Category Archives: Featured

Severed From Reality

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This piece contains spoilers, although I do not reveal the ending of the movie.

Some stories seem too smart to be symptomatic. Rather than try to suppress or exorcise the fraught, irrational elements that inevitably bubble up through the floorboards, some stories court the absurd directly. This instinct is the one truly smart thing about the movie Snowpiercer, the summer’s critical dark horse, recently released to a very positive reception on Netflix. The world’s audiences and film critics can be forgiven for projecting this intelligence upon the rest of the film, which doesn’t deserve it.

In Snowpiercer, the world’s governments attempt an easy-fix to climate change, releasing a cooling agent into the atmosphere. While this addresses an overly simplistic understanding of ‘global warming,’ (adding particles would enhance the greenhouse effect, if anything,) in the world of Snowpiercer, the cooling agents actually work. In fact, they completely freeze the Earth. The final survivors of humanity exist on a train, reputedly the only shelter designed to withstand the freezing temperatures outside. The train runs nonstop on a track that spans all of the Earth’s continents. Over the course of eighteen years, the original passenger assignments– first class, economy class and stowaways– become abstracted into a brutal caste system. The first class passengers live in a steampunk wonderland of galleria cars, beauty salons, mini mall arcades, swimming pools, greenhouses and aquariums. They worship the train’s inventor and unseen tyrant, Wilford, and the ‘immortal engine’ he tends. The economy passengers are barely seen (perhaps they’ve become the soldier class that oppresses the residents of the tail section?) The tail enders live in a windowless slum in the back, abused and barely subsisting on grotesque, gelatinous protein blocks. People are harvested for mysterious uses by the first class passengers, never to be seen in the tail again. The story follows the uprising of these passengers, who break through to the front of the train, witnessing the extravaganza car by car. Their forward movement mirrors a reel of film itself, the protagonists jumping from cell to cell, from set-piece to set-piece.  Snowpiercer gets to have its cake and eat it too, decrying the excesses of the wealthy while relishing them. Along these lines, its allegories sound smart on paper, yet bamboozle more than they enlighten.

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The fun of the film lies in its rigorous application of the rules of the childhood ‘hot lava’ game, where the threat of ‘instant death’ confines pretend-play to a bed or jungle gym, which can then be re-imagined into a self-sufficient world. It also borrows from the nightmarish joys of Juan José Arreola’s The Switchman, an absurdist satire of the Mexican rail system from 1952. The Switchman smartly excuses itself of having a plot, and revels in its own bizarro world-building. Snowpiercer would have been a better film if it had done the same, perhaps witnessing the train through the eyes of the kidnapped children or violinist, spirited away into the forbidden first-class cars, than from the vantage of the ambitious revolutionary who forces his way into them. Snowpiercer-the-film stems from Snowpiercer-the-comic, yes, but as Ng Suat Tong shows in his earlier essay, Curtis’ rebellion dramatically diverges from Proloff’s misanthropic death-drive, and the film’s uprising is a invention of the director, Bong Joon Ho. Bong follows the accepted Hollywood wisdom that an epic setting deserves an epic storyline, yet to prioritize the absurdity and delicious visuals, this storyline must be kept as a barebones as possible. In the words of Jones of the Jones boys, commenting on Suat’s piece, “The script’s role in an action movie is to get the hell out of the way, and stay there.” I’d argue that Snowpiercer is a rather sloppy, if inventive, action movie: the choreography is unclear, the chain of action and reactions extremely garbled. Its not the action that pushes the script out of the way, but the insistence on dreamlike spectacle. The point is not the axe-fight, but that everyone pauses to celebrate New Years in the middle of it.

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The characters  rehash the most generic ‘motley band of heroes’ tropes. A bland, angst ridden woodsman named Curtis leads the revolt. Curtis is guided by Gilliam, aka Gandalf/Trotsky, the aged leader of the tail section, and followed around by an eager younger-brother figure, Edgar, who chiefly serves to open up giant plot holes. (He has an Irish accent and misses eating steak, yet is an orphan raised in the tail section from infancy.) Curtis’ plan relies on a enigmatic, manic Korean engineer, long imprisoned in a jail car, who tows along his doll-like and inexplicably psychic daughter, Yona, (essentially River from Firefly.)* The engineer knows how to open the doors between cars, but must be bribed with drugs. We’ve got a gutsy black mother, and a mute, ethnic, martial arts kid. Bong likely suspected that these empty shells couldn’t generate much emotional investment on their own, so he falls back on trite parent-and-child melodrama. Cue the wistful soliloquys of grown-up orphans, and the desperate plight of the parents of the kidnapped children.

When Curtis finally reaches Wilford in the final car, the inventor breaks and tempts him with a bland, 50s caricature of fatherhood, calling Curtis “My boy,” and promising to make Curtis heir to his hallowed position. This exchange contains the pessimistic, political twist so critically beloved. Gilliam and Wilford turn out to be co-conspirators, encouraging tail-end rebellions so as to ‘decrease the surplus population.’ This twist, and its corresponding political allegory, seems to be the one time where Bong really cares about the storyline, (it is his invention, after all.) Bong even leads the audience away from this suspicion early on, when Gilliam requests Wilford’s minister to relay the message that he and Wilford “need to talk.” Wilford’s sneering, flippant report of his and Gilliam’s intimacy, especially considering the inhumane conditions Gilliam suffered as part of the tail class, undermines the reveal. Wilford must still be lying on some level, as Bong never connects why Gilliam would endure what he did, and care for the tail enders as he did, under such false pretenses.  It’s a twist alright, crossed off the list of what a good action movie plot should accomplish, but one that’s hardly believable. It counts as political allegory, but one deeply out of touch with its own humanity.

The character’s motivations and the political allegory must be dropped whenever they threaten to overshadow the dream-logic and dream-visuals themselves. For example, the tail-section people talk a lot about food, a basic necessity of which they are almost deprived. The revelation that their protein blocks are made of bugs is mined for horror, and ‘steak’ becomes a running symbol. When they first make it into the vacated economy class cars, a rebel protests that the residents had abandoned their food “on the table.”  Most horrifically, Curtis confesses that in the first month onboard the Snowpiercer, the stowaways came so close to starving that they resorted to predatorily cannibalism– not just eating deceased humans, but hunting each other for food.  Hunger, and outrage over hunger, is a useful and efficient way to flesh out these characters as oppressed and desperate people. Yet, this essential motivation must be dropped where it distracts from the film’s absurdist agenda. After sustaining massive losses of their people in battle, a small group of rebels finally makes it into the first-class section, and into a marvelous aquarium. At the end of the aquarium sits a sushi bar. The rebels sit down and begin to have sushi, which is prepared by a man in African dress. There’s no griping about the elitist luxury, the wait, the small portions. Tanya, the black woman, makes a quick jibe about their not being enough fish to have sushi all the time, but there’s no urgency in their hunger, or even to keep moving ahead. This is one of the strongest sequences of the film, where the dream logic completely dominates the action, and the disposability of the storytelling becomes most transparent. Its easy to miss Minister Mason’s explanation of the aquarium as a closed ecosystem, “where the number of individual units must be closely, precisely, controlled,” later reprised by Wilford in half-explaining why certain amounts of tail end people must be periodically slaughtered.

