Supplement 11. Archers of Loaf. “Chumming The Ocean.” 

“I think he’s in trouble/ the water is red.”

“Sometimes a ghost entered my heart and I could feel, and sometimes phrases entered my mind and I could speak, with reason. But never was I able to stay a man long enough to remain him.” -Jeff Clark, “Napoleonette,” The Little Door Slides Back 

Dose 94. Nick Drake. Pink Moon.

I first heard Pink Moon’s title track nested within the quite infamous 1999 Volkswagen Cabrio commercial. I am probably not alone in this*, and it’s possible that the use of Drake’s song within the spot catalyzed the past decade’s troubled and contentious mining of non-commercial music for the purposes of commercialism, as well as spawning millions of future Google searches for “what song is in the _______ commercial?”** There must be hundreds of think pieces about the liberal arts students, MFA writers, and aspiring film makers that made up the second (third?) wave of Avant-Madison Avenue, helping clients like Volkswagen woo and inculcate, essentially, their own generation. And these think pieces must surely have explored how, in some serious ways, this phenomenon was all very deeply problematic, or hyperreal, or presciently foretold by McLuhan and perhaps even aided posthumously by him, or a striking instance of capitalism’s reterritorializing of the counter-culture or the youth-culture or the decidedly-not-into-buying-cars culture, or an impingement upon that which we wanted to hold sacred outside of media’s destructive tendencies, or all of those things all at once. 

These think pieces are probably all independently and interdependently right. Here I am, after all, engaging everything but the album, as though its effects must necessarily be brought up first, or are first. Theorizing only seems to buttress our initial, visceral displeasure regarding what has happened to this man’s music. When, in 2010, AT&T employed “From The Morning” in its rebuttal to Verizon, I remember my dad, upon the 10th or 11th repetition of the ad as we sat watching whatever, thinking out loud, “I love this song and this is going to ruin it for me.” 

“Now we rise / and we are everywhere.” And the “we” had horribly mutated, it now meant AT&T and their sterling cellular coverage, and seek not death for it will come to you. 

The unfortunate conclusion here is that Nick Drake has accumulated the ways in which he has been distributed, and so his latter-day presence is now indispensable, even primary, to understanding and encountering him; he is now just his songs in those commercials, the same way “The Old Guitarist” is now just a poster in a “deep” boy’s dorm room. 

But also, also, I wan’t to say, he isn’t. 

I’m fairly certain that, when I first saw the spot in question, Volkswagen was a sponsor for ABC’s coverage of college football. What was so culturally “lasting” about that spot was its blue palette, its low volume, the absence of narration or the otherwise annoying loudness of every other (car) commercial. It stood out, it could not not allure, it could not not captivate. For a hypersensitive preteen, it was emotionally overpowering. Primed to manic responses engendered by sports spectatorship, the sudden aural/visual disjunctive of a bunch of young twenty-somethings ditching a beach house party to ride around bending roads and listen to tragically beautiful music at twilight was active feedback against television’s own aims and my own pre-teenage angst and anger at fever pitch. The ad urged one to run far away from the world of what bookended the ad itself, to be “truly,” happily released (or somber, happily somber, or some heretofore unknown emotional state).  Of course, it was also adding “…and do so in a brand new Cabrio convertible.”

I want to hope, at that age, I wasn’t interested in cars (“bullshit, you loved cars,” you say, “and anyway—ads sell experience, you’ll think of the experience when buying a car and remember Volkswagen and remember Camel Lights and buy a Pink Moon anniversary edition at a Starbucks”), I want to say I was attracted to the music first, and I’ll grant that the commercial’s visual representation of that music was rudimentary but not on its face so far off, at least for a kid  (“but,” you say, “that’s entirely the point, you can say that you were not subliminally indoctrinated until you are blue in the face but the fact remains that you are writing about this album and still feel the need to defend it against the possible aesthetic corruption that introduced so many to it”).  

