investigatingregionalscenes - Tumblr blog

[investigatingregionalscenes]

story about music #8

Winter-Spring, 2013: In order to graduate, I needed a capstone. I chose to do deep reporting project I’d been threatening to do since 2009, and looked into the noise and experimental scene of New England. I recorded seven interview with experimental artists about their lives and work. These are five of them. They were taken in a variety of locales in the Boston area: Cambridge, Somerville, Lowell, and Salem.

In the last year, I’ve been thinking a lot about this period and these conversations as I ask myself, why keep doing this?

above: Ron Lessard, as Emil Beaulieau, performs in someone’s basement in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Music

Music for this episode was created using the following household objects: a desk lamp, a can of beer, a record player, a radiator, and a vacuum cleaner.

With the exceptions of “Fog in the Ravine” by Lejsovka and Freund as well samples from their songs “From Royal Ave” and “Nothing, Just Looking at the Moon” and the song “Blue Line Homicide” by Twodeadsluts Onegoodfuck.

The soundtrack was created with advice from musician Jacob Rosati. It will be made available for download later in the summer. For more info please subscribe to the podcast, tumblr, or follow us on twitter.

Links

Crank Sturgeon still performs and tours regularly. He also builds contact microphones and other circuit bent sundries, one of which was used in the production of this episode. A full recording of his set used in this episode is available here.

Crank Sturgeon, 2012, from Wikimedia.

Shane Broderick spent most of his twenties making music with his friend Ted (and later, their friend Josh Hydeman) under the name Twodeadsluts Onegoodfuck. Their music is a good example of the subgenres Grindcore and Power Electronics. The name is also exemplary of those subgenres. The performance video which is referenced in the documentary, taken in the mid-00s, has been removed from Youtube. A video from that period is visible here, uploaded by the band’s Ted Sweeney. (contains nudity)

Shane Broderick, from Existence Establishment

Ron Lessard still runs RRRecords in Lowell, Massachusetts. He previously performed under the name Emil Beaulieau. A collection of performances, including the one used in the documentary, can be seen in the video compilation below. 

Emil Beaulieau: America’s Greatest Living Noise Artist, from Youtube

Andrea Pensado still makes music and performs live. She composes in Max/MSP. Her most recent release is a pair of live collaborations with Id M Theft Able. Her former project, with Greg Kowalski, is QFWFQ. 

Andrea Pensado live performance, 10-13-13, from Youtube

Angela Sawyer owned Weirdo Records until it closed in 2015. She now performs comedy and experimental music around Boston. 

Angela Sawyer, from her personal website.

The interview with Andrea Pensado was recorded along with my friend Samira, who was producing her own documentary of Boston’s experimental music scene, below. It includes footage from the Andrea interview as well as her own separate interview with Angela Sawyer. 

“The Noise” by Samira Winter, from Youtube

Luigi Russolo’s manifesto is The Art of Noises

Luigi Russolo and the Intonarumori, with his asst. Uglo Piatti, from Wikimedia

Transcript

Brendan: Would you mind telling me about the show at [withheld] , from six years ago, down the street?

Shane: Yeah, um, I was setting up a show with some old-school Detroit noise dudes. When we showed up, the owner was there instead of the doorman, and he was just upset cause he was there on, like, a Tuesday night. 

So what ended up happening was is, uhh, two bands played and he came up to me a said, “show’s over.” “Well there’s still two bands to play,” and he’s like, “I don’t care, the show’s over.” I’m like, “the show’s been booked for two months.” Just because you want to go home and, like, jerk off into a kleenex or whatever it is that you fuckin’ do. It has nothing to do with me. And he got upset, and I was like, well listen dude, how about the last two bands play at the exact same time.” So that’s what we did. Warmth and Twodeadsluts collaborated. It lasted about fifteen seconds, and the owner came over and kicked a table with everyone’s gear on it. So the only logical thing for me to do as a Bostonian–– and I have pride being a Bostonian–– is I just looked at this guy and I was like, “I don’t care how big he is, or how Italian he is, I’m gonna wind up, and I’m gonna punch this guy right in the fucking face.”

Brendan: And what happened?

Shane: That guy hit me back––I-I lost a little bit of time there. He’s a lot bigger than me. Uh, clocks went still. I kinda woke up, I was on the ground, and he was smashing everyone’s gear. Cops came in, they put me in a car, they, y’know told me to leave and blah blah blah.

Brendan: Is that the only time cops have been called on you?

Shane: No. Not even close.

music: “Blue Line Homicide” | Twodeadsluts Onegoodfuck

You’re listening to Stories About Music, a podcast on the subjects of music, journalism, and memories, and how the line between those three things is often not as clear as I’d hoped.

My name is Brendan Mattox, and this is story about music number eight, “Who’s Afraid of the Art of Noise?”.

Room 1 (Crank Sturgeon)

Cars pass by on Massachusetts Avenue, seen out the front window of Weirdo Records in Cambridge. It’s night time. A few young men in their twenties sit on the floor of the small storefront, waiting as Crank Sturgeon sets up in a corner.

Crank: Cool. So, do you think this is our show? Shall we wait, or?

Angela: I think…What time is it? It’s not eight-thirty, that’s probably most of our show. Let me turn that off.

Crank: Not that uh, four’s a wonderful audience, I’ve played for two. One of them was my brother who never saw me before that point…and Id Em Thft Able and I had some very bizarre sexual ritual in front of my brother, involving instant powdered milk and a plastic poster from 1970 of this naked woman holding a stuffed animal…And I had a penis helmet at the time… but alright, well I will perform for you hello, my name is Crank Sturgeon everybody… (6:37) We could do a performance where I have everyone sing introductions of themselves to each other. Everyone up on your feet. 

Crank: Hello! My name is Craaaaaaannnk Sturrrgeon!

Angela: Hello! My name is Angela Sawyyyyyeerrrrrr!

Crank: All at once now!

Brendan: And I am Brendan Mattox!

Crank: Hi Brendan Mattox, my name is Crank, it’s a pleasure to meet you, you have a really firm handshake. And this man in the corner, what’s your name? Andrew, another Andrew, Brendan, Angela.

Angela: Wow, we’re nearly phonemes.

Crank: Ahh, phonies…

Crank Sturgeon sits down behind his instruments: a few tape recorders, a sharpie, and a loudspeaker full of tacks and jelly beans.

