Aldus Santos

Part memoir, part music criticism, The Demo Versions by writer-musician Aldus Santos experiments with both forms and delivers a book of creative nonfiction that is lyrical in its analysis, and critical of its own voice. It acknowledges the lines drawn among the forms it inhabits, then engages in a negotiation of its differences and contradictions, ultimately creating a new space to speak of music, its making, and its critique, as it has unfolded through a life built on all three.

The Demo Versions

In Robin Sloan’s famous reference: ‘Look at your fish.’

Claudine

It's superbly unattractive, I know, but I think modern critics should pour their energies on only a handful of artists. Life's work, sort of deal. And I don't mean stop covering up-and-comers and Johnny-come- latelys altogether. Not at all, because that would be both unfortunate and irresponsible. What I mean is we've got to nurture our own personal devotions. Like our mothers and aunts and their choice saints. Find your saint, dog that saint for as long as you can, and give them hell.

…We should be on a gung-ho quest to quench that thirst, sure, but we also need to make sure that we stay thirsty. Or that we remain in a place where that thirst is everything.

In other words: The thirst and its quenching should be of equal import.

What I'm saying, in so many words, is that scholarship requires focus.

And I know the internet gives us the delusion that we can know all of ita harmless fiction that wouldn't rob anyone of sleep -but, really, we can't possibly love all of it. Despite our appetites, we only have time and energy for some of the chocolate.

But if heartbreak were soap, I feel we've been getting sold the same characterles, sculpted white rock for eons now. 

And heartbreak can't always be front-facing, off-the- shelf stuff.

Don't you want your pain to be, like, "special" soap? The kind which, when a house guest uses your shower, would prompt spirited inquiries? 

That's why sitting through a metal record (or an entire live metal set) is always a great privilege; it's like witnessing some special alchemy unfold. Suspension of disbelief, of course, is requisite. "Surely nobody can be this furious over anything?" But you know that's not true, because every day people get duped, hearts get broken, homes get burgled. Surrendering to metal is volunteering for a pummeling. And that takes courage.

It's a real cest la vie moment, but also telling of our musical meterstick as a people. We love our belters, our bend-over-backwards divas, our Freddies and Ar's. It is as though singers were athletes, and we choose our favorites based on some physiological ideal.

Wouldnt you want the voice of your prophesier a little more personal? More human? Being sung to by a pitch- perfect, near-infallible talent-show singer is like being told your fate by an always-on voiceover guy.

But because music consumption is as personal as dating, no hyper-logical set of rubrics, no amount of technical obsessivenesS, can pluck a listener away from making terrible choices under terrific pretenses.

 I never kill myself over the exclusive consumption of material in a vacuum, because part of the metrics, I realize, should be whether a piece cuts through the constant pipe-in whirr of life. And by "cut" I don't mean "interrupt," but more like how audio people use it: the ability to rise above the clutter, like a flower piercing through concrete.

Another odd thing: that if you're "critical"whether the kind or unkind, uhm, kind you should be able to come up with something better.

The Demo Versions quotes

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