Ancient Patterns

an essay on Life and Lucky Dragons

Life is Long I (Intro)

I’m not sure anybody would have noticed, but I’ve been absent from the writing scene for a few weeks. To answer your question, yes, I am lazy. But my hope is that through this experimental meditation on a very special artist, I can demonstrate the very artness of life that surreptitiously surrounds all modes of creative production. I’ve been the architect of an imaginary universe whose materials are the very stuff of living. I’m putting my entire life into an aesthetically unified package they call ‘the record’. I’m unpacking my life through my body via sound. (Audience: “Right…”). In other words, sticking to the tradition of saying the unsayable, this piece—my return to writing— shouldn’t really be read. [I don’t mean that literally. Keep reading. I also don’t mean the next sentence literally (keep reading)] I plan to masturbate, and cover way too many topics beyond the scope of a blog post. There is a method to my madness, however (melty-brained intentions aside). This exercise is as much about form, construction, confusion, division and sincerity as any of the topics it purports to unpack. My absence from writing will be included within this return to writing as a source of spectral potency. The transitive property of space in ten dimensions: a=b, b=c. Therefore, a=c. Art is Life. Life is Love. Therefore, Art is Love.

Lucky Dragons

I heard Lucky Dragons for the first time in 2005 when I copped their major-bargain, 47-song CDR compilation-reissue A Sewing Circle. Needless to say, that puppy gave me a lot to digest over many years. When you consider that each Lucky Dragons song is a sound universe in itself (and I really mean it! More than any other artist), the figure of 49 songs begins to feel impossibly large.

It helps that the man at the helm, despite having spent his undergraduate years at Harvard and finished a Masters degree in Music from Brown, doesn’t take himself too seriously. When I think about listening to Have One on Me, Joanna Newsom’s new two-hour masterpiece, part of me dies in the face of genius overload. If I didn’t love it so much, I would insist the album’s grandiosity is its own undoing. A Sewing Circle is like that micro-universe Lisa Simpson (I swear, the jump from Joanna Newsom to Lisa Simpson was not intentional) grew one Halloween: Impossibly huge, but bite-size and pretty cute. Look at these songtitles: “I Made You Nervous (In 1995)”, “One Version of 23-Year Old American Boy”, “Stereo Glitter”, “Oh My Gosh Vagina”, “Flake Jingle” and my personal favorite… “Blunt”. Those who know me should be nary surprised that I’m completely sucked in to this kind of youthful, suburban, fuzzy carpet and VCR and American Flag and weed mythologizing. It’s just too good to pass up. On the other hand, most of the music that assembles a little shrine to hyper-literate slackerdom is a fucking half-assed generic mess. The thing with Lucky Dragons is, he’s a unique genius and demolishes 98% of the bands in Brooklyn who, to quote the inimitable Charlie Looker, “still can’t figure out how to work their guitar pedals.” As if all that weren’t enough to get your ears wet, I discovered during the correspondence leading up to this interview we like, grew up in the same town or something. My hero.

Make a Baby

Though I had been a semi-enthusiastic admirer (at best) of Luke Fischbeck’s recordings for a few months, it was the first time I saw him perform in 2005 when my interest became devout. It’s important to understand that Luke Fischbeck is something They refer to as a ‘total artist.’ Meaning, his aims are not constricted to the paths of any particular media. He thinks, he writes, he dances beautifully, he’s a well-regarded visual artist and, of course, he’s a musical genius. So before I try to paint a picture of what a Lucky Dragons show is all about, understand this is not a band. From the band’s own bio:“Lucky Dragons” means any recorded or performed or installed or packaged or shared or suggested or imagined pieces made by Luke Fischbeck, Sarah Rara, and/or any sometimes collaborators who claim the name. The name “Lucky Dragons” is borrowed from a Japanese fishing boat caught in the fallout of hydrogen bomb test at bikini atoll in the 1950’s. The crew stricken ill, and the boat itself contaminated, the “lucky dragon” became a crystalizing symbol for the previously diffuse worldwide anti-nuclear sentiment. Eventually the boat was painted black, renamed the “dark falcon”, and put into reuse as a fishing vessel, until it was retired and disposed of on the man-made trash island “dream island”, where it remains today.

My vibe is: this kind of band origin myth would be bullshit if it weren’t so sweepingly, tragically sincere. Can’t fault a guy for having deep thoughts about his surrounding environment (Empiricism), not to mention his enveloping interior environment (Metaphysics, Romanticism). It’s also admirable for outlining a clear socio-aesthetic philosophy. Dig how sensitive Fischbeck is to the sometimes awkward relationship between performer and observer. The circumventing route of course is to create a participant-observer situation for everyone involved—to bring the spectator into the aesthetic situation like a small society takes on a curious, bewildered ethnographer.

Lucky Dragons are about the birthing of new and temporary creatures–equal-power situations in which audience members cooperate amongst themselves, building up fragile networks held together by such light things as skin contact, unfamiliar language, temporary logic, the spirit of celebration, and things that work but you don’t know why. There have been hundreds of these simple yet shifting and unpredictable instances–with audiences ranging from the intense intimacy of one person to the public spectacle of thousands of people. At the heart of it all is playing together–building up social collectivities, re-engaging the wonder and impossibility of technological presence. It sounds–and looks–like simple and ancient patterns coming together and falling apart in a sincere attempt to let wires and screens and words become clear and crystal.

Luke Fischbeck’s entire critical dialogue is worth analyzing over and over again. As a total artist interested in spectral and perilous technology, he writes incisively about why music as human production or craft demands to be taken seriously even in a non-Romantic context. The intricate social entanglements of sound technology are a huge part of the history of modern music, particularly music reshaping and responding to the culture of recording. Like another limitless techno-philosopher, Brian Eno, Fischbeck is simply asserting (and rightly so) that Lucky Dragons are about a lot more than just pleasant sound. Much of Fischbeck’s recordings are maddeningly sprawling and schizoid, coming across as curiously indebted to Frank Zappa’s home studio mad science and Madlib’s self-absorbed, weedy beat-shitting. A Sewing Circle even contains this bold yet charming disclaimer: The older the sample is the more it’s getting chopped up and just put in a different context. You might say “that beat sounds like shit” or “that’s a crappy little hook there” or “that part is nice, I can dance to that”— but it’s not about that. I don’t see beautiful or ugly things. It’s all part of your life and that’s great. The emphasis on a non-hierarchical approach to aesthetic reflection, along with an apparent interest in play, suggests that Lucky Dragons have given some thought to the thought of John Cage. Well, good. I’ll be damned if anyone can prove to me after Cage that there is logic to beauty, more specifically to ugliness. Every day is a good day, or so the Zen master says. Why not build up more social collectives focusing on art and music? Why not seek simple and ancient patterns? No one is too busy to sit for a minute and think about how bizarre it is that music even exists, that’s it’s a documented part of every single human society in existence, and even non-human groups if you want to really get outside of Music Humanities. After all, here we are pulling a thread between music and life. Things work and we don’t know why.