Deliberate absurdity, particularly in high budget films, communicates a kind of intelligence. The director and crew are “in” on the artificiality, the fictionality, the letter-box. They enjoy interrupting the audience members, who are busy putting together the pieces to understand what’s going on. Audiences enjoy these interruptions because they are surprising, and because it connects the audience and author, who can “secretly” recognize each other. (As long as the audience privileges aesthetic distance over emotional absorption in a film, something that is statistically more prevalent with the wealthy, and consciously resisted in working class audiences. Pierre Bourdieu covers this phenomena in his book, Distinction.) While absurdity, irrationality, and surreality are present in popular culture, they debuted as high brow developments in art and literature, and still carry a kind of ‘legitimizing’ earmark. “This action movie is smart, because it is so dream-like,” for example.

Frank Kermode, a scholar devoted to reading between the lines of popular and religious texts, finds high-brow literature to be less rife for analysis because of its intentional irrationality. ‘Weirdness’ arrives in the strictly popular text by accident, seeping through routine hackwork and cliché, and exposing period or authorial concerns. This weirdness often comes in the form of repetition and/or fetishization of inessential details or descriptions, or of strange sequences that have nothing to do with the plot, (called BLAMs on TV Tropes.) High-brow authors deliberately insert weirdness, largely to avert or disrupt literary formulas. Kermode writes that in high-brow literature, “there is much more material that is less manifestly under the control of authority, less easily subordinated to ‘clearness and effect’ more palpably the enemy of order, of interpretative consensus, of message.”

Bong repeatedly prioritizes surreality and effect over message and order in Snowpiercer, positioning it in Kermode’s reasoning as a high-brow text intended to be appreciated from a critical distance, (but still enjoyed for its tittilating battle scenes.) Yet Snowpiercer is not without its symptomatic fixations. Notably,  it betrays a fascination with amputation. Just before Curtis meets Wilford, he confesses that the tail-enders initially cannibalized each other to survive, and he hates himself because he knows “that babies taste best.” Curtis killed a woman for a baby, but before he could eat it, he was stopped by Gilliam, who cut off his arm for Curtis to eat instead. “And then one by one, other people in the tail section started cutting off arms and legs and offering them. It was like a miracle. And I wanted to. I tried, it’s… A month later, Wilford’s soldiers brought those protein blocks. We’ve been eatin’ that shit ever since.”

Snowpiercer purports that the tail section became a kind of dystopic utopia, a situation so horrible it brought out ultimate selflessness. Gilliam’s response is the Eucharist made real, and was not only presumably repeated with his leg, but by a whole assembly of amputated elders, who limp notably in the film’s present on crutches. When Gilliam appoints Curtis as his successor, Curtis struggles, replying, “How can I lead if I have two good arms?” Gilliam then reveals the scar from when Curtis ‘tried.’ Curtis’ character arc isn’t completed until he loses his arm between the gears of the engine, in order to rescue a kidnapped child. As if released from his earthly limitations, he then instinctively sacrifices themselves to save Yona and the child from a fiery explosion.


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The obsession with amputation is not limited to Curtis’ realization. When two children are kidnapped at the outset, a father lurches out in rage and throws his shoe at an elite. In punishment, his arm is shoved outside of the train for seven minutes, and then pulverized by a sledgehammer. In the opening scenes of the film, an old man is also abducted by soldiers to play violin for the first class. At first he volunteers, thinking that he and his wife, another violinist, will both be able to go. A soldier demands, “Show me your hands… you follow me. Leave your belongings. We just need your hands.” The man, realizing he must go without his wife, asks, “Not both?” The soldier sneers, “Yes, both hands.” When the man resists, the soldiers respond by knocking the woman unconscious, and crushing her exposed hand underfoot.

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The lower classes have long been equated with their hands and manual labor. Its worth noting that the children are kidnapped because they are small enough to fit inside the train engine and remove grease by hand. According to Bourdieu’s ethnography of France in the 1960s, Distinction, this symbolism is understood at all levels of society, but, “At higher levels in the social hierarchy, the remarks become increasingly abstract, with (other people’s) hands, labour and old age functioning as allegories or symbols which serve as pretexts for general reflections on general problems.” When shown a picture of an old woman’s gnarled hands, working class respondents tended to respond to the picture intimately albeit conventionally, considering and personifying the photographed person, and the work she did. The middle class respondents are the first to routinely overlay ethical virtues and aesthetic comparisons onto this, and the highest classes tend to ‘amputate’ the woman entirely, with responses like “‘These two hands unquestionable evoke a poor and unhappy old age.’ (teacher, provinces.)” The upper classes also have a tendency to make highly aestheticizing references, such as in this representative remark from an engineer in Paris: “I find this a very beautiful photograph. Its the very symbol of toil. It puts me in mind of Flaubert’s old servant-woman… That woman’s gesture, at once very humble… It’s terrible that work and poverty are so deforming.” Its worth noting that Bourdieu’s class system is based more on educational level and inherited capital than earned capital, as these are not tendencies based as much on wealth as on the ability (both learned and afforded) to live abstractly.

Conflating the labor class with hands is so established that it can be found within Wikipedia’s basic definition of ‘synecdoche.’ This synecdoche also consists of the message and opening epigram of Metropolis, perhaps the most canonical caste-system dystopic film, when it says,  “There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.” Snowpiercer reiterates this in a baser, more pessimistic form, in the Minister’s speech during a torture demonstration:

“Would you wear a shoe on your head? Of course you wouldn’t wear a shoe on your head. A shoe doesn’t belong on your head. A shoe belongs on your foot. A hat belongs on your head. I am a hat, you are a shoe. I belong on the head, you belong on the foot. Yes? So it is. In the beginning, order was prescribed by your ticket. First class, economy, and free-loaders, like you … Each in its own particular, preordained position. So it is. Now, as in the beginning, I belong to the front. You belong to the tail. When the foot seeks the place of the head, a sacred line is crossed. Know your place. Be your place. Be a shoe.”

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If Bong were simply interested in amputations, visually or conceptually, they might appear more frequently in the graphic battle scenes. Instead, they are explicitly connected to anxieties about the tail end people, particularly in their functioning either as leaders or workers. Also, while the amputations discussed or shown on-screen almost exclusively pertain to arms and hands, Snowpiercer alters the standard synecdoche, assigning the base class to feet. More than that, the relationship of the elite and lower classes is further abstracted to clothing from anatomy, as if the parts of humanity no longer constituted the body of humankind, but served a greater reality that could exist without them. In Snowpiercer, a train’s engine is abstracted into a god, and the caste system into a holy order. Perhaps the greater reality is the train, which people serve but do not constitute. Perhaps it is abstracted Order itself.

In Snowpiercer, the lowest class is no longer a labor class. That may provide one answer to these questions. Hands work. Unlike Metropolis, or the grand body of film dystopias that followed, the tail enders are not shown toiling in factories or industrial wastelands. They are explicitly a welfare class. Only the kidnapped children have jobs maintaining the train, but they are slaves, and the one mentioned janitor died seventeen years ago. The tail enders did not have a fare when they boarded, and by the accepted logic of train travel, can be kicked off at any time. The fact that they aren’t is then an act of charity. The fact that the elites manufacture and provide them with food and water becomes an act of charity.

The tail enders can decry the insanity of prejudice and poverty in a post apocalyptic world, but the problem is, reality has been replaced with an insane, man-made system where economic class is not arbitrary. The rebels rarely appeal to concepts of ‘justice,’ or ‘human rights.’ They know their treatment is despicable, but their ability to express why, or imagine an alternative social order, has shrunk with their horizons. The tail enders never ask a question that Bong never has to answer– what more is demanded of Wilford and the elite passengers, who have ‘legitimate’ passage on this train? As long as they keep the tail-enders alive, they could be said to do more than enough. The protection of ‘a closed ecosystem’ where the stowaways are essentially parasites, make horrific, horrible sense. By avoiding the consequences of this logic, Bong made a movie that only falsely champions the human spirit. In truth, Snowpiercer participates in the same conservative media effort to reconfigure the ‘labor class’ into a ‘welfare class,’ and redefining social services into ‘entitlements.’

