Beck Teaches Fiery Furnaces Not To Mess With Xenu

A little while ago, Matthew Friedberger of lukewarm indie-suck outfit Fiery Furnaces lashed out at Radiohead calling them ‘bogus’ for releasing a song about Harry Patch, the last surviving British World War I veteran. It later became clear that Friedberger confused Patch the war hero with Harry Partch, the experimental music composer, but chose to fan the fading flames on his Furnaces by acting as if he knew it all along – before taking a completely random swipe at Beck.

“Matt naturally thought it would be interesting to pretend that they wrote a song about the celebrated American composer with a similar sounding name, hence his joking in the interview about Radiohead composing a song with something like 48 notes to an octave,” a post on the band’s MySpace blog read. “It was easy and amusing to imagine Radiohead’s attempt to colonize that relatively arcane bit of our musical lifeworld.  No doubt that would be very successful.” The post went on to say “Matt would have much preferred to insult Beck but he is too afraid of Scientologists.”

Beck, ever the clever one, has decided to let his music do the talking rather than defend his batshit religion. The increasingly-experimental and ever-mutating artist reacted by penning his own tribute song called Harry Partch, which made its debut this morning on Beck.com. The song is a kaleidoscopic circus of meandering psychedelic pop sensibility and intense weirdness that actually does justice to the late experimentalist. Listen here:

There’s some fragmented conventional promise to the track, which can be interpreted as a Pastichio Medley collection of ideas for other songs, or simply as a sampling of Beck’s oddball paisley rainbow. According to the Beck.com post, the song is a tribute to the late composer and his desire to make the body and music unified into what he termed Corporeality. It employs Partch’s 43 tone scale, which expands conventional tonality into a broader variation of frequencies and resonances.

While I at first took Corporeality to be a sociological assessment of corporate overlords in society, without the hippie goggles it more likely has something to do with focusing on interacting with the body of the song itself rather than the driving motivation for it or spirit behind it. Unless, of course, that’s not it at all, in which case you’re welcome to draw your own conclusions.

I’ve been asking why the Rock world doesn’t take a page from the Hip-Hop school of marketing and build their own hype-brewing beef operas for a while now, but Fiery Furnaces are far out of their league with these lame digs. They should’ve left it alone once it became clear that Friedberger was misinformed on the Radiohead song – now they’re just grasping for press. And because there’s an interesting new Beck song as a result, we’re gonna give it to ‘em! Hail Xenu!