One of my favorite little-known musicians, the American expatriate-in-Japan W. David Marx, is about to release his new album, Forty Years From Now, in a timeframe described as ‘soon’. In anticipation, I’d like to kick off with an ex post facto review of one of the best free EPs floating in IntarWebWorld: Marxy’s Beaus in Disarray.

There’s a provisional feel to Beaus in Disarray, available free from Creation Centre: not the “aha! we are fantastically lo-fi, and isn’t that wonderful?” sort of provisionality but in the “well, couldn’t quite figure out an ending to this song” sort of way. One can’t help thinking in listening to the songs that Marx just got bored with some of them and called them done, in much the same way that you deem an essay done when you get tired of thinking about it. This has a compelling effect—the half-finishedness is not unlike the half-finishedness of all things. It’s easy to get convinced, listening to this EP, that there’s no such thing as a completed song, and so musicians may as well damn it all and celebrate the provisionality of existence. That’s probably a bit more reading-into things than Marx expected—in all likelihood, maybe he did just get bored, or maybe the sound is just an aesthetic decision. But to me the songs focus me more on their trajectory than on their immanent content—and I like that.