So what does all this have to do with the Lucky Dragons performance? Simply, Fischbeck’s performances engage directly with the possibilities and limits of both technology and the self. This is accomplished by the use of an innovative interactive design interface which he refers to as the “Make a Baby” Project. Watch the short doc below to get a better idea of the interface components. The fabric itself is uniquely beautiful, fun to crouch over. The rules of the game are fairly straightforward. The tricky part comes in breaking the invisible social barriers that divide bodies in private space. Luckily, Fischbeck is as limber and seductive a performer as the Lucky Dragons moniker suggests. He dances like a worm at a sacrificial ritual. He walks around the room gently asking patrons to grab a rope from the mysterious quilt on the floor. Suddenly, five or six strangers are holding hands, touching each other, giggling. A pixilated rainbow of strong wave tones flutters around the room, morphing but always orbiting around a self-similarly subliminal center. It is here that music is revealed as a living thing. It is the origin myth enacted: curious bodies interacting to produce sound. I’m not sure exactly what happened that day, but afterwards I felt like there was a little Jake floating out there in the air somewhere. We fucked. We made a baby.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oqkqgq867j8

http://vimeo.com/1534996

Life is Long II (Beauty and Philosophy)

I want to cast the philosophical lens on the aforementioned ‘transitive property of space in ten dimensions’. By ‘ten dimensions’ I only mean to emphasize the ‘worlds-within-worlds’ effect of consciousness/phenomenology. It is the controlling metaphor for understanding art in a universal, rational context: Art as a beautiful way of living; a sublime adventure through all possible dimensions and all possible causal ripples in time; the totality of the thing in itself, from the point of singularity to the ‘present moment’.

The invocation of the word “beautiful” is appropriate here if we are to take Kant’s aesthetic philosophy seriously (we should). In his Critique of Judgment, Kant imagines a tripartite structure of satisfaction—the Pleasant, the Beautiful and the Good. The Pleasant is most similar to what we today call “Taste,” i.e. it’s limited to individual preference. The Good isn’t quite the Platonic Good in-itself; rather it is bound to utility and economy, the “good for”. The Beautiful is the most potent, somewhat like a reference to a universal pulse of satisfaction, free from any concept (for otherwise it would be a utilitarian reflection, or an expression of a personal position, i.e. the Good, the Pleasant). Kant: “The universal voice is, therefore, only an Idea (we do not yet inquire upon what it rests). It may be uncertain whether or not the man, who believes that he is laying down a judgment of taste, is, as a matter of fact, judging in conformity with that Idea; but that he refers his judgment thereto, and, consequently, that it is intended to be a judgment of taste, he announces by the expression ‘beauty’” (15). It’s a good thing Kant is slightly more reluctant about asserting a metaphysical bedrock of Beauty here than he was about outlining the Categorical Imperative. This demonstrates the powerful contradictions that haunt the very real breach of Life, by Art. Yes, art is a powerful technique of the self, infinite from almost every direction you look at it. Except of course, the perspective from which you can’t see it (Death, the Other).

Mick Taussig once told me, earnestly, that reality is like a block of Swiss cheese: Any way you cut it, you produce a different dimensional landscape with its own unique blend of presence and absence. It’s a potent image for thinking about the various slices of art in our life, the endless recapitulations of media, each demonstration a metaphor for living in their eruption through space and then figurative or literal disappearance—time passing, performances ending, people passing and other tricks of consciousness. Consciousness, of course, is the lifeblood of separation. Kantspeak calls this the “transcendental turn.”

According to Mark Lucht, “The revolutionary idea driving the ‘transcendental turn’ is that our perceptual and intellectual capacities do not just reflect or conform to the experienced world, but actively contribute to its structure. We project causality onto any conceptualization of events; it is as if, to use one of Kant’s own analogies, human beings all wear space, time, and causality tinted glasses that can never be taken off. Thus Kant thinks that phenomenal nature is known to be saturated with causality simply because human beings are constituted in such a way that they can experience events in no other way but as effects of prior causes.” Ostensibly, this is a relatively un-contentious assessment of Kantian phenomenology. Here comes the rub, though. “Yet since all experience is tied inextricably to the conditions determined by our all too human capacities, we may no longer hope to know anything about things as they are in themselves, independent of any human contribution” (ix). Come to think of it, since I’m not really interested in the thing in-itself, this blow loses impact. The more troubling issue for me is that we may no longer hope to know anything about the Other, or even non-consciousness. We may make worlds and contribute to the phenomenological cesspool known as the Universe, but we’re also warring specks in a vast cosmos, so who’s to say how important consciousness really is?

The hope is that there’s no need to pit consciousness against the Heavens. I think Lucht says it beautifully: “Kant argues that in the aesthetic consciousness, however, there are hints presented to feeling that nature and reason are rooted in the same supersensible substrate; on the level of thing in itself, underneath phenomenal experience and inaccessible to intellect, rational subject and world may originate in a common source” (xii, emphasis mine). I’m sympathetic to this thread in Kant’s project because I think it provides a wonderful conceptual base for thinking about modern music, as well as pushing things forward to realms “beyond music,” to what one of my favorite songwriters dubbed “full-spectrum music.” Making babies. The life creation inherent in all desire; action; labor; and love.

Advancement in music goes way beyond the scope of metaphysics, of course, straight into physics. Much study has been given to the science of music, but it wasn’t until after the Second World War that some truly astonishing empirical works of musical philosophy began to appear. Notable among is the study Sound and Symbol by Victor Zuckerkandl. It’s a pretty comprehensive philosophical study of music through sound. Many of the examples suffer from gross Euro-centric negligence, such as music’s elaboration of motion through the so-called “Paradox of Tonal Motion” (i.e. Non-spatial motion in the realm of tonality). This concept would be neither philosophically elegant for non-Tonal musicians, nor would it be a paradox, since our adjusted views on space (aided by Theory) have allowed for simultaneously metaphorical and empirical dynamism in art. It is that dynamism which must be faced when you fuck a Lucky Dragon.

Uncle Luke, Where Do Babies Come From?

Jacob: How musical is man?