On a gut level, Bong may be uneasy with the severing of labor from the ‘labor class,’ although I won’t try to assume the level of his involvement or awareness of American politics or journalism.  Amputation is a violent and disturbing image, and Bong does not shy away from its horror. It’s a fitting symbol, especially considering that conservative pundits sever labor from the labor class to drum up support and engagement from their political base, at the expense of real lives. Propoganda is entertainment. When Wilford discusses his perspective of the uprisings, he judges them based on their entertainment value, and the value of entertainment in quieting the masses. He says to Curtis,  “We need to maintain a proper balance of anxiety and fear, chaos and horror, in order to keep life going. And if we don’t have that, we need to invent it. In that sense, the Great Curtis Revolution you invented was truly a masterpiece.” A military class seems like an unnecessary expense, unless it’s to give the paying passengers a living video game.  All the first class passengers do is entertain themselves. The satire isn’t toothless, and the victimized tail-end have real-life counterparts in the working class. Still, the question stands– the logic that the tail-enders are parasites is never confronted, and thus never rebutted. The film envisions social service as dehumanizing, and the idleness of the base class as a given in an entertainment-based society. A labor-less lower class is the one great absurdity left unexplored. Violent entertainment may be an opiate, but the film itself is complicit in it.  Which is fitting for a high-brow treatment of an indulgent action premise, which sidelines the struggles of oppressed people for frivolous absurdities.

 

 

Natural Snow Buildings

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This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of French duo Natural Snow Buildings. In fact, a lot of people haven’t. Stylistically, their music isn’t what you’d call the most “popular”
of genres, but even for those whose musical tastes fall far from center, the band is still largely unknown, and your average modern music fan – of any genre – would likely be surprised at the lack of information available about them.

Sometimes tagged as “Experimental Psychedelic Folk,” “Psych-Drone,” “Experimental,” “Acid Folk”, etc, Natural Snow Buildings defy simple classification. I think it sounds like fire and alchemy, like the churning of bones and rocks and sinew. Many of their strongest pieces are deeply repetitive, trance–inducing, and visual in an organic, hallucinatory way. Sonically they use texture, noise, drone, and melody in an almost raga-like form, utilizing instruments like guitars, percussion, woodwinds, strings, and any number of other mysterious sound-making devices. Some pieces are largely instrumental – others use vocals front and center. Individual songs sometimes reach well past the 20–, 30–, even 40– minute mark, allowing each song to grow and expand, to gain density and substance until the apex is churning and spinning, opaque, frenzied. Other works are delicate, rippling, and infused with a childlike fragility. It’s like watching wild nature growing in slow motion, sometimes violently, sometimes so gently it seems to stretch on for an eternity.
 

 
Despite the band’s impressive creative output – almost 40 albums, EPs, limited edition cassettes, compilations, and CDs – the vastness of Natural Snow Buildings’ discography lies in stark contrast to what we know about them personally, which reveals nothing about their inner workings. Perhaps this is by design: when you can’t talk about the artist, there is only the work itself to consider. Both the story and the music of Natural Snow Buildings are quite mysterious; you are required to fill in the blanks and make it your own. While I wholeheartedly respect (and envy) their decision to keep matters private, admittedly I too would like to know more about them. As humans we are by nature curious about the things we like; we define ourselves in part by the choices we make and our understanding of how things work. In this case, the lack of information itself is intriguing and becomes the story, almost mythically so. In 2008, they made over ten albums. How can this be possible?

Of the band members, we do know a few facts: the project consists of two people, one male and one female, Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte, respectively, both from France. They met in 1997 at university in Paris and began working together musically in 1998. In 2004 they relocated to Vitré (Brittany), in northwestern France, where they still live. In addition to working as a duo, both members have released solo works: Gularte’s under the name Isengrind; Mehdi’s under the moniker Twinsistermoon. The recordings are made at home, and their lo-fi nature further lends the sensation that we’re way beyond eras or earthly planes. Solange does the artwork for their releases, and her visions are as odd and gorgeous as the music itself, and a crucial part of each release. In earlier years, many of the releases were handmade and produced in very limited quantities (sometimes as few as fifteen copies), but over time the bands’ work has been reissued on established independent labels, helping bring their work to a somewhat larger audience.
 

 
2009’s triple LP “Shadow Kingdom” came out on the UK label Blackest Rainbow, and in 2013 Ba Da Bing reissued three records: the 2008 self-release, “Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches,” 2009’s “Daughter of Darkness,” and 2008’s “The Snowbringer Cult,” a 3X LP release which is in fact one solo record from each member, and one record as the duo. However, the bands’ most recent release – 2014’s “The Night Country” – is yet again a self-release.

In 2013, someone posted a large portion of the band’s music on YouTube for free (hopefully with the band’s approval). Here we can take our time exploring a large part of their catalog, as each album is provided in full with individual tracks indexed. The playlist starts with more recent releases and reaches back to 1999. Listening to it all can be a challenge, and sometimes exhausting. Some of the work is stronger than others, but that’s truly a matter of taste, as there’s a deep consistency in the music’s transformative and immersive nature.
 

 
We don’t know what makes these people tick, and why they choose to stay under the radar, but it doesn’t really matter. This is merely a personal feeling, but keeping to yourself helps your priorities remain intact, if making work on your own terms is more important than working towards a traditional, “successful” career. If an artist is released from the task of promoting their career, they have bypassed many of the distractions that damage focus, which runs the risk that the work (in quality, content, and output) may suffer. I truly don’t know if this is what’s behind the band’s ideals, but if this idea figures in at all, it’d make sense. These days, a great many independent artists spend a large part of their time on DIY efforts (via PR, social media, touring) to help expand awareness about their work, and increasingly less time on creating the music which inspired them in the first place.

Why do we want to know more and more about the people and the details when we love their work? Does it bring us closer to them, or is it a fluke, a mirage? We all face a lot of distractions in our daily lives, so let’s take pause. Sometimes, enjoying something in its purest form seems to be more than enough.

Dimmur Paganini

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This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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Metal and classical sound like one another to me. Ok, that’s stretching the truth, but there’s a fundamental something that makes those two seemingly polar genres ring the same to my ear.

Metal’s got highly distorted and compressed music. Classical doesn’t. But for the life of me, I can’t think of a piece of music more metal than Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” Throw in Bach’s “Brandenburg Concertos,” too. Fast forward to the present and living composers, and it’s no coincidence that the work of Arvo Pärt is a favorite amongst many metal musicians. Likewise, classical’s timeless feel of grandeur gets channeled within me just as strongly with the compositions of In the Woods… or via the ubiquitous black metal minor scale harmony.

You can trace this convergence of the genres back to Yngwie Malmsteen, the famously obnoxious guitarist extraordinaire who partially modeled his egregious personality after that of Niccolo Paganini, the 19th Century Italian violinist whose extreme ability, flamboyance and eccentricities raised him to mythical status. Before Malmsteen’s incorporations of classical scales opened up massive new directions for the genres in the early ‘80s, metal was the doom and gloom pioneered by Black Sabbath, a band whose roots were in blues and who adapted that style into something heavier.

