form is the mask of space

"I wished for death often but now that I am at its door I have changed my mind about the world. It should go on; it is beautiful, even as a dream, filled with water and seed, plants and animals, others like myself, ships and buildings and messages filling the air - a beauty, if ever I have seen one. In the next world, should I remember this one, I will praise it above everything."

That the National were going to spend six hours repeatedly performing the same song in an art gallery was one thing. A collaboration with Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, A Lot of Sorrow wasn’t intended as a physical endurance test, but a study in the evolving emotional tenor of a work stretched to its limits: National frontman Matt Berninger described its aim as “reaching a different sort of euphoric, mantra-like state.” Releasing the entire performance in a box set composed of nine clear LPs, however, strips away the sad communion of the original Sunday afternoon show, leaving just the listener and approximately 105 iterations of “Sorrow”, spanning six hours, five minutes.

[…]

But much as it’s exhausting and unrealistic to absorb in one go, as much a millstone as a symbolic objet d’art, A Lot of Sorrow rewards patience in the most literal fashion. (Another inadvertent joke at the perception that everything the National make is “a grower”…) “I don’t wanna get over you”, Berninger sings in a faint plea every time, an Old Testament pop trope that works as an act of self-preservation and insurance against the responsibility of being the one who has to change. It’s a voluntary slow-death sentence, which he bears stoically throughout the six hours: joking, singing with a mouth full of sandwich halfway through Side O (Kjartansson brought them food and drinks throughout), and saying they’ll have to start over after he coughs during a chorus.

It’s only at the end of Side Q, around the 95th take, that Berninger breaks down. He gasps halfway through “sorrow’s a girl inside my cake” before missing a line and crying, having lost his nerve because he couldn’t see his wife and daughter in the crowd. His live performances are frequently marked by a frightening volatility, and he often openly declares that he needs someone in song, but he’s rarely vulnerable like this. Guitarists Aaron and Bryce Dessner and the band’s backing musicians take the lead on vocals (and the crowd joins in), and Bryan Devendorf intuits that he should sit this one out.

Throughout, the unspoken conversation between the band is mesmeric: early on they play more muted versions, like steady long-distance runners. They never break between songs—there’s always that hissing drumbeat or a steady guitar line to guide the transition—and the Dessners constantly experiment with different textures. Sometimes the guitar parts swing like slack machinery; later they tremble with the seismic presence of a Richard Serra sculpture, shriek like birds, and swell drunkenly. I didn’t see the original performance, and had wondered if it might mirror William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, fading as energy and morale grew dim, but the ceaseless invention here keeps the song alive.

The first was that each of us had attacked at least one of the others in print. I had dissed Eco’s book. Umberto had criticized Mario for being too right-wing. Mario had criticized me for being too left-wing.

The second discovery was that we all got on like a house on fire.

It was Umberto who suggested we should now call ourselves The Three Musketeers. (This, remember, was the time of the Three Tenors, Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras.) I remember asking, “Why Musketeers? Why not, for example, The Three Stooges?”

“No,” Umberto insisted. “It has to be Musketeers, because first we were enemies and now we are friends.”