Luke: “Musical” can be as broadly defined as you want it to be… inside of that there’s qualifying things you can say: consonant / dissonant, in tune / out of tune, rhythmic / arhythmic, formal / informal, harmonious, melodious, catchy, moving, danceable, legible, virtuosic, etc..but all of these thoughts are contained inside of musical, and are often pretty subjective / cultural / transitory / superficial / slippery. It’s been said that the only commonly acceptable way to define “musical” would be the quality of sounds as they exist in time–but exceptions to that pop up as you get more abstract… instruments, written or visual scores, lyrics, recordings, could all be musical in and of themselves, just for the mental image of music they suggest, and the ways in which they organize the universe of possible sounds to be made. Also, one could consider music that approaches the limits of conceivable time… especially as relates to music not made by, only appreciated by humans… such as harmonic intervals and relationships in nature.  “Man”… oh man.… I suppose you could say we are pretty musical by nature, organizing things the way we do… everything very structured, communicative, such a strong need to be understood and to express and to commune in different ways. Whether we are more, or less, musical than other animals, I think the variety of things we call “music” would say we are at least the most open-minded about music. The more I think about it, the best way to define either “musical” or “man” would be as clouds of possibilities, and when the two clouds overlap, and interact, that is completely musical itself! So the answer is: “completely”.

Jacob: If you are as concerned about the computery aspect of the make a baby project as you seem in the youtube documentary, why is the laptop propped up on a pedestal above the performers, as though creating a shrine to technology? Maybe this speaks to the tension between the technological and the metaphysical in your music, or music in general?

Luke: Ha! Good question! That documentary is almost 5 years old now, and it’s only going to get sillier looking as time goes by… what I was concerned about then was the awkward way the computer worked as a window into the process. It’s an organizing intermediary between the sense-world of touch / play / shared control and the sense world of hearing and reacting–as well as an amplifier that strengthens the feedback loop between the two. Transparency was, and is, important to me in the design of the instrument, but figuring out exactly what that meant was difficult. Show the software and provide direct access to it’s working? Hide the software and get nearer to closing the loop between hearing and doing? Since the documentary was made, I’ve figured out how to at least have that translating / reinforcing process set into the background, so that you don’t need to keep checking in with it to keep things moving forward in time. Set on the pedestal as it was, it allowed anyone playing the instrument to gauge their own limits of attention, and put into motion changes in texture / responsiveness / tones / etc… it provided some degree of control outside of the physical interface of the conductive material. Accessibility was equated with transparency.

The auxiliary layer of control is now built into the instrument itself… as the way people, as a group, change their playing, the software reacts to keep things interesting, and reinforce the initial interest in playing with each other. Technology provides both a promise of infinity, and an barrier to infinity, like any framing device…* Sometimes the way we present the technology is kind of shrine-like, or fetishistic, not in the sense that it is standing in for another object, but in the sense that it is an object standing in for something immaterial (that sense of infinity that encourage play, the bind between self and others, the translation of a gesture into an action, etc). Getting this right, aesthetically, was maybe part of my anxiety.

Jake Brunner

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

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

And then there is the question of poetry. I mention poetry because it is so fine an example of how music is more complicated than we give it credit for when we examine it through a philosophical lens. How to delineate the spaces of music and language? How can we think of music as autonomous from “everyday experience” when its very essence is inscribed by Being, the most important entity in Heideggerian (and other influential) philosophy. Stuart Watson, who records under Order or Ardor, shows us how these issues must be met head on in music. His songs are the familiar imbued with a spiritual intensity that emits an inspiring radiance. Not only does Order or Ardor deal with “pure sound,” it deals with pure feeling, pure being and the dynamic play between those forces in carefully constructed auditory space. Watson is a towering intellect, so it comes as no surprise that his music deftly handles weighty themes while still remaining fun in sound.

Writes the man himself: “The band’s name is meant to evoke the Apollonian/Dionysian split described by Nietzsche in ‘The Birth of Tragedy’. In this project I am attempting to harness both intensity of feeling and clarity of composition; I want there to be a dynamic, almost dialectical tension between the elements in the songs themselves. In certain instances, generally my more experimental pieces, ardor wins out over order, as it were, but in other cases, ecstatic energies are reined in and dominated by the “songness” of a piece–passion in the service of reason, order over ardor.

“Musically I draw on Neil Young as a kind of ethical center, while Johnny Cash and Ian Curtis have had the most direct influence on my singing. I have a background in jazz guitar and bass, and that in some measure informs the kinds of songs I write. Among contemporary artists I have the highest respect for Larkin Grimm, Woods, Dirty Projectors, and Animal Collective; these people are making music that inspires me on a daily basis. Philosophy and poetry inform my writing on account of my day gig as an adjunct professor and English PhD student, but I try to keep my songs as direct as possible lyrically. Simplicity of expression is something I value, as are emotional openness and honesty, and I try to make music that reflects that. I am a believer in the visionary and transforming power of love. I am also an adherent to rationality. These two elements come into conflict, hence the band name. These songs were recorded by me in my studio, Deep Dark Carlos. “Borderlands” is a meditation on change, on transformation, on traveling through liminal spaces. “How I Am Blind” is a coming to terms with failed love. Both songs represent a version of the balance of order and ardor in my life.”

On A-side “Borderlands,” the self-ascribed Ian Curtis influence rings true, but as with other bands who draw inspiration from the Joy Division frontman (Interpol comes to mind), Order or Ardor has something deeper below the surface. The synth textures call to mind the grooves of Brian Eno’s otherworldly masterpiece, Another Green World. There are also hints of the restless post-punk experimentalism of Xiu Xiu. The drum machine has that crisp analogue sound of New Order and other similar 80s New Wave bands (it is in fact the same drum machine used by New Order). One shouldn’t take this as an act of gearheadism. Rather, this points to one of the more distinguishing features of Order or Ardor’s music—that is, the sound space in itself. Watson happens to be an expert producer (full disclosure: He’s engineering and producing my new album) with an uncanny ear for mix, richness and instrumental clarity. It’s a rare thing to have a musician with battling talents in songwriting and production, although I suppose in the age of laptop studios it’s becoming increasingly common. But this is more than just some slapdash home recording experiment. It’s the continuation of a method made possible by home studio heads like This Heat and Phil Elverum. In other words, having New Order’s drum machine in your studio, if you’re not a jive fool, means incorporating a texture that has great meaning for you after years of listening. By entering that sound into the mix, Watson is participating actively in music history, recycling and readapting sounds to create new combinations. This is how music goes forward (I hesitate to use the word “progresses”) and creates a somewhat coherent narrative instead of little style islands, episodic flashes in a vacuum

But let’s not get bogged down in historical musicology. Though Order or Ardor certainly provides a platform for waxing philosophic (like all good music), it’s also about enjoyment. Take B-side “How I am Blind” which places us into poppier territory than does “Borderlands.” An Aphex Twin-reminiscent drumbeat and humming synthesizer provide the perfect background for Watson’s pleasantly simple guitar progression. However, the brighter the pop song, they say, the darker its demons. “I showed how I am blind” intones Watson, simultaneously deadpan and crushingly emotive. Sad dance!