Since then, if you choose your genres right, you can hear the ghosts of Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Albinoni (not always too subtly, either) in many of metal’s subcategories, but you’re most likely to find them in power metal bands, and in black metal bands, too, with names like Emperor, Symphony X, Stratovarius, Angra, and Dimmu Borgir being the most famous.

But this article is about the most underrated bands. Here are two that are criminally underrated and uphold the theme of the interchangeability of metal and classical.

Windham Hell.

Windham Hell is as indispensable a cult pick as it is a nerd’s dream. The band’s sound is something along the lines of if Yngwie Malmsteen recorded black metal albums with limited, semi-improvised means in the bedroom of a log cabin in the same woods where the owls-who-are-not-as-they-seem from “Twin Peaks” flew ominously overhead.

Windham Hell’s compositions often have a stark, menacing tone to them — the sometimes present, incoherent grave-moan vocals, the dissonant application of classical scales underpinned by aggressive, driving metal riffing and beats, and the often off-kilter song structures that brings all these jagged elements together, sometimes into a miasmal hell that would befit a Paganini-inspired legend, and sometimes into a calm, lovely musical respite… but Windham Hell was always something uniquely alien and utterly delightful in its genius — perhaps a genius that was as idiot savant as it was technically gifted — but like a cult show or movie like “Twin Peaks,” the cult appeal is owed as much to all the things that are wrong, goofy, or off-kilter about it as it does what isn’t.
 

 
The band’s ultimate and definitive formation was Leland Windham and Eric Friesen, two guitar genius recluses who lived in Snoqualmie, a rural, forested part of Washington state. Windham was as dedicated to mountain climbing as he was to shredding maniacal classical leads, and the theme of the cold, unforgiving, beautiful granite faces he loved so much were a major theme in his band’s music. The CDs would come with photos of Windham hanging upside down on a horizontally jutting rock face, or photos of mountain goats he would find on his excursions. Friesen was obsessed with playing guitar, and was also an accomplished drummer (while many think the drums on Windham Hell’s albums are a drum machine, they are in fact an e-kit played by Friesen) who released a couple solo albums under the name of Friesen Hell. One of these albums, Friesenburg Concertos, is Friesen’s “hail to the gods” of classical music, in which he plays various classical pieces that he learned entirely by ear, as he did not read music.
 

 
It was possibly Friesen who pushed the “Twin Peaks” worship angle in Windham Hell’s mystique. Whoever it was, the duo had a lot of parallels to play up. Snoqualmie is the real name of the place where the legendary show takes place. The third and final Windham Hell album, “Reflective Depths Imbibe,” was recorded behind Mo’s Motor, which is where Leland and Laura Palmer drive off from in the “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” movie. Leland Windham shares two names with major “Twin Peaks” characters, Leland Palmer and Windom Earle. Indeed, any and all similarities Friesen could find to “Twin Peaks,” he worked, like how the violin in “Alpinia” was played by a Bob (parallel to Killer Bob), and a keyboard bit was courtesy of a Mike (yet another “Twin Peaks” character.)

The “Twin Peaks” worship was so deeply entrenched in Windham Hell’s inspiration (with songs like “Glacier Walk in Me” and “Clear Blue Plastique,” and liberal usage of sound clips from the show amassed in hidden sections at the end of the albums), that Windham Hell’s music has come to be like the alternate soundtrack to the Black Lodge for me: a creepy, gorgeous, passionate body of work that is equally menacing as it is goofy; emotional, beautiful, evocative as it is dissonant; and metal as it is classical.

PS: In case you were wondering, the name Windham Hell is a spoof of the music made under the Windham Hill Records label, who specialized in folk and new age music. The band’s last album was released in 1999, and will likely stand as its last work, as Eric Friesen passed away in 2006.

Virgin Black.

On the other end of the spectrum from Windham Hell’s cult bedroom insanity is the music of the Australian entity Virgin Black, whose career pinnacle came in 2007 with the release of the 2nd part of the band’s “Requiem” trilogy, “Requiem Mezzo Forte,” and the subsequent release of the 3rd part, “Requiem Fortissimo,” in 2008. (The first part of the trilogy, purportedly recorded with the rest of the albums, has yet to be released. The trilogy is meant to be listened to in succession, with melodic themes that run through the albums.)

Virgin Black’s sound is like Gothic doom-influenced classical music. The classical aspect here is largely tied in to singer Rowan London’s operatic singing style, and how all their records have featured classical elements, like cello and piano, given a heavy treatment, but it wasn’t until that landmark 2007 album that Virgin Black’s sound moved out of the backroom studio and the digital box, and into recording an entire record with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, making a full record that didn’t just have orchestral segues, but was mostly orchestral, punctuated by passages of heavy guitar and bass and tastefully simple, pounding drums and martial snare rolls.
 

However, some of what or what is not going on in Virgin Black’s records is a bit of a mystery, and what I think is the truth is so awesome it gives me minor chills. I know what I witnessed. I saw Virgin Black on tour at Slim’s in San Francisco in 2008. I saw a small, muscular man in a see-through black mesh shirt take the stage as Virgin Black’s frontman and keyboardist. He seemed to be wearing mascara, and he had an odd, out of place, kind of alien demeanor about him, like he was physically there but his spirit was in different places at once. I saw this man deliver the male operatic vocals from the records, and then, I saw him deliver the female operatic vocals as well. He would seamlessly switch back and forth between the two, as well as the deathgrowl parts from the material of “Requiem Fortissimo,” and the realization that when I was blown away at the sweeping, crushing beauty of the compositions and vocals of “Requiem Mezzo Forte” and its seeming choir of singers, it seemed I had in fact been hearing the work of a man who was somehow a soprano and a tenor. Like a castrato who was allowed through puberty but never lost his choir boy voice. Maybe there’s some kind of pitch shifter voice box that allows one to do something like that. Whatever it was, I was blown away.

Subsequently, I swear I’ve looked up Virgin Black on line and found a wikipedia page in which Rowan London was dubbed something not terribly flattering like “androgena.” I swear I saw this page, and I remember it having information that supported my perception that indeed, Rowan London was *every* voice on the Virgin Black records. This elevated already superb albums into the godlike in my view: that someone could possibly have that much musical ability to physically pull something like that off, and do it in the context of such beautiful music. However, any trace of those words are no longer there. Maybe they were changed. Maybe I dreamt the whole thing. I probably did, as the soprano voice on “Requiem Mezzo Forte” is credited to Susan Johnson, but my appreciation of this band’s work was forever raised even farther when I saw them that day in San Francisco.

There’s not much information or interviews with Virgin Black out there, and the band has been on a long hiatus. Even if the final, purportedly completely choral and orchestral work is never released, “Requiem Mezzo Forte” stands as perhaps the finest example of the seamless marriage of classical and metal, featuring massive, timeless melodic themes as tremendous as the performances… whoever those performances were done by.

Mama Ain’t Nobody’s Fool

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This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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Esther Mae Scott

 
Let’s get this out of the way: this post contains no recorded music. There are no YouTube clips, no media files, nothing ripped from my iTunes library. How frustrating: after finishing this “best band you’ve never heard of” post, you still won’t have heard a thing.

It’s not a sadistic joke, just a matter of fact. Esther Mae “Mother” Scott performed for over seven decades, but she made just one album, at the age of 78. There are only a few copies of “Mama Ain’t Nobody’s Fool” floating around, some of them in archival collections (which is where I heard her for the first time). The reality is that there is still so very much in our musical past that does not exist digitally, and Mother Scott’s music fits in that category. Still, I’ve decided not to let the lack of digital access to her music prevent me from writing about her here.

