略带迷幻色彩的民谣流行乐会让人浑身泛起鸡皮疙瘩。但你必须学会如何聆听这张专辑，就像你必须勒令自己学会阅读Samuel Beckett或是Renata Adler的著作。这张专辑比19年的《Designer》更不容易理解：绝大多数的流行Hook和原声贝斯下行都不见了。它缓缓行进，旋律在你最不意想不到的地方荣发滋长。像“Ennui”这样的歌曲声波一浪高过一浪，从尖锐的钢琴到低音萨克斯挤压声道的过度，曲风蜿蜒曲折。Harding的声音像从梦中传来，随着歌曲的行进，她的声音愈加明晰。某一刻，她唱道：“No one look/And a canny fucking fill/Don’t lie to me!”这其实并无确切的涵义，但也并非毫无意义：Harding只是希望你能从中找到自己的逻辑。她在最近的Pitchfork采访中说“我只是希望每个人在听这张专辑时都能发觉自己的哲思。你播放这一张唱片，那这张唱片就属于你。”

Harding is a painstaking songwriter, even though her lyrics tend to veer toward disorder. At times, the vantage point can feel almost dissociative. On “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain,” she subverts a traditional song title into something alien and mournful. Banjos and horns bloom brilliantly as Harding sings about love, and her words are soft and searching, as if she were narrating the view through a train window. On the title track, her voice drops from soprano to alto and she sings about watching paper planes burn. Her delivery almost recalls a lullaby, and the tape hiss in the background is as gentle and constant as the sound of waves heard from within a seaside home.

Harding是一个呕心沥血的词曲作家，即使她的歌词往往倾向于无序混沌。有时，身处恰当的时机、地点她的音乐会让人感觉到几乎是割裂、游离的。在“She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain”中，她颠覆了传统简短歌名，转而使之变作一种陌生和哀伤的存在。当Harding唱起爱时，班卓琴和号角灿烂地绽放，她的话语柔和而透彻，仿佛她只是在随意描述着车窗外的景色。在专辑同名曲中，她的声音自女高音渐渐降至中音，歌唱着目睹纸飞机燃烧。她的表达方式总会让人想起摇篮曲，背景中磁带的嘶嘶声就像身处海景房里听到的海浪声一样温和而延绵。

For all her inscrutable intensity, there are also moments of levity and light. “Lawn” is sneaky and surreal, the kind of song that demands you put on vintage Mary Quant and go boogie—or turn into a human-sized gecko wearing Twiggy eyeliner, which is what happens to Harding in the video. On “Leathery Whip,” her voice bends abruptly from the sound of a long-haired songwriter living in Laurel Canyon circa 1972 to that of the chipmunk outside her window. “Here comes life with his leathery whip/Here comes life with his leathery leathery!” she exclaims, joined by the flat, freaky baritone of Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson. She draws out her words as she sings, blowing up vowels like twisty balloons. It’s funny yet vaguely threatening, like the last thing you’d hear before Harry Houdini saws you in half.

对于她的歌曲蕴涵着高深莫测的力量，但也不乏轻松和明亮的时刻。“Lawn”是低微而又超现实的，这种歌曲需要你穿上复古Mary Quant长款体恤，然后奔向舞池；或是变作一个人形壁虎，画上尖佻的眼线，这也是MV中发生在Harding身上的事。在“Leathery Whip”中，她的声音会突然从1972年左右生活在劳雷尔峡谷的长发歌者的声音变作在她窗外驻足观望的花栗鼠的声音。“Here comes life with his leathery whip/Here comes life with his leathery leathery!”她感叹道，于此同时，乐队Sleaford Mods主脑Jason Williamson平坦、怪异的男中音也加入进来。她一边唱一边牵引出她的词，像吹瘪气球一样吐出元音。这很有趣，但也有点惊悚，像是你在Harry Houdini把你锯成两半之前听到的最后一句话。

The sound of Warm Chris is sparse and oblique, and trying to anchor yourself in Harding’s lyrics can feel like organizing a narrative from the shape of passing clouds. But that’s also where its brilliance lies, what makes this some of Harding’s best songwriting yet. Warm Chris asks you to surrender catchiness and legibility and think instead about how a lyric like “sometimes shepherds have it right” (from “Staring at the Henry Moore”) might also be infused with inexplicable melancholy. Or why on “Lawn,” you have to suppress a giggle when Harding rhymes “They don’t mean a thing to me” with “All these lamps are free!” She favors this kind of free association, unconnected turns of phrase that synthesize the strange, lonely resonance of staring at a piece of abstract art or visiting an empty beach in winter. These are concrete images, but Warm Chris isn’t explicit about anything: The feelings you have when you experience these songs are yours alone.

专辑中的声音是简朴而含蓄、娓娓道来，试图将你的全部注意力锚定在Harding的文本之中，这感觉像要从飘过的云朵中捕捉到一个具体的轮廓。但这也是它的精彩所在，也揭示了究竟是什么造就了Harding如此优良的词曲创作。《Warm Chris》要求你摒弃一贯的朗朗上口和可读性，转而思考为什么像“sometimes shepherds have it right”（出自“Staring at the Henry Moore”）这样的词也会被注入莫名其妙的悲伤；或是为何在“Lawn”中，当Harding选择用“They don’t mean a thing to me”和“All these lamps are free!”押韵时，你会不禁笑出声。她钟爱于这种漫无边际的自由畅想、豪不相干的语义转折，混杂有盯着一件抽象艺术作品或是在冬天访问一个空旷海滩的奇怪而孤独的情感共鸣。这些都是如此具象，但《Warm Chris》从未明确阐明了什么：当你体验这些歌曲时，你究竟是什么感受只有你自己知道。