Crank: First Piece, oh, wait. My brand new fish helmet, so I can lose even more water to my body. There we go. First piece is improvisations with the letter D. Delirious, Delightful, Delicious, Dumb, Dumbfounded, Dimwit, Diplodocus, Dinosaur, Diana, Dagnasty, Dagnabbit, Diddling, Dawdling, Doodling, Dude Ranch (buzzing noise) Dick, Doofus, Dammit, Darn, Dangle, Drink, Drunk, Dank, Dork, Dusty, Dunce, Distinguished! Development! Duplicitous.

Crank is wearing a black garbage bag over his head, adjusted so his face and white goatee peek through the hole he’s cut in it for air. On either side of the bag are two enormous fish eyes, drawn on card stock, with marker. 

I’m here tonight reporting a story about a couple of loosely associated experimental musicians from Boston, a story whose meaning is starting to exceed my grasp.

Brendan: How would you describe Crank Sturgeon?

Crank: In uhh, a sentence? Brendan: I have no idea. How would you describe the experience of being Crank Sturgeon?

Crank: Well it’s, uh, it’s not a party.

Angela: It is so.

Crank: It is a party. It’s funny because, I’ve survived for awhile, through the many phases of experimental music.

Brendan: What do you mean the many phases?

Crank: The many phases. You’d go to a show in 1996 in a basement in Allston and it was like, a tough guy scene. 

Angela: People sitting on the floor, like indian style, and a dude looking at his belly button going “doonk-doonk-doonk.”

Crank: (laughs) Very true…

Angela Sawyer, the owner of Weirdo, jumps in. She and Crank know each other going back to the nineties, when they were at the beginning of the path that has led to the three of us standing in a circle in her record store.

Brendan:  what’s the trick to growing old with grace within the experimental community?

Crank: Oh that’s a really fun question, because I’m still figuring it out. I think…did you want to say something?

Angela: Well I feel like no one– when I was twenty, or eighteen, and I met people who were much older than me, it never occurred to me to look at myself from their point of view, ever. So I only ever thought, “oh, that person is as old as my mom and my dad, but they’re doing what I want instead of what my parents are doing. Once you get to be–– I’m in my forties…then is when you’re like, oh, I have been there so many times and they have no idea where I am. So that’s when you start to feel marginalized a little bit

Room 2 (Shane Broderick)

The TV in Shane Broderick’s living room is on mute. A weather man gestures in to a map of New England in shades of blue and purple. At the top of the screen is a red banner with the words “Blizzard Warning.” It’s mid-afternoon. Shane and I are drinking cans of beer that Shane brought out of the fridge.

Shane: I was always playin’ music and stuff since I was a little kid. Even when I was, like, twelve years old I’d be up late smokin’ weed and messing with drum machines and stuff like that.

Brendan: Where’d you get your hands on a drum machine at age twelve.

Shane: Uhh, Christmas present.

Brendan: Christmas present?

Shane: Yeah.

Brendan: That’s pretty cool.

Shane: Yeah, I had my beginner guitar and a drum machine. Y’know once I was like, fifteen and stuff I got a job, started collecting equipment…I thought I’d make a career out of it but I ended up just being, like, a lifelong mailroom guy.

When he was 19 years-old, Shane dropped out of college in Florida and moved back to Massachusetts. He started making abrasive music with a friend he knew while working at a gas station in high school. 

Shane: We worked together and every time we finished a shift it would be like a hundred and something dollars under, and I was like, what the fuck this kid man.

They called themselves Twodeadsluts Onegoodfuck.

Shane: We joked around on the internet about how we were going to start the most extreme band ever and how the first record we’d just put a bunch of contact mics in a blender and throw a rabbit in it and whatever it sounded like, that was the first LP. Which we never did. [music in]

Brendan: But what instead came out of it was…

Shane: I stuck my boner in a blender. Which was a demo that we did which was me and him coaching eleven of our friends, we were just trying to make circus music with grindcore parts.

Shane: We got reviewed in something like Metal Maniacs, that was like a magazine that when I was ten years old and my mother would drag me to CVS to grab things, I would sit in the aisle and look at, like, pictures of like, Slayer looking sexy and stuff like that, so I was like “oh shit, I’m in this magazine now.” After that, me and him decided to keep the name and go forward with it.

Shane is in his early thirties and he still makes music, although Twodeadsluts hasn’t been active for awhile. He also still plays shows sometimes, though he doesn’t really enjoy it.

Shane: I don’t know I think it’s just, like, nerves. It was easier with the other guys because we were more like a wrecking crew. Y’know, get blind stinkin’ drunk and it didn’t really matter what happened.

Brendan: What would one night at a TDS show end up being like?

Shane: It would start off sloppy and then I wouldn’t remember then end of it. 

(Indiscriminate yelling)

Shane: We’re Twodeadsluts Onegoodfuck from Boston, and we need the drum machine way fucking louder. Get that shit way the fuck up.

Brendan: When you guys got onstage, there seems to be sort of a pattern. You start off with some harsh feedback, and then it progresses into stuff getting knocked over.

Shane: There was definitely a lot of feedback and definitely a lot of things knocked over.

They were also usually naked. 

Shane: I think we were probably more performative over substance, to be quite honest. In those early shows we were just using five or six microphones, a bunch of fx pedals running back into each other, and just whatever sounds were happening, were happening

[music]

Shane: Either people really liked it or found it very entertaining, and on the flipside– we’d have people picket our shows, feminists thinking that we were, like, um, promoting sexism… Just that band name wipes off at least 70% of the population from even giving you a chance. It’s probably a higher percentage than that…

Brendan: So the choice of the band name then, was it to…

Shane: It was kind of like, a filtering mechanism and also it was like an inside joke that just kept going and going, and no one was really in on it but us. The band wasn’t supposed to last ten years either.

Shane: I can’t even give you any rationale behind it…it really might look pretty forced, but it was actually pretty natural for the people involved in the band.

Brendan: Why was it so natural?

Shane: I don’t know. That’s a question for a therapist. I don’t know.

I sip from my can of beer even though it’s empty. Shane plays with the pull tab on his. On the television, the weatherman predicts a foot of snow is going to cover Boston over the next two days. Shane, still dressed in scrubs from the hospital where he works, says,“I got to work tomorrow no matter what.”

