crix crax crux - camel and needle
“camel and needle” is crix crax crux’s fifth CD (all capitalizations are consistent with the label’s usage). It was recorded on a 4-track but mixed and edited with a computer which gives it a nice lo-fi sound without sacrificing quality. It’s an experimental piece and that requires playing through a few times before making a decision about whether or not you like it.
The name of the CD “camel and needle” alludes to that frequently misunderstood biblical parable: “It’s easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle then for a rich man to get to heaven”. The “eye of the needle” in question was the name for a narrow, easily defended, after-hours entrance that a late-arriving merchant would use to get into the city. And the difficulty came from unloading the camel, carrying the heavy bags through the narrow corridor by hand, and then convincing the cantankerous beast of burden to follow suit.
It’s a very clever and insightful analogy (no matter what you happen to believe), but if you’re not in on the meaning of the phrase it sounds positively grotesque. That’s appropriate for a CD which could either be random noise or something very clever. Is the final effect an act of intent or an accident? I’ll get to that down below.
The more I listened to the CD, the more I liked it. The music is fairly mellow, characterized by several layers of music that converge and diverge in a variety of interesting ways — sometimes melodic, sometimes bordering on the dissonant — there’s an internal structure to the music that’s bit hard to grasp on the first few passes but slowly emerges with repeat listening.
The singing is heavily reverbed and practically Dylanesque in comprehensibility. c/c/c gets credit for creating their own version of lo-fi underwater, multi-tracked post-rock. I hear some similarity with Jennyanykind’s CD Mythic on a few tracks, but I wouldn’t say that “camel and needle” is anything other then a c/c/c original.
Like a distant childhood memory grown fuzzy through the passage of time, many of the songs sound familiar… like songs I’ve heard in the past, but distorted by the artistic sensibilities of c/c/c until something definitely new has emerged. It’s possible that many of their sound samples are actually derived from songs I’ve heard on the radio, and that THIS is the source of the familiarity but it’s hard to tell for certain. It’s just as likely that it’s all something completely new. That’s a blurring of boundaries, and it’s one of the reasons that I find the music so interesting.
At times it’s a very dystopic sound—very lonely and lost—multiple voices raised in a confusion of noise with no one to answer (I’m thinking in particular of track eight—“from the east”). I find that compelling. Just as compelling as I find the hints of familiarity in the other tracks. So the question remains—did they do it on purpose, or am I projecting myself onto the music, like a crazy man looking at inkblots? The answer is, as it must be, that it doesn’t really matter.
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