"Winged Migration," which was nominated for an Academy Award for documentary feature, is, like Mr. Perrrin's English, more poetic than precise, with minimal narration and music that sometimes threatens to soar off into the stratosphere.
"It's a precise, direct and realistic narration of a bullet's path.
The solo singing in the first act - Robert Gambill's Oedipus, Jan Hendrik Rootering's Creon, Juha Uusitalo's Tiresias - had been efficient and precise rather than involved, and Steven Berkoff's narration was stagily contrived, though that was more the fault of the rather faded dramatic device than the actor.
The Listener knocks on a table to halt the Reader's narration, as Beckett did in rehearsal, finding the precise rhythm of a line.
"As precise and scientific as a production line at Coventry," honked the narration.
The narration is full of these puzzles – ruminations that seem precise but are actually sloppy, explanations that are carefully elaborated but make no sense at all.
The track itself is built around a rattling drum machine sequence that's simultaneously inchoate and all-too-precise in its scatteredness, shot through with an internal dissonance between thinking-out-loud narration and free jazz-esque vocals: "This is not a nightclub/This is not a nightmare".
Lindeman has a poet's eye for precise, unsentimental detail ("I noticed fucking everything," she sings, recounting a scene at a gas station), and the rigor of her narration recalls Courtney Barnett's "Depreston," maybe the best song ever written about ennui and real estate.
And, finally, the narration.