There’s a half-open ironing board against a wall. In the bathroom, the sink is plastered with shavings. Next to the un-flushed toilet sits a stack of musical notation paper. I stare at it, because it says something specific about the person I’m speaking to. I can’t figure out what, or why.

Brendan: If you could maybe, like, point me in the right direction of some people in the area to talk to…

Shane: I think you should definitely talk to Ron in Lowell. He runs triple-R records. He’s kind of, America’s greatest living noise artist. Like a godfather type…

Room 3 (RRRon)

I walk out Shane’s front door and into Ray Robinson’s café in downtown Lowell. Ron Lessard waits for me in a yellow booth along the window. Through the rain on the glass, the world outside is a blur of different shades of gray.

Brendan: Where should we begin?

Ron: (chewing noises) So. Today is Wednesday. I’m eating lunch. I’m almost through with my fries, soon I’ll be starting on my burgers. Fuckin’ awesome.

Ron is the noise expert, one of the engines driving America’s experimental music scene since the 80s. Ron has released about 1000 recordings on Triple-R’s in-house label.

Ron: I was the source. And everybody who ever learned how to play a tape backwards or make feedback decided to send me a demo. And man, I heard so much crap like you wouldn’t believe…I mean, how many Rock’n’roll bands are awesome, and how many suck beyond belief?

Ron first got into noise music around 1981, after he left the Air Force and came home to Lowell.  

Ron: There was a mail-order outlet out of Colorado called Aeon A-E-O-N. When I got their catalog, I couldn’t believe the stuff they had listed. They had, like, Whitehouse albums, New Blockaders, Maurizio Bianchi, and it’s like who the fuck are these guys? So I started buying that stuff  and I was like, woah, this is what I’ve been looking for all these years. The guy that ran it became a survivalist kind of guy, y’know, living out in the woods with his gun type of thing and, actually, he eventually sold me his entire inventory, I bought him out.

Ron: When I first opened I tried to specialize in all the really weird imports, bizarre bands and that kind of stuff, y’know. But at the same time, I knew enough to know that pedestrians, your average everyday person, has no freakin’ clue. They just want to listen to a Barry Manilow or whatever the fuck they like, y’know.  

His store, RRRecords, opened in 1984.

Ron: After Aeon, I was the guy that was thoroughly obsessed, and I just devoted myself to it…Day in day out noise, morning, noon, and night. Listening to tapes, checking out bands all day every day. At that time Heavy metal wasn’t heavy enough, punk rock wasn’t extreme enough, Noise did it for me, it really did.

Ron started performing noise music himself under the name Emil Beaulieau. Footage from from the nineties, like this, show him using vinyl records and their accessories as instruments. 

This is another way to look at noise music: instead of using something like a trombone, or a tuba, a guitar, or a piano, you take whatever you can find, whatever objects appeal to you, and you refashion them into something expressive. The screeching noise you hear is coming from a modified turntable, which Ron stands behind with a goofy look on his face, pretending to polish record.

Ron: Remember to always, always use the circular motion when cleaning your records.

From that perspective, noise is a positive, creative philosophy, and I can see how people get so obsessed with it.

Ron:A lot of people, y’know, they can’t play guitar, they can’t play the drums–– but twisting knobs and screaming your brains out, getting out that primal scream, whatever it is…it’s inside everybody.

Brendan: And speaking of which, what’s your personal experience with it.

Ron: (Darkly) What do you mean?

Brendan: I mean with Emil Beaulieau.

Ron: Yeah.

Brendan: Well you just said that Noise music was this personal experience. How did you get stuff out through Emil Beaulieau?

Ron: I–I’m not sure where your leading, as far as recording or getting the name out?

Brendan: Why did you start Emil Beaulieau?

Ron: ––you know, I just wasn’t any good at sports (laughter).

The uncomfortable moment sticks in the back of mind for the rest of our interview. Though Ron’s eloquent and energetic, as I was warned he would be, he’s also a little guarded. Maybe that’s because I showed up looking for someone to answer the criticisms of noise music or its culture, which he brushes off with a simple:

Ron: Lately? Lately I’m out of it.

Brendan: When was the last time you were in it?

Ron: Seven years ago (laughs)

Brendan: So let’s go back seven years, because this is something that keeps coming up in interviews with people. Seven years ago, things were very…

Ron: Active.

Brendan: Active.

Ron: Wicked, wicked, wicked active.

Brendan: What’s happened?

Ron: The bands that are making noise today sound like the bands that were making noise ten years ago, that sound like the bands making noise twenty years ago, y’know they sound exactly the same, they’re doing the same freakin’ feedback, they’re still screaming the same lyrics, y’know, it’s just the same thing over and over and over and over again. Which is fine, y’know, punk rock exists for a reason, y’know. The young people, they’re totally into it because it’s new for them. It’s like wow this is freakin awesome these guys are screaming their brains out! They’re talking about killing people! But then ten years later it’s the same thing all over again…I mean do you want to listen to that same band for freaking ten years in a row? I mean do you still want to hear Aerosmith? No you don’t (laughs).

He seems tired in a way that I’ve not seen before. As we talk, I get the sense that what Ron and I are doing has become an exit interview.

Ron: I did what I had to do. I did what I had to do and just to keep doing it because somebody else wants me to? Wrong freakin reason. That’s how bands start to suck. So fuck that y’know.

Y’know there was a time when I couldn’t wait to get on stage and scream my brains out. It’s like, well I mean y’know, you ever had a girlfriend? You make out with her it’s like the best! And then one day, you don’t want to make out with her anymore. It’s no different.

I mean, it’s been seven years. I stopped performing seven years ago, March of ’06. It’s now March ’13. It’s seven freaking years that I’ve stopped. Chances are you’re not doing the same thing you were doing seven years ago. And I’m willing to bet, seven years from now, you’re not going to be doing the exact same thing you’re doing now. People change, they move on. Been there, done that, why do it again?

music: “Fog in the Ravine” | Lejsovka & Freund

The scene dissolves. In the darkness, I think of the question that I wish I’d asked. This isn’t just some thing Ron was doing, it was the thing – what can you do when you lose touch with the something that was core to your identity?

