Like a freezing Mardi Gras celebration, the Mummers march every year, all day, with elaborate costumes, moveable scenery, floats and gigantic bands, dancing and playing all manner of music.
In György Ligeti's Atmospheres every instrument in a symphony orchestra, including every string part, plays its own unique, melodic pattern; all of these parts coalesce into gigantic bands, or spectra, of tone colour that contrast with one another.
He pushes and pulls a pair of levers, which cause the wrecking ball to be inserted into a gigantic rubber band attached to a gigantic slingshot.
Exhibit A: Gigantic, the band's first single, which Deal co-wrote with Francis and the best example of their brimstone-and-treacle dichotomy.
Greens and Blues is, by Thompson's own account, an attempt to out-Gigantic Gigantic, the band's totemic indie disco staple; a song, not insignificantly, co-penned by Deal.
It's not that the stuff isn't beautiful or valuable, it's just that I have nightmarish visions of the whole load being passed down from one generation to the next like a gigantic rubber-band ball, and I'd rather spread some of these lovely things around than sell it all.
Deal earned few songwriting credits in the Pixies and sang lead vocals on even fewer, but Gigantic, from the band's 1988 debut album Surfer Rosa, was among their best moments: jaw-droppingly sexual ("my big, big love") and catchier than a medieval plague.
A secondary pattern of irregular crisscrossing beams is woven through this frame, creating the illusion of a gigantic web of rubber bands straining to hold the building in place.
Then Black, at the microphone, asked Deal, "Do you wanna do another one?" "Sure, why not!" she replied, and the band launched into "Gigantic," a vast, thrumming song driven by Deal's fierce, tiny voice.