Esther Mae Prentiss was born in 1893 in the Delta town of Bovina, Mississippi. She was a contemporary of better-known musicians, including Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (born 1886) and Bessie Smith (born 1894) and the trajectory of her early life mirrored theirs. Like Rainey and Smith, Prentiss (who soon was to become Scott) left home at an early age—she told an interviewer that she claimed to be 16 when she was actually 14—to join F.S. Wolcott’s Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels, a traveling tent show of musicians, dancers, animal acts, acrobats, and medicine hawkers. Asked to describe her work on the show, which traveled throughout the Mississippi Delta, Louisiana, and other parts of the Mid-South, Scott—whose stage name was “Big Baby”—said, “I’d play and sing and act and lie!” Like Rainey, Smith, and other blueswomen, her personal history blurs the boundaries between singer, dancer, actress, and entrepreneur, for she was all of these things. Life on the touring circuit was hard, but it provided access to the wider world and a sense of freedom and self-determination not provided by agricultural work or domestic service (the two options most available to black women in the South).

I’ve written elsewhere about the importance of the traveling tent and minstrel shows (as have Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff in their amazing book Ragged But Right), and how attending carefully to these shows helps reframe our understanding of early blues. Here’s what the earliest blues was not: a man walking down a dusty road by himself, a guitar slung over his shoulder. The public in the teens and twenties primarily understood blues to be a women’s form, a popular form, and a theatrical form. It is for this reason that Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and, yes, Esther Mae Scott, should be considered the foremothers of blues, a form and a mythology which was later almost entirely turned over to men.
 

Mama Ain't Nobody's Fool

 
Why don’t we know about Mother Scott the way we know about Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lead Belly, or Son House—or even Rainey or Smith? Though known widely and well as a live performer, Scott made no recordings until very late in life. And when it came time for the largely white male blues revivalists of the 50s and 60s to “rediscover” forgotten legends of blues, their investment in particular narratives of racial authenticity led them not to the commercial, popular, theatrical female performers of the early twentieth century, but to the male agricultural laborers who more clearly fit their image of “authentic” rural folk. Though her work remained unrecognized and unrecorded, Esther Mae Scott was, well into the late twentieth century, a living link with a largely female tradition of blues singing, comedy, and popular entertainment.

Scott retired from show business for the first time in 1941; she left Mississippi, like so many others who were part of the Great Migration, to move to Washington, D.C. She worked as a housekeeper and baby nurse until picking up her guitar again some decades later. As an older woman, she brought her theatricality, her professionalism, and her humor to civil rights campaigns for senior citizens, and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, one of the highlights of her career.
 

Esther Mae Scott with Guitar

 

And about that album (which has a not-yet-famous Emmylou Harris on backing vocals)… “Mama Ain’t Nobody’s Fool” (Bomp Records) shows us just how widely varied the blueswomen’s repertoires were. There are 12-bar blues here, like the “Gulf Coast Blues” Smith made famous. But there’s also a cover of Jimmie Rodgers’ “Blue Yodel No. 1” (here called “T for Texas”), which shows the proximity of “blues” and “country” among traveling tent show and vaudeville performers like Scott and Rodgers, both of whom were from Mississippi. Like her peers, Scott showcased her ability to adapt contemporary popular songs, and produces a swinging “Can’t Buy Me Love,” which imbues the Beatles’ teen-pop hit with the wisdom of a woman who’s lived a long life. Finally, her “Black Jesus/Alleluia” wittily links the domestic labor of her earthly life to the promise of reward in a heaven that belongs to “Black Jesus:” “When I get to heaven, do I enter the back door? Hang up my robe and start scrubbing floors?” “Black Jesus,” like so many of Scott’s songs, links popular, memorable melodies to calls for civil rights that are irresistibly singable. And so while Scott’s music may not endure on countless recordings, her work as a musician, dancer, comedian, and songleader, persists in the less traceable repetition and reinvention of songs sung in churches, around campfires, and recorded by others whose names we do know: Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong.

In the late 1970s, Scott was interviewed for the Black Women Oral History Project at Harvard:

http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/45175352

 

Find more pictures and poetry of Scott’s here: http://esthermaescott.com/

An Introduction to the Music of Eritrea

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I come from a land in Africa bordering the Red Sea. Its name is Eritrea. There’s no reason for you to know it. I barely know it beyond its past. The country is one of the most informationally opaque in the world, governed by a regime convinced isolation and control trump vulnerability to invasion by land or Western politics. It took 100 years from that start of Italy’s reign to the end of Ethiopian occupation for my people to stand freely beneath their own flag. Twenty years later, they flee one of their own.

map_of_eritrea

In North America, the music of my home remains largely unknown outside the diaspora.
While the fetishization of East African women in hip-hop has been extensively documented, references to Eritrea by popular bands have either had nothing to do with the country (Future of the Left’s “Arming Eritrea”) or ignored it altogether (Bright Eyes’ “Haile Selassie”). Lupe Fiasco’s latest track is also titled “Haile Selassie” and uses excerpts from the Emperor’s speech on inequality at the 1963 United Nations General Assembly:

“That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned; That until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation…[Until that day, the African continent will not know peace.]”

If these words seem familiar, the same excerpt was featured in Bob Marley’s “War.” The General Assembly address occurred less than a year after Jamaica’s independence; the General Assembly address occurred less than a year after Haile Selassie annexed Eritrea and declared it the 14th province of Ethiopia, leading to a war for independence spanning 30 years.

Another of the excerpts in Fiasco’s “Haile Selassie” involves the act of silencing:

“Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”

There are many ways to destroy a cultural identity. Forbidding access to a language is one of them. The year 1962 was also the year Haile Selassie burned all books in Eritrea written in the country’s most widely spoken tongue, Tigrinya, and decreed all new books and educational materials would be printed solely in Amharic, the national language of Ethiopia. The role of Eritrean music, for decades already a call to arms against occupiers, skyrocketed in significance.

In terms of global distribution, this music has at best been lumped in with the synthesizer-averse E?thiopiques series. Emulations of Eritrean music have also appeared stateside by well-meaning bands (e.g., Fool’s Gold’s “Yam Lo Mosech“). Yet, the Eritrean heroes responsible for inspiring large swaths of the country to fight for independence — singers who were jailed and tortured as political dissenters — have seen limited exposure beyond their borders.

The reasons are numerous. To Western ears, Eritrean music has about as much rhythmic variation as mud; the same drumbeat can be heard at roughly the same tempo on the majority of songs; the length of each song typically falls between 6-9 minutes: Pop music this is not. And truly, these songs are for dancing, which in certain Eritrean traditions entails shuffling in a circle while shrugging one’s shoulders to the beat.

Listen, I know. I know how this sounds. I expect no miracles from new listeners. It took decades for me to embrace it. The voices were shrill. The singers’ frequent inability to commit to one pitch per vowel an affront to whatever thread of Puritanism I inherited from America. The meandering saxophone — an aural figure so revered it was employed during a minute of silence when Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki held a gathering in New York City in 2011 — haunting more songs than I care to admit.

Historically, ours has been a music of metaphor and self-censorship. For more than half a century, Eritreans have been singing about their presumably-human-and-definitely- DEFINITELY-nothing-at-all-to-do-with-political-independence loves because they couldn’t sing openly about their own country. Some tried; eyes were lost. And yes, occasionally the lyrics were about romance, but mostly they were about the endless pursuit of freedom.