Room 4 (Andrea Pensado)

Andrea: I think it’s very important to not to be scared of being in a place of not knowing. To be in a place of uncertainty, is excellent! Even if it is uncomfortable. Honestly, I don’t want a comfortable life. 

I’m sitting in a cozy loft apartment in Salem, while my friend Samira chats with a small, owlish woman in her late 40s named Andrea Pensado.

Andrea: Well if you feel it at twenty than you cannot imagine in your forties.

Samira: I just taste it and I’m like, ‘wow, I’m just feeling all the sugar.’

Andrea: I ate a lot of chips, it was a bad idea. With beer, y’know, not good.

Samira is working on her own documentary about experimental music.

Andrea first got interested in music when she was a little girl, growing up in Buenos Aires.

Andrea: Eh, I was living in an apartment building, and a friend of mine, she started taking piano lessons. She showed me her music and I saw the notation, ehh, and I was fascinated. Honestly I was not aware of such a rich experimental music background until when I was in Poland… 

She left Argentina to study composition in Krakow as an adult. But the music she composed on paper was so complex, that she often had trouble finding people to play it. Andrea likes to think about timbre–– the color of sound, what differentiates one instrument from another.  To wring out some really interesting timbre with traditional instruments, you’ve got to do some out there stuff.

Andrea: Like, I don’t want to be just writing for the drawer.

And then, Andrea went to the Audio Art Festival, a meeting of the minds held in Krakow every November. The festival focuses on objects used to produce sound: musical instruments, but also computers. 

Inspired, Andrea taught herself to program and began using electronics in her work.

Andrea: So I create a wifi for myself just to avoid latency, you can work with any wife…So my controllers are! An iPod–– I say, I look like an apple merchandise stand, which is quite depressing, but you know, what can I do? So this is an iPod with a special application I use to… [iPod click]. Well, first I have to set up the wifi, I show you…

Andrea is wearing a a headset like the kind people use to play video games. She’s sitting at her computer with an iPod Touch in her right hand. 

Andrea: This is a simple wave, just a simple low tone. So if I move it like this, I change the pitch. And then if I do like this, the distortion is the direct result of– 

She twists and bends her arm manipulating the sine wave into a complex pattern.

Andrea: And I can do the same if I had my voice…

Then she flicks on her mic.

Andrea: Hey, hah, that’s my voice! (noise) hello! Hah! (pause, noise ends). So you know it’s quite dramatic.

Andrea: Maybe for somebody who is not a lot in music, this seems harsh. I don’t think this is harsh at all, this is just the way new music is going. I do believe that, even though I don’t think what we do now is better than what was done in the Renaissance, ok, I do believe that there is constant change, and that artistic languages keep having a need of refreshing themselves, ok?…yeah?

Brendan: (18:49) Why do you think music is shifting in that direction?

Andrea: To explore timbre…Because now, thanks to the technology, we have access to it. It’s easier to manipulate. We are like kids, we are, like, playing. (12:26) I compare it to the beginning of the baroque, where they became aware of chords, of verticality, and then for 300 years, they explore that.

Andrea’s grandiosity reminds me of the document that first inspired me to pursue this project. In 1913, a young painter named Luigi Russolo wrote a letter to a composer he admired. The two of them were part of an Italian movement known as Futurism. Russolo’s letter ended up as one of the movement’s major manifestoes, The Art of Noises. 

In The Art of Noises, Russolo laid out a framework for the music of the new industrial world, in which the city itself is both the inspiration and the instrument. 

For centuries life went by in silence, at most in muted tones…Amidst this dearth of noises, the first sounds that man drew from a pieced reed or stretched string were regarded with amazement…and the result was music, a fantastic world superimposed on the real one…

We Futurists have deeply loved and enjoyed the harmonies of the great masters. Now, we are satiated and find far more enjoyment in the combination of the noises of trams, backfiring motors, carriages and bawling crowds than in rehearsing the “er-O-i-ca” or the “Pastorale”.

We cannot much longer restrain our desire to create finally a new musical reality, with a generous distribution of resonant slaps in the face. Discard violins, pianos, double-basses and plaintive organs…

I am not a musician, I have therefore no acoustical predilections, nor any works to defend. I am a Futurist painter using a much loved art to project my determination to renew everything. And so, bolder than a professional musician could be, unconcerned by my apparent incompetence and convinced that all rights and possibilities open up to daring, I am able to initiate the great renewal of music by means of the Art of Noises.

It is, and I am one to talk, very pretentious. And yet, I kind of sympathize with the guy. When I started making a podcast, I was intent on remaking a whole sector of journalism with my own bold incompetence.

A man of his word, Luigi built these giant boxes called the Intonarumori, whose purpose was to make a bunch of noise. A photo of them often accompanies The Art of Noises, and you can see Russolo standing behind one, this thin guy with a mustache, a hand placed on the crank handle at its back. 

Like most manifestoes, The Art of Noises says very little about its writer, except what he wanted to be: a great destroyer come to remake the world in his image. If you’re a certain type of young person, that idea is very attractive, and you can embrace it without really thinking about what other things you might put to the side to achieve that.

Samira: What’s your, I know you’ve done a lot of work with visual, audio and visual.

Andrea: Well that’s with my ex-husband (laughter). Greg, whom I met in Poland, he comes from video, from cinema. We had a duo, eventually, I stopped doing my own to work for our duo, which we worked together for ten years. Greg did the images and I did the sound. And we work on interactivity. Then we split, so now I work just with sound.

Brendan: How is your music different working with your ex-husband, than after?

Andrea: The main goal of our duo was to have real time interaction between images and the sound. So if there was something onstage like a movement or, whatever, it had simultaneously a result in both. It gave some rigidity. So now that the interaction isn’t so important, I have much more freedom to just to improvise. It’s like much, much more freedom.

Room 6 (Angela Sawyer)

Angela: One of the first people I ever met who was interested in experimental music was Ron Lessard. 

I’m standing at the counter in Weirdo Records one afternoon, talking with Angela Sawyer again She’s telling me how she first got involved with the experimental scene, just after she started at U-MASS LOWELL in the early 90s.

I had never been to New England at all, I just flew here on a plane from Denver and I wanted to meet some people, and I didn’t really know what to do, and I heard some other kids saying that they wanted to join the college radio station. They said at the meeting to join up, you have to show up and volunteer…I went back the next day, and there no one was there.

Brendan: How long were you there for?