Today I listened to the album on Spotify. Between “Parasite” and “Free Ride,” I had to listen through an ad about Intel Pentium Processors, complete with a robot voice. Maybe I should buy the album on vinyl to experience it in its, what, original form? But that LP is just a record company cashing in on the reissue of an album that sold under 5,000 copies in its original pressing. Perhaps even my own enjoyment of the album, the mere fact that I like it and feel it is important to me, is predicated upon a tragic misuse of the original material. I am actively pissing on the grave. The sum total of our grief about what happens to music long after it is born and its progenitors are dead risks our own believing that it is impossible to have any genuine, unmediated relationship to the material. 

But we ought to begin to wonder if it is possible to believe, to choose to believe, in the inviolate haacceity of something like Pink Moon. That is, to believe that time has not plasticized or destroyed its essence, has not ruined or permanently altered the quality of its experience. We might choose to believe that Drake’s final album is fundamentally incorruptible, that to corrupt it would involve breaking the laws of physics, traveling back in time and crashing through the studio in a silver Cabrio convertible, forcing Nick Drake to finish the recording on an iPhone, selling the album as a promotional app. We might consider whether choosing to believe otherwise, choosing to believe that there can only ever be a relationship of ingenuity and falseness, is an act of supremely bad faith. 

In opting for a belief in a “genuine” experience I don’t seek merely to wish away, to avoid, engaging with the possibility that Pink Moon is a vastly different thing to discuss now as opposed to 40 years ago. What I want to question is the permanence of what else has been caked on after the fact. I feel as though in listening, just listening, those layers—some of them—might be easily removed.

It is late summer. Nick Drake recorded Pink Moon on two midnights in October, and there is a strong sense that the album is actively looking back at its own August and September. Up late, for whatever reason, you want to play “Road,” over and over again. The timing seems right. So much is in there. It might have nothing to do with your television. 

*33 1/3rd’s entry on Pink Moon touches on (all) this, likely in depth, and I should admit that I haven’t read it and ought to. 

**It also might have started the careers of Jonathan Davis and Valerie Faris, who—through Little Miss Sunshine—further spread the gospel of Sufjan Stevens, DeVotchKa, and causal encounters with Proust, Nietzsche, and the concept of twee to whosoever desired a DVD worthy to place next to Garden State. 

Supplement 10. Bosse-De-Nage. “Why Am I So Lovely? Because My Master Washes Me.” 

“At twilight, those who play in the water touch the moon on its waves. In bed, those who lay on the covers hallucinate their existence. A conversation with the slave who fought to save the work from a fire. At midnight, those who play in the dust grasp the wind by its hair. In emptiness, those who die drain their bodies into a bowl left beside the bed. At dawn, the tree that still grows gropes the world with its leaves.”

Fragment 1.

Walking home, a small insect moving off the sidewalk onto the grass which looks like a young bumblebee. This brings back the refrain of a childhood song that wasn’t even particularly frequent in my childhood. 

I recently picked up a friend in my car. He paused to listen to what was playing and then said that if I keep listening to bummer songs it will only make me always bummed. But recalling this childhood song: it’s actually fairly sad, somehow. Which seems true of all childhood songs—light and harmonious and concealing weirdness and tragedy.  Won’t that bee sting the child on the way home? Ring Around the Rosie is apocryphally about the plague, but where did that association come from? It sticks harder than whatever the song is ostensibly about (and is caught up in my mind with “I had a little bird, / it’s name was enza…”).

And it seems like most up beat pop songs are secretly bummers: Doo-Wop’s severe heartbreak inflicted on a supposedly indestructible era of peace and happiness. 

The bee in question, also, didn’t appear to have any wings. And very well could have been some kind of beetle. 

Live Dose 1. Gilead Media Music Festival. 4/28-4/29. Oshkosh, WI. Part 2.

