搬運自：網(wǎng)易云音樂專欄【Music Online Zine Courier】（在原文基礎(chǔ)上添加了英語原文與排版調(diào)整）

翻譯：Beans_Beans?

Bon Iver’s first album in five years takes an unexpected turn toward the strange and experimental. But behind?the arranged?glitches and processed voices are deeply felt songs about uncertainty.

Bon Iver五年來的第一張專輯出人意料地轉(zhuǎn)向了怪奇的實驗性風(fēng)格。但在精心布置的故障元素和數(shù)字處理化的聲音背后，是有著未知而真摯情感的歌曲。

There’s a line deep in Thomas Pynchon’s?Inherent Vice?wherein Doc, a small-time stoner-sleuth, considers the dissolution of the 1960s, wondering if the decade wasn’t merely “a little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness.” It’s a funny way to think about time—that an entire era can be nudged back into the ether, erased. But on?22, A Million, the extraordinary third full-length from?Bon Iver, Justin Vernon echoes Doc’s somber pondering. These are fluttery, skeletal songs that struggle against known trajectories and then threaten to disappear entirely.?22, A Million?might be musically distant from?For Emma, Forever Ago, the collection of aching folk tunes Vernon debuted in 2007—mostly gone are the acoustic strums, replaced by lurching, electronic gasps born from the Messina, a doctored combination of the Prismizer software plug-in and some hardware that was invented by Vernon and his engineer, Chris Messina. But the albums share an ideology. All things go, taken back into darkness.

在Thomas Pynchon的《性本惡》中，有一句話深入人心：Doc，一個三流偵探，卻想著20世紀(jì)60年代的消沉，懷疑這十年是否只是“一個小小的光明插曲，畢竟最終也會走向消逝，一切美好都會失去，重返黑暗中去?！边@是一種有趣的思考時間的方式——整個時代可以被推入虛無之中、被抹去、失去意義。但在Bon Iver非凡的第三張全長專輯《22, A Million》中，Justin Vernon回應(yīng)了Doc的陰郁思考。這張專輯中都是些輕飄飄、骨感的歌曲，它們像是會與既有的音軌“抗?fàn)帯保敝亮硪环酵耆?。?2, A Million》在音樂上可能與Vernon在2007年的首張專輯《For Emma, Forever Ago》（有著痛苦內(nèi)核的民謠錄）相去甚遠——原生弦樂難見蹤影，取而代之的是由the Messina實現(xiàn)的電子喘息聲。（the Messina是Vernon和他的朋友Chris Messina一起發(fā)明的Prismizer軟件插件和一些硬件的補丁套裝。）但即便如此，這些專輯把握著一個共同的意識形態(tài)——所有事物都將逝去，被引入黑暗之中。

22, A Million?is certainly Bon Iver’s most difficult record; it’s the work of a songwriter who seems to have lost interest in established, easily deciphered forms, a possibility Vernon has been hinting at for nearly all of his career. In 2006, Vernon, then living in North Carolina, was emotionally razed by a perfect storm of shitty turns: his band broke up, his relationship dissolved, he came down with an acute case of mononucleosis. He did what any reasonable person with an eye toward self-care would do: decamp to his family’s hunting cabin in rural Wisconsin, drink a gang of beers, watch endless hours of “Northern Exposure,” and write a batch of lonesome, yearning folk songs on his acoustic guitar. His high, brittle falsetto gave these pieces an otherworldly quality, as if they had blown in on a particularly cold wind.

《22, A Million》無疑是BonIver制作歷程最艱難的專輯；這是一個似乎對既定的、玩爛了的形式嗤之以鼻的作者筆下的作品，Vernon在他的職業(yè)生涯中幾乎一直在追尋這一傾向。2006年，當(dāng)時住在北卡羅萊納州的Vernon剛剛結(jié)束了一段情感，被狠狠得蹂躪了的他——他的樂隊與他分道揚鑣、戀情破裂——最終診斷患有急性單核細胞增多癥。他在這時選擇去做一件任何生活能自理的人都能做到的事——去他父親在威斯康星州農(nóng)村的狩獵小屋，喝著啤酒，無休止的看《北國風(fēng)云》（“Northern Exposure”），用他破舊的二手木吉他寫了一些孤寂卻又在渴望著的民謠。他高挑而清脆的假聲賦予這些作品一種超凡脫俗的質(zhì)感，仿佛它們像是被一股冷峻的寒風(fēng)中吹來人世的。