Angela: Probably an hour (laughs). Finally someone came by…I was just like, “hey, hey, I’m here to volunteer, what should I do?” And they just looked at me like I had three heads. They were like, “why don’t you clean something?” So I found a vacuum and I just started vacuuming…

And I went through all the rooms, and finally I got to a room that I hadn’t been in yet, and there was a person in there, and it was kind of dark in there…So I waited for him to notice me. I said hi, I’m trying to vacuum. I had no idea that it was the air studio and, um, Ron, of course, he’s like a firecracker going off. So he’s like, “OH YES COME ON IN,” he was mic-ing the vacuum cleaner, and I’m just like “oh hi,” and he’s like tell me about yourself, who are you? And uhh, he was really awesome to me

As we walk down memory lane, Angela starts talking about a world that I was once very interested in, the network of noise and experimental artists who connected in the early days of the internet, after decades of being little feudal kingdoms.

Angela: There was definitely a feeling at one point of there being a first-world wide, at least, community, if not worldwide, of people who were listening to the same releases, and they were seeing the same bands, they’d heard some Throbbing Gristle records, and they had a common language and finding out about cool stuff and figuring out how it worked, and they knew what happened when you stuck a clarinet underwater and put delay on it. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about what Angela said at the Crank Sturgeon show, about choosing to live on the Island of Misfit toys without thinking about it very hard. Because I feel, in a lot of ways, that that’s become my life. I’m more devoted now than ever to completing the work I set out for myself, but I’m also deeply unhappy, and more isolated.

Angela: Every town has the person who is like, I’ll become the nun, I’ll sacrifice myself and do all this work and…y’know, I have a store, that’s what I do.

Brendan: Can you talk a bit about sacrificing–– about becoming a martyr for the scene?

Angela: I’m not trying to do that, I actually really dislike that. 

Brendan: How did you fall into the role?

Angela: If you have some job related to underground music, that’s what you’re doing. ‘Cause there’s no money. But that’s one of the only ways you can spend your whole life surrounded by it. 

music: “Fog in the Ravine” | Lejsovka and Freund

Angela: Everything I know about politics and geography and sociology and psychology, and how to sort of figure out how to deal with the world at large, I mostly learned them from records. It’s been a very long time since I’ve had a conversation about anything else. I’m a very narrow person outside of records. Basically, records are sort of my defense system and or window for everything, I think of every record as like a pair of of tinted glasses, and you can look at the whole world through that and see it in a new way, and each good record has a slightly different shade on it, so you never get done figuring out how things work and enjoying new wrinkles in how things are. The bad news is that if you take the glasses off things look terrible, then you have to function like a regular person. And that’s not something I’m very good at.

If I’m being honest, neither am I. I’ve agonized over these interviews for a long time, afraid of saying the wrong thing about the people in them. To call it a “cautionary tale of loving something– an idea– that cannot love you back,” sounded unkind, both to them and to myself. I can’t help but feel at the end that that’s exactly what it is.

I avoided revisiting these interviews for almost five years because they held up a mirror to the shaky logic I built ambitions on. They pointed out, in no uncertain terms, that art cannot save me. It can help me find a way to save myself, by learning to communicate things that I feel deeply in a way that’s truthful, accurate, and honest. But that’s all that it can do. 

And it took losing someone I loved very much to understand that. 

Room 7 (Somerville Ave)

Shane Broderick and I stand on the sidewalk of Somerville Avenue on a cool spring evening. Shane’s arm is in a cast. He’s just finished telling me a story about the time he punched a club owner at a venue up the block. As we’re talking about the reputation that Twodeadsluts Onegoodfuck had amongst Boston’s club owners, some of Shane’s friends emerge from the bar where he’s just finished a gig.

Shane: it’s funny because we never actually gave any of the venues our actual performances, it was more like basement parties and shit like that that they were scared of, that they’d heard about.

Brendan: I can’t remember if I got this on tape last time, would you mind describing what the actual performances were?

Shane: Can’t really do that, I don’t know, you can ask these guys.

Friend 1: What’s that?

Friend 2: You gotta lighter? I just realized I left my backpack down there, I got good beer in there but whatever fuck that shit.

Brendan: Would you guys mind describing to me what a normal show by Twodeadsluts Onegoodfuck was like?

Friend 2: Is this an interview? I wasn’t ready for an interview man I can’t do that! My voice cannot be heard on tape.

Friend 1: (makes jerk-off motion) It’s like this.

Friend 2: Can I get a lighter from somebody?

Shane: (shouting) It’s like looking at something, and gettin’ so excited and just BAM! And then it’s kind of like aww fuck.

Friend 1: I don’t have a lighter!

Friend 2: Do you have a lighter?

Shane: We need to go home. Need to hide under a blanket.

Friend 2: Do you have a lighter buddy?

Brendan: Nah, I’m sorry.

Friend 2: Motherfucker! How can you do an interview without a lighter? (distant) Fuck! Amateur!

Brendan: So, just so I don’t take up the rest of your time, there was something you said during the last interview. You said that, for TDS, there was this joke that you guys…when the joke stopped being funny, you guys were like, ‘alright, I’m gonna do something else.’

Friend 1: The joke didn’t stop being funny.

Shane: Well ok I’m not sure the joke ever stopped being funny but…

Brendan: So, what, in your opinion what was the joke?

Friend 1: The band was the joke.

Brendan: What specifically about the band was the joke?

Friend 1: I don’t know…

Friend 2: (strike lamppost) Do a funny voice c’mon what the fuck! We’re supposed to be entertained by this shit.

Shane: Alright, you can cut my voice here.

Friend 2: It doesn’t matter what you say so long as it’s in a funny voice it’s cool.

Shane: There are a lot of Boston noise bands and people from Jamaica Plain and Allston and they want everyone to be like, onboard with, ‘hey, we’re all friends, this is a scene! come down to our house play a show blah blah blah.’ And what Twodeadsluts was more like, was just like, ‘We’re not even invited. We’re playing a show, we’re trashing your fuckin’ house.’

Brendan: Do you ever miss it?

Shane: Yeah, of course I do. It is what it is.

Brendan: I feel like that’s a pretty good place to end.

Shane: There you go.