Erase certain connotations you have of the word. They are hard to divorce from. Hiding as weakness, hiding as nihilistic, hiding as solipsism, hiding as juvenile misanthropy.  Imagine a kind of hiding that is also an exposure—to the unknown, to the rare. Imagine the hiding spaces that are foreign to the hider, weird, uncomfortable, potentially dangerous, lacking light, but always at last temporary. These aren’t spaces you are meant to spend long periods of time within; they are not intended to be lived in. But then imagine hide and seek. Imagine hiding as an entrenched social trait, hiding as the desire to be found out.  We are drawn toward a turning inward. We are drawn to confronting solitude, experiencing it, espousing it:

“We must take the soul back and withdraw it into itself; that is the real solitude, which may be enjoyed in the midst of cities and the courts of kings; but it is best enjoyed alone.”                        

“Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;

   Thus unlamented let me die;

Steal from the world, and not a stone

                             Tell where I lie.” 

“The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility. So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude.”

Not to mention Mathew 6:6, the hesychasts, the eremitics and ascetics of the early Christian church, communities without overt, incessant communion. Communities with a withdrawal built in.

Can one experience solitude in the crowd? Montaigne suggests this is possible. Hide and seek is a silly but maybe deeply illuminating example. A game in which even the ‘seeker’ is alone,  isolated. A group-endeavored isolation. Perhaps this comes back too close to Schiller, to the dancers of the eightsome reel—or later the waltz, or the samba, touching but not ‘colliding,’ with but never over. Hide and seek seems itself to be ordered, beautiful qua genteel. But also totalizing, cyclical: The found aid the seeker until eventually the game exhausts itself and begins again.  There is something to be said about the bands at Gilead (I’m thinking specifically of the sets by Hell, Sleepwalker, Ash Borer, Aseethe, Mania, Fell Voices, Loss) that engendered a sense of a much more crowded, less overt game of hide-and-seek. It is no coincidence that a good deal of metal or ‘dark’ or  ‘esoteric’ bands refer to their live performances as ‘rites’ or ‘invocations’ or  ‘sacrifices.’

Because there is a game in this. The crowd begins as eager, social. Then there is some theatricality: the lights dim, in many cases at Gilead the bands requested solid-colored, low light—enough to see but not enough to be overly foregrounded. Then the band leads the group in hiding. They begin playing. The down-tempo, slow-paced crawl of what is sometimes called doom metal, or the atonal, repetitive, droning high-treble of what is sometimes called black metal. Roger Scruton mentioned that “Plato deployed the concept of mimesis, or imitation, to explain why bad character in music encourages bad character in its devotees.” Does the dance of the eightsome reel reflect precisely the character of the music it is hinged into? Perhaps not, its ‘gentility’ is in part a result of it being invented, contrived, built up so as to function as mimesis (this does not discount its beauty). It has to get there. At an old Eagles Lodge in Oshkosh, WI, the mimesis is simpler, more direct. Everyone moves their head back and forth, rhythmically, standing still. Their eyes are closed. You might close your eyes long enough that when you re-open them you find yourself surprised that you are in a crowded room of people. And then surprised at being surprised. And so the power of this music is its ability to isolate you. Isolate the crowd, divide a mass into its constituent parts. Many people seemed to literally wake up after Loss’s set, to raise their heads and widen their eyes, stretch, smile, engage in human social activity again, to group. There seemed to be a restorative force brought about by an hour spent disappearing into, with this music. A knowledge gained from it. And somehow that restoration appeared more powerful when it occurred in the presence of others, when it was chosen. The mimesis is not of something negatively charged, it is either a positive or neutral stillness—listening, accepting,  joining with the performers.

