Bosch, Hieronymous (c. 1450–1516), Dutch painter
Bish bosh (sl.), job done, sorted
“I was thinking about making the title refer to a mythological, all-encompassing, giant woman artist.” Scott Walker
A Hieronymous Bosch painting can’t be apprehended in a single blink of an eye. The Garden of Earthly Delights is made up of panels in parallel, with scores of tiny actions and allegorical representations teeming in every square inch of canvas. The painting is big enough to encompass heaven and hell.
Perhaps we should listen to Scott’s music in the same way we’d approach a Bosch canvas. You probably won’t understand it after one viewing, but you can become obsessed with one corner detail another until you eventually come to some understanding of how the different parts fit together and complement each other.
“It’s moving on a bit each time we go. Hopefully it’s getting nearer and nearer the kind of thing that’s in our heads. Little things are improving, a bit more focused. The style is improving.”
Since the 1960s, Scott Walker has scaled the heights of pop superstardom, produced some of the most revered solo albums of the late sixties, coasted on his laurels during the seventies, then metamorphosed into something very different. The music he has been making at his own pace since the early eighties might be utterly estranged from the songs that made him a household name, but they stem from the privacy he requires to write this complex and hugely inventive music.
Bish Bosch is the latest in Scott’s discography to pursue the line of enquiry he began back in 1978, with his four devastatingly original songs on the Walker Brothers’ swansong, Nite Flights, and continuing through Climate of Hunter (1984), Tilt (1995), The Drift (2006). He has continued to mature and develop in a late style utterly at odds with the music that made him a superstar, a lifetime ago, but which is totally honest, uncompromising and transcendent.
Scott began writing his new material around 2009, and recorded it sporadically over the following three years, while he was also involved in composing a work for the ROH2 ballet Duet for One Voice, chorographed by Aletta Collins. Unsurprisingly for a long-term exile from his native America, Bish Bosch is a great melting pot of clamouring voices and languages, swift scene-changes (the album’s geographic reach covers Denmark, the Alps, Hawaii, the ancient landscapes of Scythia, Greece and Rome, and Romania), time-travelling jump-cuts, and metaphors from medical science and molecular biology that seize you by the throat...
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Oooohhhh - very excited about this one!
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