I walk off into the night. A block away, I come to a stop on a concrete island in the middle of Somerville Avenue and look back at Shane and his friends. They were still down by the bench we were sitting on, drunk, being loud, but their noise is drowned out by the cars flying past me, headed for the outskirts of Boston.

Standing here, it occurs to me that need room tone, the sound of the place I’m in. Room tone helps smooth out transitions in editing, makes a radio documentary sound more natural. I’ve forgotten to get it for almost every other interview with the noise artists. But that I remember now seems significant to me, an promise to myself that someday I’ll figure what made this experience worth telling.

Credits

Today’s episode was produced with help from Wes Boudreau and Samira Winter. Editing help by Kyna Doles and Jon Davies. Special thanks today to Lejsovka & Freund, Jacob Rosati, Sean Coleman, Elissa Freeden, Brittany Rizzo, Tyler Carmody, and Birgit from Denmark. 

Visit our website, investigating regional scenes dot org, for more episodes and, this summer, some bonus materials. You can find Stories About Music on your local podcast provider. Please leave a review to helps us find new listeners.

From Philadelphia, I’m Brendan Mattox, back soon with more stories about music.

[investigatingregionalscenes]

story about music #7

Season one concludes with a story about Taraka Larson, her band Prince Rama, and her first manifesto, The Now Age.

music

04:12 “Bahia” | Xtreme Now 05:35 “Breaking the Kitsch Barrier” | Architecture of Utopia 08:41 “Those Who Live for Love” | Top Ten Hits for the End of the World 12:36 “Rest in Peace” | Trust Now 15:46 “Portaling” | Trust Now 24:20 “Your Life in the End” | Xtreme Now

or listen to it as a single playlist here.

links

The Now Age manifesto

Prince Rama and Taraka’s new manifesto.

Thank you to Kyna Doles for being our editor. Kyna currently reports on the New York real estate market.

transcript

Intro

Brendan: Ok, so, before we get started, who are you, and what do you do? Taraka: (pause) Who are you and what do you do? Brendan: No one’s ever done that to me before.

April 10, 2015

I’m once again sitting in the side chapel of the First Unitarian Church two weeks after I recorded my interviews with a Winged Victory for the Sullen, and about fifteen minutes after Prince Rama just brought the house down in the church basement.

Brendan: I’m Brendan, and I’m a journalist––well, kind of. Taraka: So, I’m actually trying to practice not being anything, and not doing anything. So I almost feel like this is a trick question you just asked me that

Since she never actually said it and I’m feeling kind of crunched for time, I’m talking to Taraka Larsen of the band Prince Rama.

Taraka: It’s like an ego removal, but also like, a time removal. I feel like time mostly exists when you are doing something because all of the sudden, you don’t ever have enough time to complete the task or you’re always fifteen minutes late, or whatever. If you can get rid of the doing aspect, it’s just like you’re, you’re just here, and there’s always plenty of time, it’s just floating all around.

You’re listening to Stories About Music, a podcast on the subjects of music, journalism, and memoir, and how the line between those three things is often not as clear as I’d hoped.

music: “Bahia” | Extreme Now

My name is Brendan Mattox, and this is story about music number seven, “Ouroboros.”

The Now Age Manifesto

Brendan: So you have this, like, very complex manifesto of sorts online. Taraka: Is it complex? Brendan: Well, I feel like I finally understand it and I think this is the third time I’ve read it. Taraka: Cool––wow! Thanks for reading it three times! That’s great.

During my last few months in Boston, in 2013, I found the website now dash age dot org. The site carries the subtitle “meditations on sound and the architecture of utopia,” and what follows are few pages of homemade diagrams, thoughts on music and eternity, and kitschy internet gifs.

Taraka: Well it’s kind of a funny story. I was born and raised Hare Krishna and…When were first kind of starting the band, I was really deeply into it. I mean to the point where like, I was out living on an Ashram in––actually in Pennsylvania, and I just––I had this like realization when I was there that I couldn’t be a monk.

music: “Breaking The Kitsch Barrier” | The Architecture of Utopia

Taraka: It just didn’t feel honest––it felt very like, this was how I was raised, even though I really connect so deeply with, the music especially, of the Hare Krishna movement and stuff. I just felt really, like, constricted in this organized religion. The world is so disorganized. When you try to organize it it doesn’t make any sense any more, there’s all these contradictions.

The Now Age website, of course, belongs to Taraka, and they mark the end of what could be called the first phase of Prince Rama.

Taraka: This guy actually, he gave me this keyboard, he was like, “you should play this,”…And I wrote the first Prince Rama song and…I just had this intense realization, I was like…there’s other ways of being a monk. You don’t have to be in an Ashram and washing dishes and gardening.

When it began Prince Rama consisted of Taraka, her sister Nimai, and her boyfriend Michael, whom she’d met as a teenager while near Gainesville Florida. Not long after three recorded their first album, The Architecture of Utopia, and hit the road.

Taraka: I remember I was in Paris, we were, like, on tour, and I’m just like, “What––what do I believe, right now?”

And then, in the midst of a tour in 2010, Michael and Taraka split up.

Taraka: I think we had been on tour for like, 80 days straight or something crazy and I wasn’t feeling connected with this religion. And I kind of had dug myself in a hole here, I named my band Prince Rama…So I just started writing out everything I don’t believe, and all of the sudden this thing started forming. Brendan: Did all come out in just one piece like that? Taraka: Yeah, pretty much, I mean, I did some google image search for the pictures later. It’s not like, y’know, anything just happens spontaneously, it’s like you’re obviously chipping away at this ice block for a long time, and like you read something and that gives you another little chip and then you read this other thing and then all of the sudden you’ve got this ice sculpture and you’re like––I didn’t even realize that!

This was the first draft of the Now Age manifesto, born out of a period where the group was living on the road, functionally homeless by their own account. It wasn’t all bad––at SXSW that year they impressed Avey Tare of Animal Collective, who gave them their first label contract.

The trio recorded their first record for Paw Tracks, Shadow Temple, in their new home of Brooklyn, New York. Then Michael went on a hiatus that became permanent. Prince Rama is now a duo of Taraka and Nimai.

music: “Those Who Live for Love for Love” | Top 10 Hits of the End of the World

Taraka was an art student at the MFA school in Boston. Her time there, especially the year or so she apprenticed with painter Paul Laffoley. Some his terms and ideas influenced the Now Age Manifesto, which launched in 2011 with a series of happenings in New York City.