There are times when it did not work for me. Times when I felt doubt or boredom or  problematically fearful, unhealthily isolated, times I was paranoid of being perceived as a pariah. But this was outside the tide of live music.  I went to Oshkosh alone, staying with my parents in Green Bay and driving the 45 minutes there and back each early afternoon and late evening. I was excited to go. I had been salivating about the chance to see Sleepwalker and Thou since the festival was announced and I bought my tickets. And the venue was perfect, and accommodating. The bands were warm and friendly. Things moved fluidly, there were no sound problems. The downstairs bar had great local beer. I ate criminally good soul food for lunch, a few blocks away from the venue, each day. And I didn’t talk to anyone for longer than four minutes. Or felt I couldn’t, or blocked myself from doing so. Or didn’t know how to. Or got overtly, internally caught up in spurious distinctions between the recognizable visual traits of those who ‘live’ a scene and those who nomadically accumulate many of them, and I felt very much like the latter. This music is always something I have, primarily, consumed alone. Something I share with others but often out of their own fascination more than anything. Social situations have always made my throat catch but this was my social ultima Thule. And I was only there for two days, and a lusty part of me would have liked to have disappeared into someone’s van and received stick-n-poke tattoos in a gauzy daze. This is all indicative of my relationship with live music I care about,  how I am always immensely surprised that there are others, too, others that seem to have fallen much more deeply for this music visually and behaviorally, how I feel trapped between a longing for and a fear of that.

But this is also chosen. You have bought the vinyl and played it alone at home, you have put headphones on and listened to streaming audio. You have enjoyed what you felt and where you went, internally, when that happened. It felt ‘good,’  not in the way of eudaimonia but in the way of catharsis. Or it felt like theoria, your own hesychastic ritual. And now you have come here to be wedged in with others and you lack the full-sleeve tattoos and your jean jacket isn’t sewn into with patches. You lack crust. But you’ve come. And it feels good when you close your eyes, when you almost fall on the stage, when you are bracing strangers for structural support. It reminds you of your feet, your arms, the body that is the house of your wayward mind, a mind reeling from change and indecision and wide-ranging, macroscopic doubts. There are metric tons of solace in the noise.

And if it was safe and ordered and pre-ordained? If it lacked risk? If I remained somewhere else, where what was beautiful was only ever gentle? But then what is the worth of the tension, the pulling back-and-forth? And why confront solitude in a throng of almost performatively tough strangers?

I’d submit that hide-and-seek is enjoyable because of its dual risks: of being found and of never being found. ‘Winning’ for the hider is as well a risk because it eventually eliminates what is at first to be avoided in the game but what cannot be avoided forever. Hide-and-seek recognizes the impermanence of solitude in that the game can only end when all are found. The ‘solipsistic’ experience of a live metal show recognizes the impermanence of solitude in that the song, later the set, must end. Yet both recognize solitude as in some way rooted to, principle in, necessary for our relation with others, and more importantly with ourselves. Scruton suggest that morally instructive music gives deference to “the I-Thou relation on which human society is built.” Perhaps what is meant is that it instills in us a sense of respect or recognition of that relation. And perhaps this is correct—after all it seems the bulk of moral work is dedicated to our treatment of others. Not to say that our treatment of the self doesn’t fall within the field, but Scruton’s conception seems to come after the self, with a society in place, with the problems of the self as it relates to music being solved.

This music comes before, and perhaps this is where it might slip out of or sideways to direct moral adjudication. What is instructive about hide-and-seek, why do we play it? A clear possibility would be that in it we learn the necessity and the limits of being alone, of opting out of the I-Thou relationship. Again, it is not a uniquely pleasant place, or a thing we are pre-disposed to do for overly long periods of time. Its moral instruction is unclear, but its lure isn’t. Nor is, perhaps, its positive social valence.  But it remains shrouded, it lacks the light and saftey of what we for whatever other reasons associate with the positive or the morally sanct.  Which is perhaps why we avoid it, why it is here couched in a childhood game, why music that instills and requires a conscious shift inward and away from others is often labeled  ‘dark’ and so plausibly  ‘amoral’ and so mimetic of ‘bad behavior,’ and this is perhaps why these bands sometimes self-style this way already; why the former, cheaper assessment of metal presented  is made easy by many bands’ rough-shod, aphoristically expressed worldviews. I have Barghest shirt I bought at Gilead which reads “ANTI-HUMAN/ ANTI-LIFE.” I’m of two minds about it, constantly. 