Below are a handful of songs/videos featuring Eritrean performers. Some highlight the kraar, a stringed instrument present in many Eritrean songs. By no means is this a comprehensive list. While the Tigrinya tribe of Eritrea is its biggest, there are eight other ethnic groups in the country, each with its own language, style of dance, and festive garb. Additional songs and artists can be discovered on Eritrea 24, Spotify, and other online primers.
 

The Arresting Sound of Cardiacs

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This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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Cardiacs are a British band from Surbiton. They were active from the late 1970s through 2008 — a lengthy career that can be divided into at least two distinct phases — and in that time they produced several difficult-to-describe albums. I like aspects of all their records and rank certain pieces alongside any earthly music that I have heard, from any era and any nation. (In fact, some of you might just want to cut to the chase and check out my personal favorite Cardiacs composition, “The Everso Closely Guarded Line,” before reading any further. It’s the final track from their 1989 album, On Land And In The Sea: an attention-demanding eight-minute mini-epic distinguished by recapitulated sequences of Baroque-style melodic counterpoint. The last three or four minutes coalesce into a rhythmically complex, anthemically rousing passage of such startling beauty that my heart swells in my chest and my eyes get all watery every time I listen to it. I recommend turning off the phone and the lights before hitting play. It’s available here in HD audio:
 

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Don’t forget to adjust your YouTube settings for full quality!)

Adoring the band as I do, I have often thought that it would be nice to share my enthusiasm with friends and acquaintances. But Cardiacs can be a tough sell. Most people have simply never heard of them. But it also turns out that lot of the people who have heard of them don’t like them.

They are a challenging proposition. I’ll concede that right away. Their overall sound is a rebarbative fusion of punk and progressive rock. Like a lot of classic punk acts, their music is often abrasively loud and manically fast, and combines grating, adenoidal vocals with aggressive guitar-based riffing. But like a lot of progressive rock bands, they have a penchant for odd time signatures, multi-layered arrangements, surprising chord modulations, and unpredictable song structures that eschew the traditional verse-chorus-verse template. Tim Smith’s lyrics are also strange and obscure, shot through with grotesque humor and playful mock-infantilism. Themes of suburban alienation (“A Little Man and a House”), the confusion and profusion of sexual desire (“Buds and Spawn”), and apocalyptic religiosity (“Fiery Gun Hand”) are all discernable, but rarely resolve into a coherent statement; the results can be entertaining, frustrating, and unsettling, by turns.

I think this unlikely blending of two ostensibly opposed popular musical genres — punk and prog — aggravates some listeners for reasons that are as much ideological as aesthetic. To be more precise: I think the music of Cardiacs inadvertently exposed the deep formal conservatism behind the putatively radical aesthetic assumptions of the British music press in the 1980s, according to which punk and prog were regarded as essentially equivalent to matter and anti-matter. Certainly, the punk-worshiping journalists of the early 80s were primed to despise anything that smacked of prog almost reflexively; the idea that a band might try and bring both genres together to forge a new idiom simply could not be countenanced. Consequently, Cardiacs were repudiated more harshly than many bands of the same era that committed the (more ordinary) musical sins of blatant commercialism and shameless derivativeness.

For example, reviewing the Big Ship 12-inch (1986) — Cardiacs’ first vinyl release — Mick Mercer of the Melody Maker suggested that somebody should “arrest these peasants before they get another chance.” For Mercer, it was as if the band had committed some kind of musical crime. A year later, reviewing A Little Man and a House and the Whole World Window for the New Musical Express, Jack O’Neill was even harsher: “Cardiacs are the sound of both feet in the grave,” he opined. What’s more, shortly following O’Neill’s review, the editors at the NME — a powerful organ of musical opinion at the time — seem to have taken the unusually vindictive step of blacklisting the band altogether. Even if another musician or band cited Cardiacs admiringly, the subsequent article or interview would eliminate the reference; no one was allowed to say anything good about them!

It wasn’t just the press who reacted with revulsion in those early days. I witnessed at first hand the hatred that Cardiacs could inspire in an audience on what was (tragically, for me), the only occasion that I ever saw them perform live. The year was 1984, and I was fifteen years old when I caught Cardiacs as the support group for a headline act that I am now embarrassed to name — although of course it was that headline act that I had actually gone out to see. (OK, it was Marillion, but please don’t hold that against me, or more importantly against Cardiacs, who really don’t sound anything like Marillion at all.)

I can still clearly recall that both Tim Smith (lead guitar, vocals, principal song-writer) and Sarah Smith (saxophone) were wearing garish, clown-like make-up, to disturbing fake-jolly effect. I also remember a few obviously choreographed bits of cabaret-style theater. For example, there was a curious Brechtian mini-drama during the final number, in which Tim was joined onstage by an MC-figure in tie-and-tails who presented him with a bottle of champagne and then showered him in confetti — a display that seemed to move Tim to tears. (You can see a version of this set-piece here, played on a much larger scale and stage for a more receptive crowd.)

Cardiacs were hardly the first band to incorporate such antics into their act, of course. But at the time, even the slightest gesture towards such self-consciously “arty” theatricality was very much out of fashion. I doubt most of the teenagers in the crowd had ever seen anything like it — I certainly hadn’t — and the unfamiliarity of the performance style might partly explain why the response was so blisteringly savage. Within a few minutes of taking the stage, Cardiacs were under attack; bottles, cans, and homophobic obscenities (anything different was “queer” in Cardiff in 1984) were hurled at them in a barrage that lasted for pretty much the entire set. (In retrospect, the viciousness of the crowd only made Tim’s clown-child onstage persona seem even more vulnerable and incongruous — thereby adding to the affectively off-kilter dynamic that he was clearly trying to generate.) It was a pretty horrifying scene, really, but the band just played right through the storm of missiles and insults as if it wasn’t happening. Perhaps they had already got used to that kind of reception; I’ve read it was even worse at other gigs on this tour. (Apparently, at one show irate audience members set fire to the stage curtain in an effort to drive the band off). Still, it cannot have been easy to keep going in the face of such violent hostility.

As for me — I pretty much loved the band instantly. I’m not sure what it was, but I just knew the audience had got it wrong — and that something was happening on that stage that was a lot more interesting and unexpected than what I had come out for that night, even if I wasn’t fully able to process it. The sound and the look were unusual, no doubt about it. But it got under my skin and into my head and I knew I wanted more.

Unfortunately, I didn’t even know what the band was called. The ticket and posters just said “Marillion plus support.” It would be some days before I learned the name, talking to an older kid at school who it turned out had also been at the gig (apparently he’d seen the word “CARDIACS” stenciled on an amplifier or equipment box or something). And even when armed with this information, I could not find any records by the band in the local shops. (Reasonably enough; Cardiacs had yet to release anything on vinyl, as it turns out, although they had released several recordings in a cassette-only format of very limited distribution. In the absence of the Internet, however, I had no way of knowing any of this.)

In fact, almost three years would pass before I finally stumbled over a Cardiacs album one fateful day in 1987, while browsing the racks in Cardiff’s justly famous Spillers Records. It was called A Little Man and a House and the Whole World Window; the cover image was a black and white photo of a giant daisy. I saw the name, I remembered that weird, intense, disconcerting gig from what already seemed like eons ago (three years is a long time when you are a teenager), and I bought the thing, unheard and untested, and eagerly caught the bus home to play it.