Ultimately, if these songs prove anything, it’s the overwhelming and inescapable presence of feeling in music. Scoff if you will at the idea of philosophy in music, but both derive from two important sources: Being and Feeling.

Jake Brunner

Side A — Borderlands Download audio file (01 Borderlands.mp3)

Side B — How I am Blind Download audio file (02 How I am Blind.mp3)

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

Brooklyn’s Little Women understand the issues at stake here. The quartet, comprised of Darius Jones (alto saxophone), Jason Nazary (drums), Travis Laplante (tenor saxophone) and Andrew Smiley (guitar) deal in sounds that present a real challenge to traditional notions of beauty and pleasure. It takes about 1 second of listening to A-side “[1] Untitled” from the Teeth EP to hear what I mean. A waterfall of high-pitched shrapnel comes raining down without warning. The drummer sounds like a robotic octopus gone haywire. It’s not all sonic warfare here, however. About a minute in, some serious rhythmic unison interrupts the free-jazz tapestry being woven previously. Another minute goes by and suddenly the rhythm section has disappeared. We’re floating in a saxophone cloud assembled by Ornette Coleman’s long-lost evil brother. A roaring punk section rips us out of that zone. Proving that “out” music doesn’t necessarily mean pathological melody-aversion, the last few minutes of the song ride out on a pretty serious hum-dinger (well, before dissolving into another atonal freak-out at the end for good measure).

At this point, some of you faithful readers may be questioning my commitment to this Cagean Zen philosophy of “everything is beautiful.” After all, there are certainly some parts of the song we just listened to that would really stretch the essence of the word “beautiful.” Isn’t the point rather that ugliness has its place in music alongside its glorified Other? It’s important to remind ourselves here of the precarious nature of cultural ideals with large amounts of stock. Our theories of musicality and aural pleasure are like an anesthetizing distraction from all the directions we artists and art consumers have to choose from. Who said music had to be beautiful all the time? Or is there even a transformation effect, where beauty becomes displeasing and the base reclaims the upper hand? Walter Benjamin prophesied that man’s aesthetic telos was to find beauty in its own self-annihilation. The question then remains: Why can’t there be a place for the grating, the deranged, the violent in our musical universe?

As a perfect example of the grating, the deranged and the violent in music, let us now turn to Side-B “[4] Untitled” from the same EP. The song starts off with a dissonant (gotcha!) foghorn which at one point inexplicably begins dueling with bagpipes (not actually). After a minute or so of this raw bleating, the main event begins. Someone fingers a saxophone almost inaudibly while the remaining band members whimper into microphones like scared children. This continues until these grown men (not Little Women) are screaming like possessed lunatics. Then, they growl like animals and slowly die out. It’s sick, disturbing and incredibly powerful. I find the theatricality of this piece really interesting. It’s a forward-thinking composition that introduces new realms to me. If you find this stuff intolerable, I don’t blame you. But before you write it off as “unlistenable” or whatever, think about the language you’re using to describe these sounds. Think why you’re turned off by it and what this has to do with your learning of a certain system of musical signs. Invoking Cage again, “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”

Jake Brunner

Side A — (1) Untitled Download audio file (01 1 Untitled.mp3)

Side B — (4) Untitled Download audio file (02 4 Untitled.mp3)

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

The world of sound is a strange one, indeed. Think about it. We pay money to watch people make sounds. If people make really cool sounds, we pay more money. I’ve heard people make some pretty cool sounds in my day. But it’s all a hoax. I sincerely regret to inform you that the current sound world you inhabit is limited, a sham. After all, there’s a potentially infinite combination of sonic textures to be tapped. If it’s in the range of human hearing, we should be able to hear it. The problem, however, is that there’s a finite number of instruments in the world. The objects we have for realizing sound potential are inherently limited.

This is one of the many reasons why experimental instrument design is such a vital field in music. Instrument designers are like musical scientists, forging new vehicles for the manifestation of previously unimaginable timbres. If the potential sound world is limited, then there must be a whole range of textures waiting to be uncovered. Jon Scoville, in his introduction to Bart Hopkin’s useful Musical Instrument Design, waxes philosophic on the matter: “There is an ancient imperative lodged in our DNA which asks us to make music. Our intuitive understanding of being alive on this blue planet is most poetically expressed in our songs and dances. In our instinct to organize sound and movement we fully express both the ambiguities and certainties of life. Making the instruments that make the music that makes the soundtracks to our lives is one of the ways that we reconnect ourselves with the world and with our ancient heritage. Thus we join that long tradition of (mostly) unknown instrument makers who gave birth to drums, violins, lutes, bamboo zithers, steel drums, gamelan, and the countless other instruments that produce our planet’s songs and symphonies” (iii).

We can now add to that list the daxophone, a friction idiophone invented by German musician and typographer Hans Reichel. Pictured with Dandelion Fiction above, it’s essentially composed of a variety of thin wooden blades (or “tongues”) inserted into a wooden block, which is in turn amplified by small contact microphones. The tongues are then bowed with a horsehair bow and bent to alter pitch. Daniel Fishkin, the brains behind Dandelion Fiction, is one of the few daxophone players you will ever meet. He learned how to play and design this unique instrument under Mark Stewart, an instrument designer, founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and ensemble musician for Steve Reich and Arnold Dreyblatt. The sound of the daxophone can be accurately described as mammals mating (this could be why one of the songs on the 2008 Dandelion Fiction LP You’re A Strong One is called “Badger Thumpin’.”)

Check out A-side “Leg Shimmy” for a glimpse into the world of the daxophone. The instrument’s vocal quality is immediately apparent here, particularly in the song’s first few seconds where the pitches jump around so much as to sound like a muffled reproduction of a conversation. The track quickly settles into a fun little groove, proving that you can be on the cutting edge of 21^st century music and still have a sense of humor. Towards the end of the song, a mysterious drone is introduced. Is it feedback? A tape? Frankly Mr. Shankly, it matters not. Sometimes the mystery of sound can be as important as the exact documentation of its production. This couldn’t be more true for the epic nightmare-techno of B-side “Unravel With Ease.” I could spend all week trying to figure out how all the sounds here were produced, but I’d rather let it pummel me with its Stravinksy-like syncopation and relentless pounding. There’s definitely something to letting the sounds occur without further investigation. The song’s directions are pretty clear.

