AEM055 Megafaun

We often speak of sep­a­rat­ing the artist from the work. There’s always a small con­tin­gent of peo­ple who ignore Ezra Pound’s poetry on the grounds that he was a fas­cist and anti-semite. Many more peo­ple, how­ever, approach those poems with an appre­ci­a­tion for their qual­ity despite con­tro­ver­sial ori­gins. In this day and age, nobody really fears the artist as a threat to moral codes. Media is exchanged quicker than stolen tourist notes in Barcelona; do you have the energy (or the stu­pid­ity) to read into G.G. Allin’s back­ground, only to stop lis­ten­ing to his music once you dis­cover he smeared him­self and audi­ence mem­bers with his own feces? Fuck that, I say. Let’s cel­e­brate the fear­less freaks and worry about their alleged dan­ger to civil soci­ety after the party’s been busted up.

Putting our music his­tory caps on for a minute, John Cage more or less had this same covert pro­gram of artis­tic demor­al­iza­tion (or a total­iz­ing spir­i­tual econ­omy of the good which made such judg­ments point­less in their prop­ping up of exclu­sion­ary cat­e­gories) all hid­den behind a cool screen of Zen and down­town philo­soph­i­cal art hap­pen­ings. John Cage was a men­tor to so many great artists of a vari­ety of media (as well as the part­ner of the recently deceased chore­o­g­ra­pher Merce Cun­ning­ham) that he sin­gle­hand­edly made a place for avant-garde Amer­i­can music along­side Cold War prop move­ments like Abstract Expres­sion­ist paint­ing, even going so far as to hock exper­i­men­tal piano tech­niques on a stu­pid and short-lived game show. In say­ing too much, he rev­o­lu­tion­ized the medium and broke down the flimsy dis­tinc­tions between pleas­ant and unpleas­ant sound, leav­ing a world of striv­ing exper­i­menters in his wake.

Speak­ing of the world of striv­ing exper­i­menters, I recently posed a decep­tively sim­ple ques­tion on Face­book to see how peo­ple would respond. The ques­tion was basi­cally this: We speak of musi­cal laws, but who really enforces them? It’s not hard to elim­i­nate the actual legal mumbo jumbo and see that we’re talk­ing about unspo­ken laws, almost what Larry David would call “the unwrit­ten rules” such as tip-toeing around at night. So where do these so called laws of sound claim their author­ity? As my good buddy Daniel Fishkin (Dan­de­lion Fic­tion) had the insight to say:

“Sound is fun­da­men­tally a phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­non, and its char­ac­ter­is­tics inform what we do with it. These aren’t laws so to speak, but pat­terns which through­out his­tory music mak­ers and music lis­ten­ers have found inter­est­ing, sig­nif­i­cant, excit­ing, holy, sexy, beau­ti­ful, or worth fight­ing for. Unfor­tu­nately the acad­emy isn’t the only place you’ll find peo­ple draw­ing boxes in which to put you. Take Cage, Reich, Eno, Merzbow, and Partch to an unin­formed crowd and they’ll just call it ‘mod­ern music’. Before the rules are taught, they exist merely as practice—internal struc­tures, obeyed with dis­ci­pline, love, and devo­tion by their com­posers. [Address­ing me:] You use Schoen­berg as an exam­ple [of a mod­ern music rule­maker]. Set­ting aside his Nation­al­ist streak, all Schoen­berg did was devise a sys­tem and fol­low it to its cre­ative con­se­quences. Let the music his­to­ri­ans judge the mer­its of this sys­tem, or, let the pub­lic decide how lis­ten­able its results are. There is never one way; even the most crit­i­cal and struc­tured musi­cal laws will be found irrel­e­vant in other sys­tems. Seri­al­ism and techno are both out of tune by Car­natic stan­dards. In the mid­dle ages, every­one shunned the ‘dia­bo­lus in musica’, but cen­turies later com­posers delighted in its capac­ity to change keys—and Black Sab­bath loved it so much, they didn’t even bother mod­u­lat­ing. Musi­cal laws are made moot by other laws. Who says par­al­lel fifths sound crude? Who cares if Bach swings?”