But there are instances when I feel a band’s constructed mythos belies their own music, if not—in the case of early historical instances of extreme metal—behavior. Because this music and its consumption do not seem to me to be an instigation, something  “at” me to which I must react in kind. It does not seem like a moral (or anti-moral) dictum so much as a vessel of inquiry. Inquiry that prefigures instruction. There is no end in mind for hide-and-seek. When you go into a stranger’s kitchen cupboard you have started an investigation of the contents of that cupboard and your own ability to live, silently, for twenty minutes, with yourself. At Gilead I often felt within a cupboard, adjacent to a ‘culture’ I admire but for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is my own often crushing social shyness, have little conventional communion with. Except when I am standing, facing a stage, my head as well bowed. The lesson of two days and 19 bands is the lesson of a good game of hide-and-seek, of a dive into the deep end. The lesson is that we are linked in our solitude, that our isolation can itself, paradoxically, through the shaky grounds of belief, often ascend to a proof of others—their unshakeable, humming, weird import. Their and our sanctity.

Live Dose 1. Gilead Media Music Festival. 4/28-4/29. Oshkosh, WI. Part 1.

“Metal is shouted at its devotees, and the loss of melody from the vocal line emphasizes this. Not that melody is entirely absent, of course; it is allowed in with the guitar solo, which is often a poignant reflection on its own loneliness—the ghost of the community that has vanished from this harshly enamelled world. The world of this music is one in which people talk, shout, dance, and feel at each other, without ever doing those things with them. You dance to heavy metal by head-banging, slam dancing, or “moshing” (pushing people around in the crowd). Such dancing is not really open to people of all ages, but confined to the young and the sexually available. Of course, there is nothing to forbid the old and the shrivelled [sic] from joining in: but the sight of their doing so is an embarrassment, all the greater when they themselves seem unaware of this.

[…]

To suggest that people who live with a metric pulse as a constant background to their thoughts and movements are living in the same way, with the same kind of attention and the same pattern of challenges and rewards, as others who know music only from sitting down to listen to it, clearing their minds, meanwhile, of all other thoughts—such a suggestion is surely implausible. Likewise, to suggest that those who dance in the solipsistic way encouraged by metal or indie music share a form of life with those who dance, when they dance, in formation, with the spirit recorded so eloquently by Schiller, is to say something equally implausible. The difference is not merely in the kind of movements made; it is a difference in social valency, and in the relative value placed on being with your neighbour rather than over and against him.”  -Roger Scruton, “Soul Music”

“What is a poet? An unhappy man who conceals profound anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so fashioned  that when sighs and groans pass over them they sound like beautiful music. His fate resembles that of the unhappy men who were slowly roasted by a gentle fire in the tyrant Phalaris’ bull—their shrieks could not reach his ear to terrify him, to him they sounded like sweet music. And people flock about the poet and say to him: do sing again; Which means, would that new sufferings tormented your soul, and: would that your lips stayed fashioned as before, for your cries would only terrify us, but your music is delightful. And the critics join them, saying: well done, thus must it be according to the laws of aesthetics. Why, to be sure, a critic resembles a poet as one pea another, the only difference being that he has no anguish in his heart and no music on his lips. Behold, therefore would I rather be a swineherd on Amage, and be understood by the swine than a poet, and misunderstood by men.”  -Søren Kierkegaard, “Diapsalmata,” Either/Or

 “And though I feel that music is an art which to the highest degree requires experience to justify one in having an opinion about it, still I comfort myself, as I have so often done before, with the paradox that, even in ignorance and mere intimations, there is also a kind of experience. I comfort myself by remembering that Diana, who had not herself given birth, nevertheless came to the assistance of the child-bearing; moreover, that she had this as a native gift from childhood, so that she came to the assistance of Latona in her labor, when she herself was born. The kingdom known to me, to whose utmost boundaries I intend to go in order to discover music, is language.”  -Søren Kierkegaard, “The Immediate Stages of the Erotic,” Either/Or

The last band to go on was Baton Rogue’s Thou, performing their first album Tyrant in its entirety. Somehow I made up to the very front of the stage for this, and by the time sound check was almost over the crowd  had packed in so tightly that most of us up front took to putting one foot on said stage—a stage at most two feet off the ground. On one side of me was an either purposefully dispatched or opportunistic photographer, and on the other was Joseph, the tall, lion-maned bassist from Santa Cruz’s Fell Voices. I think I fell into Joseph or he fell on top of me a good half dozen times throughout the set, balance not really ever being assured, and the crowd sometimes swelling forward as if to overtake the stage.