For Emma, Forever Ago?was, in its own way, an experimental record—Vernon’s vocals and phrasing are deeply unusual; its stories are impressionistic, fractured—but because it’s so heavy with heartbreak and loss, it feels intimate, authentic, easy.?22, A Million?is comparatively strange and exploratory, but its worries are more existential. The album opens with a high, undulating voice (Vernon, singing into an OP-1, a combination synthesizer, sampler, and sequencer) announcing, “It might be over soon,” and goes on to examine the idea of impermanence. Nearly all of its songs contain a question of some sort, as if Vernon’s own reckoning with the inevitability of decay has led him to interrogate every last thing he’s seen or known. Inasmuch as his lyrics are narrative—and they have always been more connotative than exegetic—he seems preoccupied with whether or not a life has meaning. “Oh then, how we gonna cry? Cause it once might not mean something?” he asks on “715 - CRΣΣKS.”

《For Emma, Forever Ago》以其獨一無二的方式成為一張實驗性專輯，有著Vernon不尋常的唱腔和措辭；它的印象派敘事，斷斷續(xù)續(xù)，如此的沉重、令人心碎，又是如此的真切、真實、令人放松。《22, A Million》相對而言更為怪奇，更具探索性，但也會讓人心生疑慮。這張專輯以一個高亢、波瀾起伏的聲音（Vernon通過一個合成器、采樣器、音序器三合一套裝OP-1發(fā)出的）宣布這：“It might be over soon”并持續(xù)探索著這些無常的思緒。幾乎所有歌曲都隱含著某種癥結(jié)，就好像Vernon被自己陳腐、難以避免的壞習(xí)慣所控制——總是對所有他看到或知曉的事予以審視。只要這首歌的詞帶有敘事性——它們總是內(nèi)涵深刻，難以闡明——便總是著重于探討生命的意義。

Kanye West?once called Vernon his “favorite living artist,” and has long professed a deep and unexpected admiration for “Woods,” the closing track from 2009’s?Blood Bank?EP, and an obvious precursor to “715 - CRΣΣKS,” itself a kind of warped a capella jam. “Woods” featured no instrumentation, but is merely five minutes of Vernon singing through Auto-Tune, in ghostly harmony with himself. In retrospect, “Woods” feels like a revelation: it was not only an unexpected affirmation of pop’s future—artists aggressively distorting their vocals, feeding their voices into machines in order to build spectral, nagging songs that reflect alienation, arguably the reigning sensation of our time—but of Vernon’s own trajectory.

Kanye West曾稱Vernon是他“最喜歡的在世藝術(shù)家“，并且長期以來反復(fù)對外強調(diào)自己對“Woods”懷著深刻而意外的欽佩之情。而“Woods”——作為09年發(fā)行的EP《Blood Bank》的結(jié)束曲和“715 - CRΣΣKS”的前奏——本身具有一種扭曲的純?nèi)寺曊吵碣|(zhì)感。“Woods”的一大特點便是沒有器樂，僅有的是Vernon自己的Auto-Tune為他自己完成5分鐘的和聲?，F(xiàn)在來看，“Woods”像是一個預(yù)兆：它已不僅僅是對流行樂未來的意外允諾——藝術(shù)家們爭相扭曲他們的聲音，將他們的聲音屬于機器，以塑造幽靈般呢喃的樂曲、營造疏離感，它以Vernon作品的身份引領(lǐng)了我們這個時代。

Plenty of beloved contemporary artists, from?Dylan?to?Neil Young?on, have ditched the supposed purity of folk music to push the work harder, to make art that’s less reliant on a tradition and invests, instead, in the strangeness of the present moment and collective uncertainty about the future. Trading on preexisting pathways—it’s too easy. Vernon isn’t alone in his hunger for true, tectonic innovation, for songs that seem tethered to and reflective of their actual time and place:?Radiohead?has been mirroring anxiety about the encroachment of electronics and virtual living since?Kid A, a record that also required them to warp if not abandon their beginnings as a guitar-rock band.