I loved this record instantly, too, and even recognized some bits and pieces from the show I had seen (such as the repeated refrain of “that’s the way we all go” from the title track and the song “RES”). This time, though, I was encountering them in the context of an ambitiously “modernist” concept album (or near enough) about the fear and loneliness and false bonhomie engendered by contemporary urban life — and the idea that something bigger than the big city might be glimpsed out of the “whole world window.” (For a lengthy review that does a superb job contextualizing both the band and this unusual record, check out the essay by Sean Kitching in The Quietus from last year)

I was now a bona fide Cardiacs fan; nevertheless, I somehow missed their next album (1989’s on On Land and In The Sea) — probably due to my being wrapped up in my final year at university — and then in the early 90s I left the UK for the United States, and got distracted by … well, a whole bunch of things. After a few more years I even got rid of my record player (though not my records) and over a decade passed when I didn’t listen to the Cardiacs music at all.

But just a couple of years ago I was going through my old vinyl records with a view to finally selling them off when I found my (now more than twenty-years-old) copy of A Little Man and a House … and found myself wondering “what happened to these guys?” And this time, thanks to the marvelous technology of the Internet I was able to make a belated rediscovery of the band. I think this is the closest I have come to that uniquely 21st century experience of hooking up with an old high-school sweetheart in middle age via Facebook. I feel as if I should have loved this band all my life; that other groups were mere dalliances by comparison to this — the real thing. Getting back into Cardiacs has felt like coming home, and for the last few years I’ve listened to them with more passionate interest than almost any other band, almost as if I’ve been trying to make up for lost time.

I swiftly learned that they too had gone through some major transitions in the early nineties, transforming from a six person line-up featuring saxophone, keyboards, and a second percussionist along side guitar, bass, and drums, into a leaner and meaner guitar-driven quartet. To my delight, I also discovered that I liked this later incarnation as much as the band I first fell for back in the 80s. The musical texture of their sound obviously changed with their instrumentation, but all the things that I loved — the strangeness and complexity and inventiveness and emotional intensity — were still there in abundance. They still had the capacity to disturb and they still had that wild, ecstatic, manic joyfulness.
 

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Rather less happily, I also learned of the terrible series of strokes that laid Tim Smith low and almost ended his life in 2008 (apparently when he was just on the eve of completing the first Cardiacs album of the 21st century). According to several reports, while Tim’s mind is as sharp as ever, he is now partially paralyzed and badly in need of ongoing physical therapy. I continue to hope that one day we may hear better news from the Cardiacs camp regarding his condition, but for the time being, at least, it seems unlikely that he will be able to lead his band onto to a stage again. (The story is covered here in article from The Guardian. I suspect this article represents the only time Cardiacs ever got a write up in the mainstream British press, which is a bitter irony and a damned shame all by itself.)

For a few years after this disaster, the Cardiacs website was dormant and the albums slipped out of print (although old copies would sell for quite shockingly inflated prices on eBay). As of last year, however, the shop at their website re-opened, and you can now buy all their albums once again, direct from the UK. So if after reading this and listening to any of the tracks I’ve chosen as a selection, if you do decide you want to hear more, PLEASE consider ordering the CDs from Mary at the website. A good portion of the proceeds will go towards Tim’s ongoing medical expenses, so you can actually feel good about an act of self-indulgence, even as you acquire some of the most interesting and under valued British pop music of the last century. Humanity point and hipster points in one happy purchase — you can’t go wrong!

OK, time now for a few sample tracks from across the career. This is an entirely personal and idiosyncratic set of choices — other Cardiacs fans might have made a very different selection — but I’ve also tried represent some of the different musical phases of the band with the few choices.

1. TO GO OFF AND THINGS

That link to the disturbing original video, although personally I’d rather just listen to the track which is intense enough as it is. This version is from the CD re-release of one of those obscure “cassette only” albums from the early 1980s, The Seaside. I actually remember them playing this when I saw them; the stop-start riff was very distinctive, and the whole band would freeze each time the music stopped. I think it’s this kind of track led music critics to call Cardiacs a Pronk band (after the unlikely mixture of Prog and Punk). Tim rejected the label, preferring “psychedelic” — if you have to have a label for us, he said — but this is indeed pretty pronky, IMO. Recently covered by Napalm Death.

2. A LITTLE MAN AND A HOUSE

A fade-in and crash, followed by some ominous parping on the horns and strings, and then those too fade away, replaced by muted industrial clanking sounds, over which a tentative, anxious character sings of his eagerness to get to work on time. And things get stranger from there. I think this album really needs to be heard of a piece … but maybe this first track will whet your appetite. (You should skip I’m Eating in Bed if listening to the whole thing, BTW, and listen to it later; it’s a fine track — but it was not part of the original album release and doesn’t really belong there.)

3. THERE’S TOO MANY IRONS IN THE FIRE
 

A delirious single from 1987. I. Inspired performances from the rhythm section in particular. Love this one. Echt Cardiacs.

4. BUDS AND SPAWN
 

 
This version kindly uploaded in HD so your dog can appreciate the higher frequencies. From On Land And In The Sea. This track completely defies my powers of description. It comes in so many different pieces and the tempo shifts are truly boggling — I can’t imagine the amount of rehearsal required to pull this off. And yet it really doesn’t feel like prog-muso showing off to me. It’s just too damn manic for that. I hear something new in it every time.

5. DAY IS GONE
 

 
Can’t find this in higher than 240p, but this should be good enough to get the flavor. With this track we jump to 1992 and the Heaven Born and Ever Bright Album album — the first by the more stripped-down four-piece the band became in the 1990s. This is a remarkable composition that manages to look backward to 1960s psychedelia and forward to the future of pop, at the same time. In another instance of the band’s bad luck, ROUGH TRADE (the record label) went bankrupt shortly after this record was released and the album became impossible to find till 1995 when Tim was able to re-release it on his own label.

6. FIERY GUN HAND
 

 
A relatively straight-ahead rocker (well, almost … the instrumental break is quite mental). From Sing To God (1996), a double album that most fans consider to be Cardiacs’s masterpiece. I think I like on On Land And In The Sea (1989) slightly more, but both are wonderful, and Sing To God has just been re-released in a deluxe 180g vinyl pressing for all you true audiophiles.

7. DIRTY BOY

For this one, I’m just going to quote a section of Sean Kitching’s recent review of that deluxe new vinyl edition of Sing to God, since he offers a better summary of this song than I could possibly write myself.

‘Dirty Boy’ is perhaps the album’s crowning achievement. It begins with a guitar riff reminiscent of Alice Cooper’s ‘I’m Eighteen’ and alchemically transmutes its base material over the course of its nearly nine minutes duration with celestially ringing sounds constructed by innumerably overlaid strata of acoustic guitar and incredibly drawn out sustained vocals that when performed live had an undeniably consciousness-altering effect on all those present.” (For the whole review, go here.

8. THE EVERSO CLOSELY GUARDED LINE
 

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Here it is again just in case you didn’t play it already. And here they are doing it live many years later — bootleg sound, of course, but they pull it off.

Enjoy!
 

Going to Brownsville? Take that Right Hand Road.

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There’s not much to Durhamville, Tennessee, where Sleepy John Estes (born John Adam Estes, January 25, 1899 according to his grave/born John Adams Estes, January 28, 1900 according to his World War I draft card– June 5, 1977) was born and buried, with a life in nearby Brownsville sandwiched between. To get there, you drive narrow, mostly straight, country roads. The speed limit is 50, but that’s only to encourage the locals who could certainly drive faster to watch out for the rare stranger who has to take the roads much slower. For Tennessee, the land is flat, though, being Tennessee, that means it has some gentle rolls to it. It’s mostly farmland, interrupted by wavy lines of trees in the low spots where the creeks lay. I’ve always come into Durhamville from the south, so it’s one farm after another, then a cemetery on the right, more farms, and then the cemeteries surrounding the Elam Baptist Church on the left. Maybe a quarter mile up the road is “downtown” Durhamville, which is four empty wooden buildings at a crossroad—three brick store-ish looking buildings on one side of the street and one wooden building on the other that gives off a kind of post-office-ish vibe. They are obviously no longer safe to enter.