And there were the times I was practically prostrate on the floor of the stage before guitarist Matthew Thudium, hands reaching up in the classic, gnarled gesture of invocation, a gesture lost between play-acting and hardened seriousness, between a utilitarian expression of ‘please, more of this guitar’ and a Faustian ‘please, remove the burden of the soul from my mortal body.’

And there were the large swathes of time erased from retrievable memory by the blood thinning effects of untold cigarettes and bottles of New Glarus and slow, deliberate, very much deeply meant “head banging.” Head moving back and forth slowly. Davening. Prayer. Gesture one makes, eventually subconsciously, to be with a music purportedly only ever over and against them. And I have to confess it works. Very straightforwardly, as your chest meets your propped and raised knee and a nearly 7 foot bassist grasps your shoulders for his own support and Bryan Funck is disassembling the microphone and putting it inside of his mouth, it all very much works.

It is almost too easy to speak of “metal” only in the context of violence and immorality. To not even have to specify the particular stripe of metal at stake. You can point anywhere in the field, utter a demonstrative, and follow it with “is inherently x,” where x is to be any set of words that are not necessarily disagreeable or even incorrect about “metal” but are intended nonetheless to exhaust any further need for interrogation. It is “dark”, say, or “scary,” or “depressive,” it seems prima facie directed “at” and not “to” its “devotees.” And then this is it.

Roger Scruton admits that his assessment of metal “is not yet a criticism, of course, but it is moving us towards recognizing what seems to me an important truth about pop music, which is that what seems like rhythm, and the foregrounding of rhythm, is often in fact an absence of rhythm, a drowning out of rhythm by the beat.” His example thus far, it should be noted, is Meshuggah. Certainly this suggestion begins an interrogation beyond labeling, and Scruton seems to be suggesting that it is the phenomenological rhythms (he gives as an example the eightsome reel) that are being drowned out, “in the one case they are heard as regular beats, like the pulse of a machine [metal]; in the other case they are heard as repeated movements, of the kind that our bodies produce when running, walking, or dancing.” Would it be too much of a stretch to suggest that Scruton believes complex melodic structuring to be ‘natural,’ with the phenomenological ‘feel’ and accessibility of this music serving as evidence? Scruton would apparently contradict this when quoting Schiller’s examination of the reel as a demonstration of the link between gentility and beauty—an account which seems at bottom to hinge on the order and rigidity of the reel and the music which accompanies it.

But this is Scruton’s point as well—this order is at the heart of an argument about the moral validity of certain strains of music, as “whatever we wish to say about the moral character of music, it is bound up with the movement that we hear in music.” If that movement is “natural,” genteel, ordered, disallows a certain level of unpredictability and risk (the Schiller excerpt is keen to note the dancers in the reel “change their direction willfully but never collide”), then for Scruton it achieves “ a difference in social valency, and in the relative value placed on being with your neighbour rather than over and against him.” This is like a normative moral account—moral music gives us the rules (or perhaps in accessing morally instructive music we access moral instruction), its capitol rests in its corrective aims as well, I guess, as in its aesthetic merit alone. It is ordered and yet, paradoxically, this is the music Scruton suggests we are in some deep way already “with,” invited into, while other music might (Scruton insists this exercise is a suggestion of the possibility for a critique of pop music and not a firm assertion of any one critique) demand we submit to it, that it is only ever “at,” “over and against,” and “external” to us. We cannot seek to lodge a similar complaint against the order and routine of the reel, for instance. We cannot ask “but aren’t we, in your account, just submitting to a teleological, ‘morally instructive’ subset of music?” We cannot because the phenomenological efficacy of this music should just strike us, it ‘naturally’ taps in to our lived experience, it as well needs no further interrogation.