許多受人喜愛的當(dāng)代藝術(shù)家，如Dylan或是Neil Young，都在摒棄民謠音樂的所謂純正性努力鉆研這，使藝術(shù)不再過多的依賴于“傳統(tǒng)”，轉(zhuǎn)而投資在對當(dāng)下盛行的陌生疏離的人際關(guān)系和未來社會集體的未知將來的探索。在預(yù)先存在的軌跡上行事——未免太過容易了。Vernon并非孤身一人，他渴望真正的、有建樹的創(chuàng)新，渴望那些能觸及現(xiàn)實社會、映射真實世界的歌曲。自《Kid A》以來，Radiohead一直在向外界反饋著對電子虛擬生活侵蝕真實世界的焦慮，這張唱片也要求他們即便不放棄作為一個吉他搖滾樂隊的初衷，也要有所變革。

Beyond its sonic striving,?22, A Million?is also a personal record about how to move forward through disorienting times. Vernon occasionally employs religious language to express his anxiety, some explicit (“consecration,” “confirmation”), some more plainly vernacular (“So as I’m standing at the station,” “I could go forward in the light”). He samples two gospel tunes: Mahalia Jackson’s live version of “How I Got Over,” from 1962, and the Supreme Jubilees’s “Standing in the Need of Prayer,” from 1980. There is a song titled “666 ?,” and another titled “33 ‘GOD.’” A bit of marginalia in the album’s liner notes (“Why are you so FAR from saving me?”) is attributed to Psalm 22, though in the King James Bible, that imploration is for help, not salvation (“Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?”). Either way, Psalm 22 opens?in medias res: its author is undergoing an urgent crisis of faith. So is Vernon?

除了在聲音上的鉆研，《22, A Million》也同樣作為一張如何在迷失時代中前進的個人傳記。Vernon偶爾會通過宗教語言來表達他的憂慮，有些情感相當(dāng)坦然赤裸（“consecration,”“confirmation”）、有些則是更為質(zhì)樸的白活（“So as I’m standing at thestation,”“I could go forward in the light”）。他還采樣了兩首福音歌曲——來自1962年Mahalia Jackson的“How I Got Over”現(xiàn)場版和來自1980年Supreme Jubilees的“Standing in the Need ofPrayer”——分別出現(xiàn)在名為“666??”和“?33?“GOD””的曲子中。專輯內(nèi)頁中的一段旁白（“Why are you so FARfrom saving me?”）收錄于《Psalm 22》，盡管在《圣經(jīng)》（KJV）中，這句話是為尋求幫助而非救贖（“Why art thou so farfrom helping me, and from the words of my roaring?”），但不管怎么說，《Psalm 22》開篇仍描述了身處兩難處境時的困頓：它的作者正經(jīng)歷著嚴(yán)峻的信仰危機。Vernon難道也是如此？

Maybe. Musically, Vernon resists not just verse-chorus-verse, but all the ways in which Western cultures have come to conceptualize narrative. As kids, we’re taught how stories work, and we use that rubric to organize and make sense of the events of our lives. But the imposition of structure can be violent; perhaps, Vernon suggests, the idea that we are organizing events at all is patently nuts. So when he ventures a line like “We’ve galvanized the squall of it all,” from “8 (circle),” it feels like a mission statement. There is solace in resisting formal structures, in both acknowledging and embracing a certain amount of chaos.

也許在音樂上，Vernon不僅抵制主歌-副歌-主歌的傳統(tǒng)歌曲行進形式，更是抵制西方文化中所有概念化敘事方式。當(dāng)我們還是孩子是，便被知道故事應(yīng)被如何續(xù)寫，同時我們也用這個標(biāo)準(zhǔn)來組織梳理、理解我們生活中的事件。但這一系統(tǒng)的授予可能是暴力的強加；也許在Vernon看來我們梳理事件，規(guī)劃時間的念頭愚蠢至極。因而，但他在“8 (circle)”中冒出一句”We’ve galvanized the squall of it all“時，像是在作任務(wù)匯報一般。想必在抵制所謂正統(tǒng)歌曲結(jié)構(gòu)時，在承納和擁抱某種程度的混亂是，他得到了慰藉。

It’s the same story on “00000 Million,” the album’s haunting closing track, where Vernon samples a wobbly line borrowed from the Irish folksinger Fionn Regan: “The days have no numbers.” Pitted against the record’s obsessive numerology—each song has a number in its title—it lands like an admission of defeat. There’s resignation in his voice, which gives way to desolation. The song’s lyrics will be familiar to anyone wondering if they’ll ever actually start to feel better, while still continuing to do something they know is hurting them: “If it’s harmed, it harmed me, it’ll harm me, I let it in.”