Well, cer­tainly not me. Besides point­ing out the obvi­ous cul­tural speci­ficity of musi­cal laws, Daniel’s essay shows us the most impor­tant thing of all: That these rules were made to be broken.

You might think all this hocus pocus is a lot of bull­shit for an intro to “some folk band.” But I can assure you that, just because these guys have beards and occa­sion­ally tour as mem­bers of Akron/Family, just because they grew up friends and col­lab­o­ra­tors of Justin Ver­non (Bon Iver) in Wis­con­sin, they have the game-changing hybridiz­ing abil­ity of any com­poser or band cur­rently mak­ing music. What’s more, they com­pletely demol­ish the notion of the neatly sep­a­rated artist and song. With Megafaun, the whole spirit of the per­for­mance is inex­tri­ca­bly bound to the “musi­cal con­tent”. The first time I saw Megafaun play in 2007, they ended their set by lead­ing a sort of evan­gel­i­cal conga-line into the audi­ence. The most jaded of depressed hip­sters stopped what they were doing and joined the party. That night, we hung out after the show, get­ting drunk and singing songs like the National Anthem and Auld Lang Syne. When you hang, you under­stand. Peo­ple this warm do what they do as a labor of love, not to be cool media mys­te­riosos. If you have never before heard their music, I sug­gest you stop what you’re doing imme­di­ately and listen.

A-side “Dark­est Hour” from 2009’s Gather, Form & Fly gives flesh to many of the issues (er…) fleshed out in this article’s intro­duc­tory pas­sages. The song starts out with a con­crete col­lage of water, vehi­cles, and wind chimes. Sud­denly a faucet is drip­ping. And, um, there’s a drum cir­cle. It sounds like Gang Gang Dance sound­track­ing a water­sports porno, and it’s fuck­ing bril­liant. More con­crete sounds fill the sound­scape. Hark, through the rain, human voices! Is this O Brother Where Art Thou? Or some shit? “I have been wal­low­ing inside the dark­est hour,” they intone with solemn joy. Now the futur­is­tic sonic adven­ture can begin. Ring mod­u­la­tor on vocals, metal­lic per­cus­sion, a vibrat­ing snare band, in-the-red drums…I mean, these guys make the Fiery Fur­naces sound like spokes­peo­ple for anti-psychotic med­ica­tion. And why not, let’s end it with a saloon song.

B-side “Gather, Form & Fly” reveals the other cru­cial side of Megafaun (well, they really do have an infi­nite num­ber of sides, but hey­hey!…). Pure, slow, heart­felt strings n’ har­monies. There’s no mis­tak­ing it: These are Amer­i­can boys bred on a slower, more con­sci­en­tious way of life. You can lit­er­ally hear the music breathe. The spaces are so preg­nant as to ren­der time a mean­ing­less back­drop against which things move and fall in and out of love. When the vocals drop, it is, quite sim­ply, game over. You see why Megafaun are such an under­rated dag­blasted Amer­i­can band? You see how you’ve been wronged for never hear­ing their sleepy notes grace your face? Well, reader friend, it gets worse. If you’ve never met them as peo­ple, you’re just not as happy as you could be in life. These moth­er­fuck­ers bomb sor­row like sucker MCs all day. They have lit­er­ally lifted me out of deep bio­log­i­cal depres­sion on more than one occa­sion. They are lit­er­ally the nicest peo­ple in the world. They are lit­er­ally some of the best musi­cians. I have lit­er­ally said lit­er­ally seven times in this review. I am writ­ing 1200 words on this band because I believe in them like no other band. Megafaun are the back­ing band that Will Old­ham never had, the Band of the future except…well…now.

Jake Brun­ner

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