Although the similarities between Dandelion Fiction and Animal Collective are scant, they have some interesting things to say on the topic of divulging sound information. Quoth Avey Tare: “Part of the mystery of a lot of the bands we like was their ability to create really special sonic environments. It was something that made us think and inspired us to make music of our own. If you just spend a lot of time telling, especially younger people, what you’re doing and how everything is done, you feel like you’re not going to push people to experiment on their own and try to figure things out on their own. And I think that’s another good thing about not saying what we’re doing all the time.” Indeed, if music and experimental instrument design are about discovery, then an element of mystery is the perfect catalyst for exploration. Keep us in the loop, I say, but not too close.

Jake Brunner

Side A — Leg Shimmy Download audio file (01 Leg Shimmy.mp3)

Side B — Unravel With Ease Download audio file (02 Unravel With Ease.mp3)

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and
Download the album “You’re A Strong One” @ archive.org

When I spoke to Elverum he was reluctant to embrace an overarching thematic interpretation of his music. “I guess it’s true that my songs can seem focused on nature, but it’s not intentional,” he said. “It’s just the world that makes sense to me. Maybe it had to do with growing up with my family and going on camping trips… But I’m really hesitant to talk about nature as this picturesque, separate place other than the world we live in. When I sing about nature, I feel like I’m trying to sing about the same world that we all live in and that there are these totally wild things that are totally natural that happen in our daily lives. It’s not like you live your life, and then you go on vacation to a beautiful place, and then come back to real life.”

After the heady explorations of Mount Eerie the album, The Microphones were reincarnated as Mount Eerie the band. It’s unclear what exactly prompted the name change. Of course, that element of mystery is a vital part of Elverum’s aesthetic language. “All of my stuff that I do I end up having not that much control over it. It just comes out, you know? So I can only look at it from the same perspective as you, like ‘oh well from this era there are a bunch of songs about this topic and from another era there are a bunch of songs about that.’” This might seem like a frustratingly lazy attempt at self-definition, but there’s something much deeper at play. “I kind of consider all of my songs to be part of one big project,” he explains. “Although some songs are little islands of their own, they don’t get touched once they’re done, most of them are just part of this larger conversation that I’m having with myself.” Rather than try to plot a grand aesthetic mission and force all his music into that mold, Elverum writes songs about life the way we actually live our lives—with great uncertainty and open senses.

That openness has recently pervaded the recording process. A-side “Lost Wisdom,” the eponymous track from Mount Eerie’s 2008 LP, was a spontaneous home-recording session with Julie and Fred Doiron of the influential Canadian outfit Eric’s Trip. “Well, we didn’t intend to record an album,” Elverum explained. “We were just casually recording these songs in my studio, for no reason. It was ambiguous what they were going to be used for.” Despite Elverum’s modest deferral to the forces of spontaneity and ambiguity, this song proves to be a mini-masterwork. Just dig the lyrics, which are so personal as to render personhood an uncanny specter: “My lost face in the mirror in the gas station/ Who are you but my face that I wake up with alone?”

B-side “Stone’s Ode” charts an epiphany at the foot of natural wonders. Suddenly, “life has new meaning. Alive, propped on bones, overwhelming feeling.” Sentiments like these abound in Elverum’s music, which seeks beauty in the self as much as it does in the wonder of our environment (broadly construed). It’s the mysterious alchemy of the personal and the universal that gives Mount Eerie its unfamiliar familiarity. Sometimes, magic. The great expanse of our senses induces a moment of spiritual clarity. The vessel of spirit, the self, becomes untenable, vaporous.

Jake Brunner

Side A — Lost Wisdom Download audio file (01 Lost Wisdom.mp3)

Side B — Stone’s Ode Download audio file (02 Stones Ode.mp3)

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

Virant went on to study poetry and music at Bard college, a hotbed of young artistic activity along the Hudson. Under the tutelage of the formidable critic and composer Kyle Gann, among others, he developed some serious compositional chops, going on to write an absolutely killer opera (as he put it, “a chamber ensemble with chorus in a story-telling psychological thing opera” ) including the personae Peppermint Man, Shades McGlenn, and Shades’s band—The Wobbler (drums), The Doctor (guitar) and Taps Fahrenheit (bass). He also developed a killer work ethic. A friend once told me that Virant refused to party on a Friday night because he was reading about Mahler. “Why are you reading about Mahler,” my friend asked, “if you hate him so much?” “Because I hate him!” responded Mr. Virant.

The picture I’ve painted here might not match the accompanying musical material. In a way, however, the stylistic diversity (and sense of humor) on display here are an even further testament to Virant’s abilities. Take A-side “Baby, Don’t Cry,” a wonderful 50s-inflected ditty. Barely hanging together, admirably casual, it’s not unlike the booze-soaked tapes of Beck’s Mellow Gold or the psilocybin pastiche of Ween. Plus, you gotta love any song with enough vocal fuzz to make pipes sound like a synthesizer.

B-side “How Much Corn Can You Put Up Your Nose?” follows genre-hopping suit, this time venturing into the realm of kinky techno. The title is ridiculous, the lyrics are ridiculous (I bet you can guess them without even hearing the song), but the song avoids total silliness by virtue of its awesomeness. All in all, it’s a pretty inventive arrangement with crazy-sounding and hilarious acid synths. Outstanding!

Talking to Virant, I’m reminded of the avant-garde/pop, serious/kitsch dichotomies of Frank Zappa, a man who wrote songs about fellatio in Spanish and compositions conducted by Pierre Boulez in the same career. “I like to do a lot of different music, not styles (ain’t got none), but performance situations. Sometimes the garage-band rock band thing (The Triangle Goons), sometimes, sometimes I will dress up as an old burnout performer named Shades McGlenn and tell stories and sing songs. I was born in Georgia in the middle of nowhere, but I’ve been away from that long enough that it’s hard to claim I’m a “Southerner” in a musical sense. I mean, I like the Allman Brothers Band, but I sort of fucked that up by going to school, so of course, now I listen John Cage and Mozart a whole lot, too. I do a lot of writing because it’s supposed to be a whole lot of things working towards one goal. Prince and Jimmy Page are Prince and Led Zeppelin not because they just played guitar or wrote songs. Those motherfuckers put on makeup and dragon suits, spent years developing a personal style of recording their music and making a sound, AND they wrote and played the music to incorporate it all. So, what I’m trying to do is to try to figure out a way of incorporating poetry people would otherwise not read, with music people would not listen to, with a body that no one would desire, and work with it!”