Taraka: We were doing this residency for Issue Project Room where we needed to form this fake cult. The Now Age kind of sprung out of that because any cult needs a manifesto, and so, we’re the Now Age cult, and this is our manifesto! We really ran with it, we were handing out pamphlets on the subway and, yknow, really creating each of the shows to be like this sort of bordering the line between cult ritual practice and musical experience. 

In practice, this meant stuff like a fifteen minute exercise routine that doubled as an exorcism, which the sisters performed for eight hours straight.

Taraka: We were exploring utopia through music and looking at the concert space as utopian architecture. It’s like this temporary autonomous zone that has its own kind of government.

All of these ideas figure heavily into the Now Age manifesto, which grew out of an attempt by Taraka to square the music she was making with the reason made it in the first place.

Taraka: This was in 2011 so on 11/11/11, we like, staged this apocalypse. I feel like utopia and the apocalypse, y’know, the end of the world and beginning of the world, it’s all in this space. I feel like the end of the world would be like a karaoke bar.

music: “Those who Live for Love Will Live Forever”

Taraka: I looked through some billboard charts at various times the world has ended…all these different apocalyptic dates the world was supposed to end. I looked to see what was the billboard number one hit single, and then we made this, like, karaoke book of all these pop songs. And we slowed them waaaaay down I mean so slow. People were like “Oh, I’ll do Alicia Keys!” and then they were up there for like, fifteen minutes.

music: “Those who Live for Love Will Live Forever”

Taraka: Karaoke is…I feel like that is the closest to witnessing zombies that I’ve ever come. It’s like if you’re really good at it and you’re really feeling it, you’re like, channeling Elvis. You’re willingly opening yourself up to being possessed.

Krishna Consciousness

Possession, Zombies, Elvis––these things are like symbols for the ideas that fuel Prince Rama, a combination of outsider art, critical theory, and pop culture.

Of course, Taraka and Nimai also draw from their upbringing in the Krishnas. Like other ex-religious kids, Taraka still sees mysticism in the world, even though it takes its form in ways that our ancestors might not have understood it.

The Now Age Manifesto is built on an idea that I was quite keen on for a long time, that a concert is its own form of worship, part of the long tradition of ecstatic religious experiences.

Taraka: In Krishna culture its like, all call and response kirtans. There’s never really like this performer-audience boundary. It’s like, someone’s saying their prayers, you’re responding, and then it kind of works itself up and then this third voice comes in, and that’s what you really want to go for. ‘Cause that, that’s the space voice. I feel like I try to create a space where I can experience that and other people can experience that too. That’s all you can do––you can do what you can with love and hopefully that space will resonate and respond, and yeah that third voice can come in.

Brendan: There’s like this intense spiritual element to what you’re doing, um, how does that interact with the financial realities of being a musician living in Brooklyn in 2015?

Taraka: Well it’s pretty simple really. We make a six-digit salary a year, but all of the digits are zeros. 

(laughter)

music: “Rest in Peace” | Trust Now

Taraka: I mean the thing is, it’s like being a monk because you’re a beggar when you’re on stage.

Taraka and Nimai have spent the last several years traveling, like pilgrims, from one art project to the next. They put such an emphasis on crafting a live experience partially because that’s widely accepted as the last way to make money as a musician.

Taraka: To this day we haven’t really ever made a profit. So it keeps us humble. Even those we’ve always been, like, pretty broke, we’ve never been, like, bottomlined. We’ve always been take care of. We always have exactly however much we need. Brendan: How does that happen? Taraka: That’s where the spiritual comes in.

And so the manifesto itself is like a religious text, a guide by which to remind herself of why she’s doing it. Going into this, I wanted to find out where Taraka’s genuine beliefs ended and Prince Rama’s Taraka’s aesthetics began for one particular reason.

The Now Age manifesto takes visual cues from the weirder, unhinged corner of the internet––the kind of websites that explains that the earth is really flat or that time is divided into four equal quadrants.

The manifesto reminds me of those websites because I read a lot of those websites in 2012, after the end of my second blue period. In recovery, the anxiety that I had about “the end of things” manifested itself in trying to figure out why people so obsessed with apocalypse that year.

I was aggressively protective of my hope that the future could be stable, a belief those theories––the mayan calendar, peak oil, political revolution––all seemed to criticize.

Taraka: I think that apocalypses are extremely healthy for culture to have. But it’s like a fantasy, y’know? Like, I think it’s healthy in the sense that you bring yourself to this emotional place where you’re ready to let go of everything and start new. But it’s like a fantasy.

I first read Taraka’s manifesto a year later, just after I graduated.

Brendan: I think I discovered it around the time that I was, like, aware of what you talk about as Ghost Modernism in it. Taraka: Oh, yeah.

Ghost Modernism––a pun off the art movement, post-modernism––is an idea that I was quite keen on during that period. Essentially, Taraka proposed, culture has become an Ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail.

Taraka: The thing with zombie aesthetics and ghost modernism is like, the past is eating the present, consuming it like flesh, y’know?… Brendan: Was there anything that you were noticing happening that happening that caused you to jot that idea down? Taraka: Yeah, I just feel like every band is a pun off of something that happened decades ago. Everything is just a parody, every band is just a pun off of something that happened decades ago, a way cooler band or a way cooler actor or whatever. I just feel like that originality is just being degraded and degraded. Brendan: Did that make you angry, at first, when you saw that? Taraka: I’m not critical of it, necessarily. It doesn’t make me angry but I’ve noticed it. Like, well…that’s not where I’m at, but, it’s interesting that’s where other people are at, and what does this mean. ’Cause I feel like being angry about it, it’s not that productive. It’s annoying, maybe, but like…I don’t have to listen to those bands.

But I did. Well, I didn’t. But I did force myself to as part of the hoops I jumped through to maintain my identity as a certain kind of person.

Up until 2013, I had just assumed that I was bound for Brooklyn, to become a writer and join up with the cultural force that is New York City. But when the time came to take the plunge, I couldn’t do it.

Instead I spent that summer wandering around Boston trying to figure out what was me. I barely looked for jobs. I decided, maybe too quickly, that I really should move back to Pennsylvania and figure out just what it was I wanted to make, so that when I made it, it would be absolutely, 100% me.

music: “Portaling” | Trust Now

My guide for all of this was, in some way, Taraka’s manifesto. The Now Age was her attempt to make some sense of her own identity even as the things that had composed it for so long were coming apart.