專輯的尾聲“00000 Million”也是如此，Vernon從愛爾蘭民謠歌手Fionn Regan那里引用了一句飄渺的詞句——“The days have no numbers.”與這張專輯令人癡迷的數(shù)字學(xué)元素相比——每首歌的標(biāo)題中都有一個神秘數(shù)字——這首歌像是對失敗的妥協(xié)。它的歌詞正是那些渴望知曉他們的未來是否有所好轉(zhuǎn)，卻仍在延續(xù)著會毀掉他們未來的事的人的心聲——“If it’s harmed, it harmed me, it’ll harm me, I let it in.”

For a while now, Vernon has been building songs in a modular way, and there are moments here (like the meandering last minute of “21 M??N WATER”) where it feels as if he could’ve jiggled the pieces together a little more—where his disavowal of connective tissue feels less deliberate than random. This is evident, in part, because he is exceptionally good at writing melancholic laments in the highly structured style of ’80s soft-rock giants like?Bonnie Raitt?and?Bruce Hornsby?(Vernon has covered Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” and Vernon and Hornsby have collaborated on several occasions; “00000 Million” feels like it could have been recorded by either).

這一段時間以來，Vernon一直在以模塊化的方式構(gòu)筑歌曲，其中有一些時刻（例如“21 M??N WATER”?蜿蜒曲折的最后一分鐘），感覺他甚至可以將這些碎片再聯(lián)結(jié)起來——他對這些結(jié)締組織的否認并非刻意，而更像是隨心所欲的結(jié)果。這一點尤為明顯，部分原因是他特別擅長用Bonnie Raitt和Bruce Hornsby等80年代軟式搖滾巨頭的高度結(jié)構(gòu)化風(fēng)格來敘寫他憂郁哀歌（Vernon曾翻唱過Raitt的“I Can’t Make You Love Me”，同時也曾與Hornsby多次合作；“00000 Million”感覺很可能就是由這兩位協(xié)助錄制的）。

“8 (circle)” is the most immediately reminiscent of Vernon’s last record,?Bon Iver, Bon Iver, itself now recognizable as a clear midpoint between?Emma?and here; it’s also the album’s most conventionally composed track, with the smallest amount of vocal manipulation. Elsewhere, Vernon’s vocals are filtered until they begin to actually dissolve, as if they have been dunked in a tub of lye. The song’s stunning emotional peaks—I come to a full stop every time I hear Vernon sing, “I’m standing in the street now, and I carry his guitar,” his voice steady and deep, as if he’s announcing himself to someone he loves—are so plainly beautiful it’s hard not to mourn, briefly, for the Bon Iver of yesteryear.

“8 (circle)”是這張唱片中最能讓人聯(lián)想到Vernon上張專輯《Bon Iver, Bon Iver》的歌曲，它本身甚至可以視作為《For Emma》與《22》二者的中點；它也是專輯中結(jié)構(gòu)最為傳統(tǒng)、人聲處理程度最低的曲目。在專輯其他部分，Vernon的人聲經(jīng)過層層濾透，直至它們最終“溶解”在一片苦堿汪洋之中。而這首歌令人驚嘆的情緒高峰——Vernon用他沉穩(wěn)的聲音唱道：“I’m standing in the streetnow, and I carry his guitar”，仿佛再向他所愛之人宣布他的新身份——有著如此質(zhì)樸的美麗，很難不讓人為昔日的美好冬季（Bon Iver）感傷。

But?22, A Million?sounds only like itself. There are precedents for all of Vernon’s moves deep in the histories of rock‘n’roll and rhythm and blues and electronic music—and, more immediately, on newer records by West,?Frank Ocean,?James Blake,?Chance the Rapper,?Francis and the Lights, and Radiohead. But this particular amalgamation is so twitchy and idiosyncratic it feels truly singular. Its searching is bottomless.

但《22, A Million》仍是獨一無二的存在，它只像它自己。Vernon的一舉一動在搖滾樂、R&B和電子樂領(lǐng)域中都有先例，卻已然被可以在West、Frank Ocean、James Blake、Chance the Rapper、Francis and the Lights和Radiohead的新唱片中窺見他的身影。這一特殊的混合體是如此的緊致特異，讓人感覺有如身處異境。我們對它的探索永無止境。