Jake Brunner

Side A — Baby, Don’t Cry Download audio file (01 Baby Dont Cry.mp3)

Side B — How Much Corn Can You Put Up Your Nose? Download audio file (02 How Much Corn Can You Put Up Your Nose_.mp3)

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A-side “Ginger” is a crash-course on everything the band does well. It starts off with a wave of texture so simultaneously diaphanous and huge it feels like U2 hallucinating in a cathedral. Insistent drums pound out a simple rhythm on toms and snare, a tinny acoustic guitar creeps stealthily in the left headphone, a beautifully cheap keyboard holds down the bass line. It’s the element of restraint that makes the track so successful. The marriage of sophisticated textures with streamlined structures makes for an irresistible hypnotic thrust. By the time the guitar stabs creep in towards the end of the verse, you’re almost paralyzed by bliss. Finally the curtain draws back, revealing a chorus like a wave of melodic reverb. At times it sounds like bouncy guitar pop of the Smiths slowed down to the speed of a slow-moving liquid. In a word: heavenly. They wisely ride out the chorus to victory, throwing in a beautiful guitar solo and a goosebump-inducing harmony of the words “I love you.” If it sounds corny on paper, get thee to a listening station and revel in great pop’s transformation of the familiar into the unfamiliar.

B-side “I Want a House” goes for drier sonic territory. “I want a house built of old wood,” intones Andrea Estella. “You can paint it any color you like, so long as I can live with you.” At once naïve and calculatingly obsessive, this simple request becomes haunting when paired with a quiet tom-pattern and a ringing, sitar-like keyboard tone. Following “Ginger,” the tune gradually adds subtle texture—some quiet bells here, a chorus of staggered voices there—before milking the foundational groove for all it’s worth. The latter half of the song is simply badass, almost reminiscent of a less junkie-bummed Sly Stone. Dare I say, funky?

I spoke with guitarist and voxman Eric Cardona about the history and future of the band. “We’ve been together one year and a half, but have been wanting to do this for about 5 years. We were always in different bands, and were each others favorite members. Our main influences range from many different things– all of our friends, John K. especially.….Kate Bush, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Cocteau Twins, CAN,  Hayao Miyazaki movies, Cats (not the play, we really really love our cats), Roy Orbison, things like that. Our new EP, Aquarellas, will hopefully be done before the new year, we’ve been working very hard on it. We started out very into our recordings, but balancing that out and getting tight with more sexual live performances is our next move, playing lots of shows, etc. In the next phase of us we hope to become better at being a band.”

Jake Brunner

Side A — Ginger Download audio file (01 Ginger.mp3)

Side B — I Want a House Download audio file (02 I Want a House.mp3)

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

A-side “Severe Confection” draws heavily from the interval-hopping style of bourgeois-shocking dissonance. If it isn’t serialism, it’s damn close. Also worth noting is that “Confection” was penned by Dustin Hurt, brains behind the excellent Philadelphia experimental music non-profit Bowerbird. If you’re tired of grinding, atonal chords and a total abuse of the metrical form, I hear you. But it’s the gentle shift of predictable expressive forms that saves this band from sameness. Take midpoint of “Severe Confection.” After several minutes of rhythmic acrobatics with notes practically suffocating the aural space, a pregnant pause emerges, almost awkwardly bare. For a moment, you think they’ve cleverly pulled the plug, given us the ol’ get’em when they least expect it. And then, rising out of the silence, a slowly growing chord of male voices, groaning more than singing, and then—wham! Three more minutes of skronk. A severe confection, indeed.

It’s moments like that that make Normal Love easy to, well, love. You can marvel at their technical prowess (which is, to say the least, daunting) or the jaw-dropping complexity of their compositions, but you’ll be missing the whole picture. As bassist Evan Lipson once put it, “everybody always comes up to us after shows and are like, ‘Whoa what was that chord you guys were playing? Was that a [insert very academic chord]?’ But it’s not at all about that.” Truer words have never been spoken. Here’s a band that mixes its musical progress with playfulness, joy, intensity, humor, and a restless hunger for new combinations. Sure, if you go see Normal Love you’re going to see a bunch of guys hunched over practically pitch-black sheet music. But you’ll also see them do it passionately with smiles on their faces and witty crowd banter. Plus, you’ll be surrounded by a bunch of drunk hipsters in someone’s living room. Carnegie Hall this ain’t.

B-side “Ndugo” (whose title I hope, but haven’t confirmed, is a reference to Jack Nicholson’s African pen-pal in “About Schmidt”) really underscores Normal Love’s playful side. The onslaught of muted plucks in the beginning verges on silly without losing its access to the realm of the awesome. Throw in an unexpected dynamic explosion, a Varèse-like siren glissando on the violin and skittering snare rims, and we’re getting into some truly bizarre shit.

Believe me, liberating “difficult” music from the confines of the academe is no small feat. There are probably plenty of over-educated detractors out there who would object to Normal Love’s lighthearted approach to the avant-garde, just as there are probably plenty of Zs fans (or former members, rumor has it) who can’t believe that such serious music should be sharing bills with a bunch of Nuggets-worshipping art-school dropouts with asymmetrical haircuts. The difference, of course, is that Zs is deadly serious, whereas Normal Love brings something else to the head table. It’s called heart.

Jake Brunner

Side A — Severe Confection Download audio file (01 Severe Confection.mp3)

Side B — Ndugo Download audio file (02 Ndugo.mp3)

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

Charlie Looker was a founding member of that band “back in 2001 when I was just a tiny shoot,” as he put it to me. As a student at Wesleyan during Zs’ formative years he would commute down to New York for rehearsals, the rest of his band being enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music. He even traveled to the Czech Republic for a music conference with members of Zs. As Charlie once told me, “we were really up in each others’ heads” (how else could one make music so f-ing tight?). Clearly, the incredible uniformity of the band’s expression was an extension of their personal connection, their countless hours spent together poring over the smallest of musical details. So you can understand my surprise when Charlie left Zs to pursue his solo material as Extra Life.

Extra Life marks a certain departure from the music of Zs. Although Charlie was responsible for one of the only (and best) Zs songs with lyrics in “Nobody Wants to be Had,” very little of the Zs material displayed the wonderful melodic sensibilities that have been put to the fore in his solo material. “This was my return to singing, which had been a part of my music pre-Zs but had fallen by the wayside,” explains Charlie. “It was my return to my voice, but in a way it was my real beginning as a vocal stylist with my own vibe. I got so inspired by the solo songs that I decided to form a band and do tight arrangements of them. I got so into the band that I left Zs to do Extra Life full-on.”