This is not to say we ought to build a pyre to immolate the 500+ years of Western music Scruton enjoys over others, it is not to say there aren’t important discussions about music and morality, or even, begrudgingly, that Scruton does not make complex, salient, difficult-to-dismantle claims. All of this is just to say that there appears to be, especially for music “of the margins,” readymade presuppositions. There must be a way past them. Scruton attempts to justify his assessment of Crystal Castles and Meshuggah as at least morally un-instructive through a metrical analyses—the sublimation of ‘natural’ rhythms wherein, at least in the case of live consumption, “your freedom is overridden, and it is hard then to move in a way that suggests a personal relation to a partner—the I-Thou relation on which human society is built.”  Is there no way in which atonal, amelodic, ‘abnormally,’ ‘unnaturally’ constructed music reflects something about its creators and does so with its listeners in a way that is positively instructive? After all, it seems easy to suggest that this music is potentially amoral or worse immoral by disavowing it as inhuman and “unnatural,” ignoring completely that it is still humans that craft and build and produce music. Must it only ever reflect their moral dubiousness? Can a kind of music exist which avoids or does not enter into moral analysis? Why do I listen to metal? What about it is ‘instructive,’ to me, at all? Do I ‘submit’ to metal? How is it that I feel, often deeply, the opposite—that I am with this music? Does my own experience deceive me?

One answer: one may come to metal to hide. One may go to Gilead Media Music festival to hide in solidarity with others.

Part 2 tomorrow. 

Supplement 9. Deaf Center. “Animal Sacrifice.” 

I went to a local farm last week and was told the animals had been moved to a new location. I wondered where they had formerly been held, the land did not smell or appear as though livestock was ever present. But inside the barn, before a reading, someone pointed out a large crate full of adolescent chickens that were to provide food for an upcoming wedding.

Also, the dusk. The dusk of Sundays.  

Dose 93. The Sight Below. Glider.

“He’d known from the beginning that he was advancing toward a future without paydays, holidays, birthdays, new moons, full moons, real meals or very much in the way of world news. He wanted the native act, clean, free of extraneous sensation.” –Don DeLillo, “The Starveling”

It happens twice. The first time my hands are resting on the back of my neck. I’m watching the water falling over my elbows. Two half-streams, droplets that begin to coalesce near my ankles. The second time I’m turning the spigots to the right, closing them off. I am a damp, naked fleshy thing surrounded on three sides by a bone white tank. The fourth side is the translucent clear vinyl shower curtain—bending incoming light. I stand out. This is a space constructed for the cleansing of my body. It is bright and closed off. It is for this one thing only. There is still some soap under my arms—I touch it. This is left over from a ritual I have performed. I feel I have slipped under and away from something. Under and away from the ritual.

The work Rafael Anton Irisarri produces under his own name is typified by brief ostinatos (either looped guitars, synthesizers, or string instruments), often smothered in delay and reverb and unaccompanied by percussion. Take the second track from the 2009  EP Hopes and Past Desires, “Watching as She Reels.” A jangly guitar loop gives way to an almost overly delicate repeating piano motif, which itself gives way to a delayed, reverbed cello motif. That cello motif is five notes. This process repeats for seven minutes. But dynamism it crafted through unpredictability—one or two layers might fade out to foreground another. The layers are static, but their presence in the mix is not. The result is music that feels bared and striped down. Actively. Something else is always already removed. Cold meat still sticking to the rib. A memory so old a significant part of it has become myth.

I don’t know how one temporarily slips under the rote and views it outside of itself, clearly, soberly, for several fleeting seconds. Or what is to be learned from it, other than to be sorrowed by the dulling of the senses toward something innocuous like bathing, an event which suddenly seemed to me ancient and anciently reverent and deeply weird.

