T.J. Borden


Picture a museum.  The woman behind you just came from the dentist.  The exhibition and essence of this building is devastatingly supernatural.  Every body in the museum metaphysically shatters, now existing as a series of qualities of particular movements.  You understand demarcation, you understand Space, and you know this because you can feel the woman’s body in back of you.  You feel the body precisely, down to the cilia count.  You endure the impossible vividness of the time it takes to drive to the dentist, the minuscule movement of metal on teeth.  The magic is you feel this woman’s presence so radically, including the details of her dental insurance, without any circumstantial evidence:  You are in the dark.  Quite literally, the museum is pitch black.

T.J. Borden’s playing is this museum.  All alone with the cello, he is the sound of Space, capitulated, incredulously technical.  A cadence within a cadence within a cadence, a unanimous inversion of noise into a sonic entity that is absolutely clean.  You are mesmerized, you cannot get enough and the next thing you know, you are closing your eyes in an already dark museum.

You can rest assured in listening to this album that Noise is Art, one that must be practiced frankly and not without humility.  The Art is the part where years of musical training reveal an apparently arbitrary noise.  Years of training to capture the nature of spontaneity.  Years of training to recover the blinding details of living.  The sound of rope burn, of a growing cyst.  The space around the detail is a permanent midnight.

You have been locked in a dark museum for 26 years.  The logistics leading up to this point are complex and you can’t with much success interrogate a cello.  So you find a second set of eyes to close.  You can hear the woman’s skin itching like amplified blinking at the Ice Capades.  


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