Extra Life still retains some of the compositional moves that made Zs such an intriguing force. The element of rhythmic abstraction, a topic I had the pleasure of discussing many times with Charlie, is still retained in all its glory. Check the asymmetrical sludge of A-side “I Don’t See It That Way.” It’s a true feat of the manipulation of musical time. You want to sway with its giant, lumbering riff, but the temporal irregularities make you quiver as though at the feet of a stumbling drunk monster. This is one of the best examples of a consciously non-metrical rhythmic style, where the rhythm is freed from traditional parameters and given a new range of unpredictability and expression. The song also reveals Looker’s gift for textural contrast. The high-tone accentuated hi-hat triplet is a wonderful move that gives the melody an even more dynamic quality and makes those bass tones seem all the more fearsome. Looker traces some of these moves back to his days at Wesleyan when he was fortunate enough to study under modern musical deity Anthony Braxton: “I was never a deep disciple of Braxton, but I took classes with him in college and played a little with him. He is deep. I can say that playing Braxton’s music exposed me to a certain rigorous approach to very irregular rhythms. That shows up clearly in the music I wrote for Zs and on a lot of the first Extra Life record.” Of course, this shouldn’t be taken as an opportunity to pigeonhole looker as some kind of prog nerd. Looker’s manipulation of musical material goes far beyond the look-what-I-can-do aesthetic of many similarly technically proficient musicians. He once described his compositional process as letting the notes tell him, so to speak, the rhythmic organization, as opposed to entering the creative zone with a preconceived idea of which moves to employ. In more recent correspondence, Looker hints at a new direction: “Nowadays my rhythms are straightening out again (relatively speaking). So who knows where the Braxton influence has gone. That rhythmic language isn’t really specifically Braxtonian anyway, it’s part of modernist classical music too.”

Extra Life’s influences run much deeper than 20th century abstract alchemists: “Some of the music that has moved me most deeply over the years has come from experimental metal, modern classical composers, Medieval and Renaissance music, free jazz, goth and new wave pop. My lyrics are always somewhat informed by what I’m reading, which over the past year has included Georges Bataille, Oscar Wilde and the Sopranos. When I write music I draw upon everything I have ever loved, but so much of that is unconscious. It’s often hard to say where certain elements or aspects come from. I don’t make music as a direct reference to influences from the past, the way most current bands in indie rock do. Whatever I may be informed by, my record or book collection isn’t the topic of the music.”

This is what gives the music of Extra Life its particular power. Rather than constructing a lineage of influences, Looker constructs a lineage of experience that is both intensely private and cosmically radiant. When he sings about the dog-eat-dog mentality of modern life on “I Don’t See It That Way,” he’s not just painting a confession of personal experience, he’s letting us in on the discussion as if to say, “you’re a part of my world, you’re implicated in this giant social web, where do you stand?” As Looker explains, this is by no means accidental: “What inspires Extra Life on a more general level are my personal experiences and feelings, conscious reflection, pure willpower and most importantly communion with the most unconscious levels of intuition. The unconscious processes are what’s most important because that’s what imagination really is. Any sensitive person can have intense emotions, any intelligent person can reflect on them, and willpower can always be summoned; but when these things resonate with the Unconscious, both personal and collective, that’s when the music takes on the mystic power I aim for. That’s why very different people can relate to Extra Life, people with different experiences, tastes, backgrounds. No matter how personal or esoteric the source is, Extra Life aspires to the universal.”

B-side “I’ll Burn,” an acoustic version from a split 10” with the Dirty Projectors’s Nat Baldwin (Shatter Your Leaves, 2009), originally on the debut LP Secular Works (I and Ear, 2007), foregrounds one of the most present forces in Extra Life: Medieval music. Listen to how Looker flexes his melismatic muscles like a modern-day Machaut, a fittingly gorgeous vehicle for sad, humble lyrics. “Medieval music is beautiful and cold,” he told me, ”It’s some of the most gorgeous, serene, entrancing, transcendent music ever. Even though it’s thoroughly pleasing to the ears, and hardly ever dissonant, it’s still so alien in many ways. The medieval sense of melodic unfolding is so exotic and subtly nuanced, I can’t even claim to have a full grip on it. There are a million nerdy musical details which I love about Medieval music. But I think for me it’s really about the spirit of it. This was a time when not only did everyone believe in God and lived every minute quaking in fear and love of him, but they had a correspondingly devout belief in the power of music to change consciousness. All medieval music is just radiant with the deep belief that music is a movement of the soul. You can feel that conviction emanating from it. They believed that tuning systems and musical intervals corresponded to relationships of the planets and stars. Cosmic harmony, music of the spheres. To them, how two notes were combined wasn’t just an issue of aesthetics but one of the highest cosmic, moral and spiritual order. Half the bands in Brooklyn right now can’t even work their guitar pedals. You see what I’m getting at here? I also love Medieval music because I feel it has this real sense of humility, in a way which I could see as both dark and enlightened. It doesn’t sound proud or self-congratulatory like classical music or later European music. There’s this sense of Man as a tiny insect crawling the earth, totally humble in the face of invisible forces which could either uplift or crush him. It’s shrouded in darkness and abasement but it aspires upward toward the divine. It’s the sound of a culture starting over from nothing after Rome burned. The start of the Age of Pisces, Christ’s age. I think you can feel this in the music. In a way I guess it’s a far cry from our current cultural spirit, but if our civilization destroys itself we’ll find ourselves again in something like this Medieval state: hanging our heads before God, picking through ruins and using our imagination to interpret omens while we pick through burnt books, shards of bones and cell phones.”

Jake Brunner

Side A — I Don’t See It That Way Download audio file (01 I Don’t See It That Way.mp3)

Side B — I’ll Burn (Take 2) Download audio file (02 I’ll Burn (Take 2).mp3)

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

On the Philly circuit, she was known as Wiseblood. Playing intimate, mostly house-set shows with the constantly evolving crew of Dark Juices (Jim Strong of Wrinkle, Floating Market; Jordan Burgis of The Furniture, Quantum Spine Recordings; many others), Mering thoroughly stoked the Philadelphia community. At that time, her music was a slab of melancholy folk with goosebump-inducing, butter-voiced melodies adorned by the Dark Juices’ mysterious amalgam of tape-collage, sonorous metallic objects and other unusual textures. In short, it killed, and it was the most beautiful music I’d ever heard in my 19 years on Earth (stick that in your hyperbole pipe). So much so, in fact, that after a performance at the now-defunct Haunted Cream Egg, I approached Mering with these words: “One day, I want you to be singing to me with a knife between your feet, cutting my throat as I die by your song.” Melodramatic, I know. I meant every word.

Fast forward to 2009. A lot has happened since for Mering since then. After a stint in Portland that included music classes at Lewis and Clark college and falling in with the excellent Americana-cum-psychedelic free-improv band Jackie O-Motherfucker (whose 2000 release Fig. 5 deserves a serious listen), she returned to the Philadelphia area to continue performing and recording. 2007 saw the self-release of her debut full-length, the intriguing Strange Chalices of Seeing. Though the record contains Mering’s trademark pipes, they’re often matched, if not obscured, by infinite layers of mystery noise. Sometimes they’re not present at all, as in the case of “Remote Beach at Avernus à Stretched Out Staircase,” which begins as a Paleolithic drum circle under Angus Maclise-like oscillation freakouts and then transitions, with the elegantly abrupt whir of a tape-splice, into unsettlingly cavernous drone territory.