Glider, Rafael Anton Irisarri’s project under the moniker The Sight Below, anchors itself in a trait missing entirely from his other projects. A constant, thumping 4/4 beat.  The beat of endless club songs. The beat you can still hear from the bathroom. Occasionally there is a clipped snare, it  makes a fairly stunning late entrance in the opener “At First Touch.” And I suppose minimalist electronic music has this power—the power to make the subtlest changes the most deeply felt. And maybe this is a result of the ritual of sound, the ritual hypnotism of the 4/4  and the ecstasy of unmooring oneself from it. Though, I think, not unmooring oneself completely. That snare doesn’t replace the bass, which is still there. It allows the listener to slip under and away from it, to see—from outside—what it has been doing to them.

There are comparisons abounding to Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas, et al. But Voigt relied on samples, in part, while on top of Irissari’s percussion—only guitars run through loops and delays and reverb, distant humming drones, once an overwhelming choral swell. Like Irisarri’s other work—his post-classical, much more hopeful and uplifting compositions—Glider is a cornerstone after the building burns down. Foundational but not a foundation. It is what has been left. There are track titles like “Life’s Fading Light,” “Further Away,” “Nowhere,” “Feeling Lost Forever,” which seem cheap but nonetheless punctuate the album’s sense of slipping out from the club and into the blue of dawn. And what is left of the music we might otherwise dance to when the lust and sweat and sawtooths and invocations to move are scrubbed down entirely? The awareness of the ritual. The slight ache that comes with that awareness, et spiritu cum tuo. 

The ritual is not lost, though. You listen, you fall into the spell of listening. It’s strange, you’re haunted by the ghost of other music in Irisarri’s works. You have both the ritual and the awareness of its occurrence. I used to drive down this stretch of I-696 where suddenly all the streetlights had gone out. Plunged into darkness and the idea, the semblance, of streetlights—but lacking them. Being in the shower and aware, despite this wholeness, holiness, of the contriavence. For whatever reason, I think of these as as close as we can get to that native act. Glider, in its being stripped down, in what it openly reveals to its listener, seems intended to bring us to that state.

PAUL  WESTERBERG  SAVES

Dose 92. A Broken Consort. Box of Birch. listen.

Loss is a tricky thing. One can easily, and poorly, enter into the metrics of comparison—weigh and measure that which has egressed them against another egression, try to lessen the blow by assuming there is a standard weight. Certainly, and recently, I’ve felt a leaving. The effects will not resolve. It goes like this: mostly you ask why, the reasons aren’t attainable but the question nags and burrows into you. Something else inside you says it all shouldn’t matter, that what you latch onto, what’s lost, must necessarily be slight and insignificant, unlike that of others. You try to lessen it, this makes it worse. 

Richard Skelton lost his wife, Louise. This is a loss the depths of which I cannot possibly fathom. I don’t know the details. They don’t matter. Box of Birch is for her. The original release in 2007 was on Skelton’s own label, the CD housed in actual birch box surrounded by the organic materials of the countryside he shared with Louise. But Skelton gave these things up to us, the anonymous.

Box of Birch progresses in syncopation, seemingly to the whimsy of each instrument, slightly off balance and scattered, as though Skelton is unsure of what to create, knowing it might not hold, as if nothing will suffice but absolutely everything is needed, as though he has sat down a group of musicians in front of half-ideas on sheet music. He is bending over what he’s written, closing his eyes and shaking his hands. The musicians timidly stumble through and he leans closer and closer into their vibrations because somewhere in there is a core, some light, a thing that must be returned to him.

Box of Birch is a music in the midst of loss—earnest but confused, directionless but purposeful. I don’t wish to say that this is ‘confused’ and ‘directionless’ in a way which intones that the music isn’t as near flawlessly constructed and performed as it is. What I want to commend is its ability to capture the ineffable center of a mind unmoored by loss, a mind serious about that inquiry.

And Skelton does not slight us, does not say “what has gone from me you cannot possibly understand.” It is the opposite—you open up the box and it is filled with twigs and dirt. It is yours, too.

(Note: parts of this dosing are appropriated from a review I’d written for this album on the now mostly archived version of Digitalis. This is an attempt to, years later, better articulate what I’d previously said.)