CD Of The Week: Fjordne – Charles Rendition

It was like being born for a second time – everything was new, everything was yet to be learned, and we had no prior knowledge we could apply to help us make sense of the overwhelming impressions that were bombarding us from all sides. They told us that we had been found wandering in the forest, completely naked and completely alone, with no sign of how we got there or how we had survived. They said we had no speech then, but communicated between ourselves through glances and the most basic of gestures. They decided we must be brother and sister – how else could two children end up alone together in the woods? – though they had no way of knowing if this was true or not.

We were taken in by a distinguished gentleman, one of the most important men in the town, who clothed us and fed us and hired a tutor to conquer our muteness. Our new patron thought that the best way for us to adjust to civilised living was to be immersed in it, so he took us with him wherever he went: to the office where he managed his factory business, to the meetings of the town council on which he sat, and to the bars and cafes he frequented in the evenings. I was dazzled by all of it, but especially by the nightlife – there was an energy and urgency to it that I did not understand, but nonetheless found intoxicating.

Late one night we were sat in our patron’s favourite haunt. He was acting strangely again, as he often did by this point in the night (drunk, I would later realise). The pianist was playing something slow and dreamy, the notes drifting reluctantly through the smoke. Suddenly I was overcome by a sense of enormous grief and loss, and I realised that I could not remember anything about my life in the forest, before we were found and brought to the town. I looked across the bar at my sister, but I could not recall any memory of her before the moment when the lumberjacks who found us first called out to us with voices that seemed to rend the silence of the world.

After a couple of years our patron’s business went bust, and he blamed my sister and I rather than his alcoholism, saying that we were bewitched and had brought him bad luck. He threw us out onto the streets, and, after a few weeks of sleeping under bridges and being spat at by most of the town, we were taken in by an old woman. She was very kind and very poor; she said she’d already had so much bad luck in her life that a little more couldn’t hurt. Together we managed to eke out some sort of existence, until my sister married a man from another town and moved away, and I got a job cleaning cars for a used car salesman.

Of course I went back to the forest many times, but it never stirred any memories for me, or revealed to me any secrets of my own past. Then one autumn morning, as I was on the way to work, I was about to cross the street when I saw an amazing sight. In a puddle in the road I saw reflected in the sky behind me what my old tutor, when he was teaching us the Christmas story, would have called ‘a heavenly host’. They even had an organ with them. Of course when I looked up into the sky there was nothing out of the ordinary there, and when I returned my gaze to the puddle the angelic choir had disappeared. For a moment I was dumbfounded, because I knew instinctively that what had happened was unspeakable, or rather, it was a moment of perfect speech. For the briefest of moments I had been back, I had returned to the forest.

All of this happened many decades ago now. My sister died of cancer a while back, though her daughter still comes to visit me sometimes at the care home. I still have no recollection of what happened to me in the forest, and no new evidence has surfaced that might have shed light on where I came from. But I retain the recollection of that glimpse in the puddle, and it has become a kind of placeholder for all that I have lost. Soon I will lose that too, and silence will fall once again on the world.

(Fjordne is the alias of Shunichiro Fujimoto, who for his second album on the Kitchen label has created a set of piano-led tracks that act as a soundtrack or musical retelling of a self-penned short story. As this reviewer had access to the music but not to the written text, he had to reconstruct the story for himself using clues in the press release and the music itself. “Charles Rendition” will be available as a digital download and a CD release limited to 700 copies, but you’ll have to buy the CD version to read Fujimoto’s own version of the story.)

- Nathan Thomas for Fluid Radio

Available through Stashed Goods and Kitchen Label

www.kitchen-label.com
www.kitchen-label.com/artists/fjordne