It’s an exercise in willfully obscure textures, sound for the sake of mystery and pleasure, a scarily focused mystical text that makes you grit your teeth at the sight of “Lo-Fi.” Sure, this isn’t high-production studio wizardry (it’d be abandoning its DIY ethic if it were), but it’s no cheap gimmick either. It’s fidelity being used self-consciously, not just as a means of representation (i.e. trying to maintain fidelity to the sound of the original source) but rather as a source of abstract expression (i.e. obscuring the original source in novel ways to produce new, more meaningful textures—“a splinter in the eye is the best magnifying glass”). It’s the moment when the painter stops using paint to represent a nude woman ‘realistically’ and throws paint on the canvas to express the violence subtending her appeal. This is the moment when Wiseblood was reincarnated as Weyes Bluhd—when gorgeous gothic hymns were misspelled as acid-drenched landscapes with a menacing, subliminal center.

Which brings us to the “Shattered Mirror”/“Liquor Castle” 7-inch. “Shattered Mirror” marks an interesting development in the Weyes Bluhd catalogue. Not as pretty as some of the earliest ballads (which, as far as I know, have never been released), not as deranged as some of the material on Strange Chalices of Seeing, the track is a true balancing act of influences. I hear an acknowledgment of pop classics in the drumbeat, that classic Jesus and Mary Chain-by-way-of-The Ronettes stomp. But in typical Weyes Bluhd fashion, the familiar element is refracted through a prism of mystery. The result is a beat without a snare, the drum’s familiar pop replaced by a ringing, bell-like sonority in some parts and a blood-curdling, trebly scrape in others. Even the pretty vocal melody is made more severe by an undercurrent of surrealistic spoken-word (“time is like a mirror, counting the days and eyes”). This sound certainly supports the closest thing to a musical manifesto I ever got from Mering: “I want to play an ancient song, but through the sonic elements of tape collage and electronics, accidental sounds that rejuvenate the melodic archetype while also thrusting it into the future.”

The element of poetry is brought to the forefront in “Liquor Castle,” which begins with a long feedback-fu*ked moan and continues through a hailstorm of harmonics guitar (a large board zither that isolates string timbre into individual harmonics, invented by NY-godhead and guitar-orchestra pioneer Glenn Branca) and occasionally decipherable words. I can’t pretend to know what’s happening in the language-scape—which is probably more than half the point—but it has its moments of weird narrative clarity (“they asked me why I was drinking from up there, that’s what they use to wash their floors up there”). Weyes Bluhd has carved out a truly unique soundworld with these tracks. The closest reference point that I can think of is UK-underground stalwarts The Shadow Ring, whose wordsmith Graham Lambkin has performed alongside Mering and made an obvious impression on her musical vocabulary.

If these tracks are any indication, Weyes Bluhd’s forthcoming LP will be a strong marriage of her across-the-spectrum influences, from straightforward songwriting to confusing noise of otherworldy timbre. As much as the Blood in Natalie Mering’s moniker suggests love, longing and connection, it also signals violence of the psychedelic cult-horror variety. You may not want to die listening to this music, but you may not have a choice.

Jake Brunner

	Side A — Shattered Mirror Download audio file (01 Shattered Mirror.mp3)		Side B — Liquor Castle Download audio file (02 Liquor Castle.mp3)
[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

Strawberry Hands, then, is not a pop band. They don’t make music for you: they don’t reach out and grab you by the lapels (or the cardigans, or whatever) and say listen. The duo that makes up the band, Jake Brunner and Jim Strong, make music for themselves. And this is refreshing.

Take “The Prettiest Song in the World”, side A of this 7-inch. Whisper quiet, almost burlesque sounding in its rhythm and harmony, with intersecting, cooing falsettos, the group has created a whole new kind of eeriness that is powerful in its quiet way. It is so creepy, in part, because of the conflicting tendencies they convey: on the one hand comforting and intimate, their music is also deeply anxious in a way that’s difficult to identify. You might call it a kind of resigned mourning. You get the sense that these guys should have laid down the soundtrack to one of those post-war European noirs, serving as the house band an empty salon that stubbornly refuses to close.

This is all my reaction to the music, of course, but perhaps my way of reacting to it is the whole point. Repetition – a main theme of Strawberry Hands’s work – leads to hypnotic impressions. Brunner waxed philosophic to me in an email about this:

“But even strict repetition is a kind of illusion. There are lots of composers that play with the idea of repetition and its inherent paradoxes. The thing about repetition in music is that people only think about the musical material, but they don’t consider the interaction of human perception with that musical material. That’s why something repeated many many times can take on a completely different character, like with Reich’s early tape loops, or with Satie’s Vexations which is a page of music played for like 8 hours.”

Clearly these guys have thought about their music. Even the texture of their sound is meticulously crafted. Though you might call the music lo-fi, this is really a misnomer: lo-fi implies some degradation of sound quality, whereas these guys deliberately morph their sound to their own tastes. It takes a little getting used to, but the warmth conveyed on “The Prettiest Song in the World” has a lot to do with the texture they create, which sounds like an exaggerated version of the sound you get from vinyl.

The self-titled B-side to this record is equally as haunting as the “The Prettiest Song”, and it re-emphasizes the importance that Strawberry Hands place on repetition – it is essentially a drum loop with various metallic-sounding samples, modified guitars and what sounds like a organ jumping in occasionally – but also, more importantly, on the way they manipulate their sound to create visuals through their music. “Jim is a painter and I think he really considers fidelity in the way he considers color or light in his paintings,” Brunner told me. “They’re very closely related.”

Attention to sonic texture is nothing new, of course, but usually bands find one they like and stick to it. Strawberry Hands, though, seem intent on fitting the texture to the given song, just as painters change the textures of their work. This can be disorienting – so few bands take these sonic liberties – but it also proves incredibly rewarding. These two songs demonstrate their ability to experiment with different qualities of sound to convey drastically contrasting moods.

I’ll leave with some words from Jake Brunner, who is far more eloquent about his music than I:

“For me I think that there’s something tragic and severe about repetition in music. It can lead to trances, to real ecstasy and a release from the bonds of material awareness, but I feel like there’s also this Sisyphean quality to it, this kind of no exit, eternal recurrence vibe.”

Nick Kelly

Side A — The Prettiest Song In The World (not available)

Side B — Strawberry Hands Download audio file (02 Strawberry Hands.mp3)

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