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- Date Released: September 17, 2001
- Genre: Alternative/Punk
- Style: Singer-Songwriter
- Label: Asthmatic Kitty Records / SC Distribution
A playful chamber-music reimagining of Sufjan's most idiosyncratic record
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We Say...
You don't need to know Sufjan Stevens' Enjoy Your Rabbit in order to enjoy Osso's chamber-music reimagining of it, but knowing a little bit about it helps. The second album from the Detroit-born, Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter is, on one level, a catalog aberration: Unlike his largely acoustic and typically lush other offerings, this 2001 disc is entirely instrumental and mostly electronic, complete with digital glitches and moments of cacophonous noise. But like his celebrated Michigan and Illinois albums, Enjoy is a thoroughly conceptual work, one devoted to representing the Sheng Xiao or Chinese Zodiac. Compositions like "Year of the Rat" or "Year of the Snake" musically reference not only the animals being honored but also each of the personality types represented by the Chinese Zodiac's 12 years.
Run Rabbit Run adds another layer of musical analogy. Osso is a New York-based string quartet here playing contemporary classical approximations of Stevens' electronics. This means what you get is a violin imitating a synthesizer mimicking an animal meant to represent people born in particular years. Yes, that's an utterly ridiculous conceit, one that's quintessentially Stevens and makes for esoteric, yet entertaining results. It's a challenge to detect anything particularly ox-like about "Year of the Ox," but its ascending melody, frantic pace, and virtuoso scraping makes for a bold opening. "Enjoy Your Rabbit" is just as explosive, if not at all rabbit-y (unless the bunny in question is Bugs.)
As the set progresses, several tracks like "Year of the Monkey" more closely represent both the corresponding animal and human characteristics, and Osso's musicianship remains audacious throughout. Antony/Grizzly Bear collaborator Nico Muhly contributes a fiery treatment of "Year of the Dragon" that hypnotically builds, drops, and rises again. Although Run mostly dispenses with Enjoy's track order, it ends with the original's closing cut, "Year of Our Lord," a solemn acknowledgment of the composer's religious beliefs faithfully rendered with calm, sustained strokes that contrast sharply with all the previous plucking and slashing. Even in Stevens' whimsical world, certain things are sacred. -
They Say...
Sufjan Stevens' second release, Enjoy Your Rabbit, is a vast departure from the pan-ethnic folk of his debut. Using almost no exterior samples, Stevens crafts an electronic, all-"instrumental" song cycle based on the symbols of the Chinese zodiac. While working within these considerably narrower confines, he still maps out a wide musical territory by using each symbol as a mode, each one exploring different textures and tempos and, in the process, evoking a surprising array of moods. At times eerie and ominous like a backwoods Autechre, other times sounding like more club-oriented fare, Stevens sometimes trades in bloops and bleeps for oblique glitches and crackles, but the underlying guiding principle is wide-eyed exploration that fills nearly every track with a sense of playfulness. Enjoy Your Rabbit never gets too serious, although at times it's very intense. Many tracks even have some sort of musical pun working just under the surface; for instance, "Year of the Horse" is by far the longest, clocking in at over 13 minutes, and "Year of the Ox" has a regular, heavy thudding beat.
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| 01. |
Year Of The Asthmatic Cat |
0:24 |
|
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| 02. |  |
Year Of The Monkey |
4:20 |
|
| 03. | |
Year Of The Rat |
8:22 |
|
| 04. | |
Year Of The Ox |
4:01 |
|
| 05. | |
Year Of The Boar |
3:55 |
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| 06. | |
Year Of The Tiger |
4:24 |
|
| 07. | |
Year Of The Snake |
6:47 |
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| 08. | |
Year Of The Sheep |
3:34 |
|
| 09. | |
Year Of The Rooster |
6:24 |
|
| 10. | |
Year Of The Dragon |
9:26 |
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| 11. | |
Enjoy Your Rabbit |
4:47 |
|
| 12. | |
Year Of The Dog |
4:52 |
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| 13. | |
Year Of The Horse |
13:18 |
|
| 14. | |
Year Of Our Lord |
4:30 |
|
14 Total Tracks, 79:04 Total Length
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Credits
- Sufjan Stevens - Composer // Sufjan Stevens - Producer // Sufjan Stevens - Engineer // Sufjan Stevens - Main Performer // Sufjan Stevens - Instrumentation // Liz Janes - Vocals
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