From The Desk Of Quasi: “In Search Of Lost Time” By Marcel Proust

For the past 20 years, Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss have made passionate, raucous music in Quasi. In the beginning, their partnership was marital as well as musical, but it continued past their divorce and concurrent with their work in other bands: Coomes in Heatmiser with Elliott Smith when Quasi began, and later as a guest with Built To Spill; Weiss as a member of Sleater-Kinney, Stephen Malkmus And The Jicks and Wild Flag. Mole City (Kill Rock Stars) is a culmination of Quasi’s many strengths: its oversaturated and distorted sound, its singsong and shouted melodies, its controlled abandon. Coomes will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Quasi feature.

Coomes: More than four thousand pages long, and not much actually happens. But it isn’t really a story, per say—it’s an exploration of the dynamic between fiction and memoir, between the past and the present, perception and reality, perception and perspective. The insight into emotional reality, the ability to evoke situations and settings in depth and detail—it’s pretty much top of the list on so many fronts. Fin de siècle Paris is as strange and exotic to me as Middle Earth, so there’s that, too. Only the first half of the most recent English translation is available in the U.S., so I’ll be hitting the bookstores in the U.K. when I’m there next, after which I can re-read ISoLT in its new iteration. One could also order online, I guess, but, of course, that is no fun.

Video after the jump.