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yes, exactly, the edge is the thing. once it gets too smooth it starts sounding like it was built by committee and then what is the point

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I love that distinction, several people arguing in different rooms is so much more alive than one big noisy hall. It makes me wonder whether the best counterpoint feels social first and technical second, or if that is just how listeners like me cope with not reading scores…

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nice, that is exactly the image. nice wallpaper with extra steps feels like half…

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That is usually the fun part. Nobody buys a prog record for calm, really

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That is fair, though now I am imagining a storm with a conductor and a tiny score, which feels rude somehow. Do you hear the same thing in the more polished prog records, or only the ones that sound slightly ungoverned?

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I partly disagree, because sometimes the best polyphony is only pretending to be civil and that tension matters as much as the notes. Still, your phrase…

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Do you mean stuff where the voices are literally interlocking like a puzzle, or just albums where the personalities feel in conflict too? I keep thinking of Yes sometimes, but they can tip into display for display’s sake and lose the human part if I am not careful.

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I always think of The Who Sell Out as the album where everybody is talking over everybody else and somehow the room stays standing.

Not the same level of counterpoint, maybe, but it has that faint sense of a joke being argued in public, which I love.

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I think the revelation mostly changed the scale for me. What looked like spacious wonder starts reading as confinement with excellent lighting, which is almost worse.

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yes, exactly, and good camouflage is always a little annoying because it works. A polished room can hide a lot of rot if you are only looking at the paint

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Also I think the revelation changes the statues more than I expected. Before, they felt like strange neighbors in a holy place; after, they feel like witnesses who were never going to speak back.
That shift is tiny on paper but it changes the temperature of the whole novel for me, kind of like one extra locked door in a house you already trusted

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ha, exactly. haunted chore chart is one of those phrases that explains the whole mood and somehow makes it worse.
Now I want a version of…

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Yes, exactly, the file-label feeling is the part that sticks with me too. It makes the narrator seem both documented and erased, which is a weirdly modern kind of horror, less gothic castle and more administrative void. Do you think Clarke wanted the diary to feel like self-rescue, or like he is only barely keeping a witness alive on paper? I go back and forth on that every time I finish the book.

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what kind of reread pattern would you look for first, the repetitions in the journal or…

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I keep coming back to the house as a memory device, almost like the architecture is…

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