I believe I have said this before, but I really enjoy KSE's Sound Library series. I know many of you out there can not listen to music while you read, but I suggest you listen to the song or album first and then read the poems. The subject for this chap, AJ Kaufmann's second KSE release, is the wonderful album Trans-Europe Express by Kraftwerk. I don't want to delve to far into the album itself, but if you can recall Trans-Europe is such an airy and epic journey that seems to glide along the hillsides and meadows, towns and villas, with songs like "Franz Schubert" and "Endless Endless" and of course the title track. Yet for all their beauty there was that disconnect, the electronic coldness that loomed in the distance. Kaufmann's poems have that same feel as he rides through Paris, Vienna, Dusseldorf, Warsaw, and Prypiat, looking at the world through glass. In a world of synthetic coffee, showroom dummies (or mannequins) dance and the train moves on to new discoveries. AJ does not only relive the album, but adds an even stranger view as he translates the music into words. It really is magical.
(Jason Behrends)
Paris
Departing
As scheduled
Luggage racks empty
Unfilled with your rain
And your rain
How it adds to the morning
Paris
4:23
Deaf speakers
Inflamed
As
Sweet St. Germaine
Malacca cane
And the rain
Still 4:23
Violas ablaze
Concrete drops
Of soul
Break Paris
In half
Break Paris
Apart
The train rolls on
How the rain
Adds to
Most anything
We get to see
Frozen frame by frozen frame
Drop of rain by drop of rain
Piece of steel by piece of steel
Paris
Is
Unreal
Metal machine
Disaster
Vienna
We're evening coffee's synthetic touch
Vienna
4:54
And we burst through the city's waltz
Heart
On an endless
Avenued
Roll
(Drums in the room's dim corner
Evacuate all latte angels
Before the bombs
Come round)
That's life's very first rehearsal
Then stray cats appear
Anew
With their leather coats
Tied to their ankles
Some kind of savior
Or mercy
Electric
Braceleted views come breaking through
While mannequins dance all observed
Oh endless halls of mirrors
Oh endless hours of waltz
O dancefloors on cool blue fire
(And the bombs come round
And we're tucked in
Mad)
Dusseldorf
Memorize... analyze... immortalize
Steel-rails
And the tunnel begins
At Rhine's industrially
Pierced
Yet still infant mouth
Bleeds white apart
Blue breeds in color
Steel-rails still
Steel-rails to rainbows
Dusseldorf
And there we are – the collectors of faded gray postcards
That's 5:01
We arrive at station's end
We meet the grim
Conductor
Pass the Apollo... pass the digit-all clock
Pictures of Bowie
Fill up the vacant still suitcase
Fill up the vacant European heart
Lost at dead-ended waltz
There's still chance we might be returning
And Rhine's inners
Wail
The train's back East
Yet again
The train's back to speak with the clouds
Warsaw
Reach Palac Kultury's
Subterranean deep-throated
Rails
So well-concealed and armored
So undergroundly
Hollow
Warsaw
6:00
Here we've gathered gray
Under bright red unity's stars
The stars that still breed terror
The stars
That were never dusted
While Vistula calmly sails her barges
A little girl unaware of Europe
All her lovers reach out
For the railways
Tied blindly
She scratches
At trains
Still on the same goddamn train
Still in the same goddamn rain
And god, it's a nursery rhyme
And god it resembles
Suicide's hope
Bleached is the starlight round here:
Thanks god
It's still morning
The mornings are only
Gray
At
Europe's last
Yawning
Border
Prypiat
At the River Station's cafe
We stop with a well-comforting hiss
Flames shoot out from the broken
Concrete
Tables
Prypiat
6:23
Prypiat's cafe's served cold
And so are all nameless now
High rise blue tower blue blocks
The cloud still speaks in violet
Cross Lenin Boulevard
Cross empire's faded
Imagery
The trees are watching still
The trees are still alive
We stop
The train gets abandoned
The whole utopian dream
Wasted
Utopian mornings ripped out
The cloud still speaks in violet
Sirens wail
And radios crackle
The cloud speaks through our spirit
As sketches of urban infrastructure
Wilderness rusts the trains
No life lost
No life here at all
The clouds only speak in violet.
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