Once tractors were cheaper than sharecroppers, there wasn’t any need for even as little of Durhamville as there was.
But the Elam Baptist Church is still something of a tourist destination, kind of, if I, going out there every year or so to Sleepy John Estes’s grave, count as a tourist. The church you can see from the road sits on a slight rise, surrounded by graves and a fence. This is the old white Baptist church. Down the lane that runs next to the church is another church, the old black Baptist church. According to the people I found at the church, it has a white congregation now. It has a smattering of graves near it. And then, the next lot south, is an enormous cemetery, one that seems to be made up of one-third Esteses, none of whom are Sleepy John. If you’re looking for him, he’s buried next to his sister in a kind of no-man’s land where the three cemeteries come together.

Sleepy John’s grave, taken by itself, isn’t actually that interesting. You can see it on Find-a-Grave and spare yourself the soggy shoes and the bug bites. But standing in the cemetery full of Esteses is totally worth it. For one thing, it’s hard to think of Sleepy John Estes as some isolated lone bluesman when you’re standing among fifty of his family members. Most of the Esteses have Masonic symbols on their graves—even Sleepy John’s sister—so it’s easy enough to imagine that he probably also was a Mason, which, in rural Tennessee in his lifetime would have been part social club, part survival strategy. Mostly, you get the feeling of Sleepy John being a part of a large family in a close-knit community that sat in a place fundamentally rigged against them. Just looking at the dead Baptists, Durhamville must have had three black people for every white person, and yet who got the nice church and the churchyard burial? Not the Esteses.
 

 
The most important thing you can see by going to Durhamville, if, for some reason, you actually would want to go there is that, if you are going from Durhamville to Brownsville, perhaps to see the girl you love, with her great, long, curly hair, you do, indeed, take the right-hand road.
 

 
Now we’re getting at the interesting thing about Sleepy John Estes. Mr. Hugh Clarke, of “Lawyer Clark Blues,” was a real person in Brownsville. “Vasser Williams” who gets what amounts to the world’s best auto-shop commercial in “Brownsville Blues” was likely Vassar Williamson, who was living in rural Lauderdale County in 1930 with his wife, Morene, and their son, Verlon. (I base this both on the fact that this is the only Vassar living in Lauderdale County and that Sleepy John drops the last syllable in a lot of words in this song—Durhamville gets shortened to Durham, Brownsville to Browns. No reason “Williamson’s shop” couldn’t get truncated to Williams’ shop.) I couldn’t nail down a Martha Hardin, but there are a couple of possible women (A Martha Ewell, whose father was Jim Hardin died in Dyer, just northeast of Brownsville, in 1956 at the age of forty. Right name, right general area, right general age. And there are a couple of older Martha Hardins buried south of Brownsville, possibilities if we imagine John taking up with 50 year old women when he was a young man. And that’s assuming her last name isn’t Harding or, considering John’s mumble, possibly Hardeman—both last names you would have found in Brownsville or the surrounding county before the song was recorded.). The streets Sleepy John refers to are real streets you can drive down in Brownsville—Wilson and Bradford.
 

 

Now, I’m trying to walk a tricky line here because I, personally, find the backstories of songs in most cases rather tedious. I don’t care how many songs Pattie Boyd inspired, for instance. But I don’t think that what Sleepy John was up to was quite that simple. Steve Leggett over at All Music calls Brownsville Sleepy John’s Spoon River, as in Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology, and I think this gets as close to Sleepy John’s artistic project as I’ve seen anyone bother to come.

Sleepy John wasn’t attempting to literally or figuratively seduce anyone by writing a song about them (at least, not in the way George Harrison or Eric Clampton were Boyd). He was, I think, transforming the ordinary people and places that surrounded him into something aestheticly meaningful. He wasn’t writing a song for, say, Hugh Clarke that would curry favor with him (or at least not that alone). He was trying to do something to Clarke through that song, to make Clarke valuable to Estes’ audience not because he was a good lawyer, but because the song about him was good.

Sleepy John was what we might these days call “adding value” to the place he lived with and the people he lived among by making them subjects of song. Think about how powerful it is, even though we all know it’s corny, when we go to a concert and the performer says, “Hello, [whatever place the performer is in tonight]!” That feeling of “Where we live matters to this artist we like!” Now imagine what that must have been like to have Sleepy John singing songs about the people in these little unknown towns, being able to go to record shops, or at that time, probably furniture stores, and finding records with people you knew mentioned on them.

I just finished Steve Johnson’s chapbook, Obscure Early Bluesmen (Who Never Existed), which, in a brief nineteen pages manages to mercilessly skewer every single thing about white people and our long, problematic love of old, obscure blues. One of the jokes of the book is that almost all of these fake bluesmen, of course, recorded a version of Stagger Lee. It’s just expected—of course every blues singer, even those that don’t exist, would have a version of Stagger Lee.

But “Stag” Lee Shelton was a real person. Billy Lyons was a real person. And we still sing about them. We don’t know who first wrote that song, but that song made those men immortal, after a fashion.

You listen to enough Sleepy John Estes and you start to suspect that he is deliberately up to something similar. He is, by god, going to write songs so catchy about these people and this place that they live on and become mythological. They are real and more than real.

I debated a long time about whether Sleepy John Estes was obscure enough to write about. Take three seconds to type “Sleepy John Estes” into Google and you’ll be able to read about what an enormous influence he was on Bob Dylan, how Ralph Peer recognized his talent, how Led Zeppelin “borrowed” heavily from him.

Sleepy John hasn’t been lost or forgotten—even if the people in the church near where he rests have no idea who he is—and he’s likely someone you’ve heard of. His music, even the old stuff, isn’t that hard to get into because he had such impact on the gods of 20th century popular music. You’ll recognize songs and phrases and vocal approaches, even if you think you don’t know him. And a lot of his songs are just flat-out fun. Try “Milk Cow Blues” which somehow sounds like a person wound three music boxes all playing the same song and set them off to playing that song at slightly different times. There’s no reason the song shouldn’t shake apart into nonsense, but somehow it doesn’t. It’s genius, awesome, and makes clear his jug band roots.
 

 
But I think what’s been obscured about him is that he wasn’t just the musical progenitor of songs we love. He had an artistic drive, an aesthetic sensibility. He was up to something in that place with those people. He wasn’t just writing about them—his songs aren’t three-minute documentaries. He was trying to do something to and for them.
But, I’ll admit, I’m struggling to even find the words to talk about what that something is. And I want to get at it. To put it into words that would make you appreciate what it’s like to stand next to someone’s grave, to see his people in the dirt there with him, and to listen to those songs and hear him singing about them like they mattered, not just to him, but to the larger world.

So, this is the thing about Sleepy John Estes: he had a goal and it wasn’t just to write the best songs he could or to be the best guitarist he could, though those are fine goals. He knew music could do something and he wanted it to do that something for and to the people he knew.

And when you stand in those places, among those familiar names, looking at how the real world maps onto Sleepy John’s artistic world, it feels like he may have done it, may have brought those two realms close enough together that some of his ordinary world was able to escape and live on.
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Editor’s Note: One of Betsy’s comments on this thread has been turned into a follow up post with youtube examples here.