Taraka: Once you’re in that place of having an identity crisis it just kind of happens. It’s like, you can’t harmonize with fear, fear is like this dissonant tone that comes in, I don’t even think it’s produced from this world. So it’s like trying to find that other more natural note that’s like…know what I mean?

The Grand Finale

I kind of do. The blue periods, I’ve realized after all this, are long, sustained identity crises. They happen when I realize that time has passed and the I am not the person I hoped I would be.

I feel like it used to be so much easier to know who I was, or at least what made me special. When I was a teenager, coming to shows at the First Unitarian, it was this music that I loved. When I was in college, surrounded by TV journalists who wanted to host the nightly news, it was the radio documentaries I wanted to create.

But I’ve never felt at home amongst the communities that surround these things. In fact, I’ve pitted myself against them, trying to defend my own sense of authenticity.

Taraka: When we went to the UK for the first time, everyone was like, “you’re like Kate Bush.” And I’m like, who’s Kate Bush? I was like mad, I’m not gonna look into her and then I actually like really loved her. But y’know it’s weird, people just like, read references into things.  And you feel like your constantly referencing. I mean people were referencing people in the past, it’s like, the Rolling Stones loved blues. They started out as a Blues cover band! Those people were referencing people in the past, too. But because there wasn’t this like––you have to go and travel to go see that person, so you’re having this spiritual experience when you’re seeing them, and then you take that inner experience with you! And so when you’re inspired by that, you’re inspired in a way more honest way. The manifestation is a more honest thing, because it was like this thing that you couldn’t really capture…it was like a moment in time and you can’t replay it. There’s nothing necessarily original. But originality stems from the idea that, like, your in touch with your origin, y’know? If you’re doing this from an honest place, you’re in touch with your origin, and so your original.

Moving home has given me a better sense of myself, and my, I guess people call it “aesthetics.” I always thought that word was synonymous with “vibe” until I was stuck on this story and decided to go to the gym one morning. In the midst of doing a pec fly I had an sudden epiphany that true aesthetics are something like a muscle stretch, deep and subtle, to the point where you can no longer figure out where the work ends and the artist begins.

I think that sums up a lot of music that I love, and especially the people who I interviewed during the course of the first season of Stories About Music. Part of reaching that honest place requires laboring for years, usually in obscurity, with the intention of making something true, and not empty. The competing desire to be known for what you do, or even just to survive making art––it can mess with your sense of self.

I certainly can’t claim to have been an unbiased journalist for much of this season. I’ve looked up to and admired so many of my subjects from a distance. But with Taraka, I feel like I’m looking in a mirror. Our career trajectories started around the same time, and while Prince Rama is massively more popular than I am at the moment, we’re both struggling to capture that small slice of attention that people have left for music. Me, in the town I grew up in, and her, out on the road.

Taraka: You’re pretty much just in this weird other time. You’re coming up to a venue after driving like thirteen hours and your like oh my god, load all the stuff in, they’re like, “you’re late for soundcheck!” and you’re like “i knoww sorry!” And then there’s just some chick in the place across the street getting, like, highlights done in her hair. And this is just so bizarre to me. There’s people just having a day. There’s some old dude eating a sandwich, waiting for the bus. Like, we’re just in such a different zone right now.

Brendan: Is it hard having to put all your energy into forty-five minutes a day?

Taraka: Playing the show is great! I don’t have any problems with that, it’s like the rest of the day. Everything leading up to is hard. I’m like a very outward person, it’s like, we’re in a new city! Let’s go on an adventure! I’ve had to be like, ‘Nope, Taraka. If you want to do this tour, you have to not do anything.’ Which brings us back to the beginning.

Which brings us back to beginning. Can you separate the art from the artist, for her own good?

Taraka: Your brain is constantly thinking of things to do, and then when you’re not doing anything it’s like ‘Why aren’t you doing anything?’ And I feel like I’m at this weird place right now where I feel like part of my sickness is that I was trying to do too much. I have to switch something up about my life, what should I do right now? Maybe I should go back and read the Now Age manifesto.

There are people to which things come with great facility, and the art they produce is the noise that gets made as their life is lived. Then there are the rest of us, the people for whom art is an impulse based half in the noble pursuit of understanding ourselves, and half in pursuit of the things you’re not supposed to make art for: fame, money, influence.

I tell myself that my worry is that I’ll never reconcile those things, but really, I worry that I won’t resolve it before my “chance” to succeed disappears. I have always seen time as my enemy, and yet time allowed me to find meaning in music.

At the end of our interview, I was probing Taraka’s belief trying to understand just what the Krishnas are all about, when she hit on this summary that I think explains what it is the two of us are reaching for, even when we get lost in the details.

Taraka: This is obviously, volumes and volumes of books, but in a nutshell, time originates from Vishnu, who’s just lying on this––somewhere in outer space, on an ocean of milk, on this bed of serpents. And he’s just sleeping very peacefully, and he’s just breathing in and breathing out. And when he breathes in, all the universes contract and go back into him, into his pores. And then we he breathes out, the universes just expand. That’s the relativity of time. Just for him, one inhalation and exhalation is, like, our eternity. But he’s just breathing in and out. He’s not going to stop breathing because he always is. He was never born, he’s not going to die. So we’re always just dipping in and out eternity.

If this is the noise I made while my life was lived, then so be it. At least for now I don’t feel like I’m chasing my tail anymore.

music: “Your Life in the End” | Xtreme Now Credits

Brendan: Taraka Larsen, lives in Brooklyn. Prince Rama’s latest record is Xtreme Now, out on Carpark Records. A new manifesto under the same name is due out in October from Perfect Wave.

Today’s episode was produced by myself and edited by Kyna Doles, who sounds a little bit like this:

Kyna:You’ve been listening to Stories About Music. All songs in today’s episode were written by Prince Rama, with the exception of “Return to Emptiness” by Lejsokva and Freund. A list of those songs, in order of appearance, can be found at our website “investigating regional scenes dot org,” where you can find this, and other stories about music. If you haven’t already, please follow us on your local podcast provider.

Stories About Music is an independent production, but that could change in the future. If you or a loved one are involved with public media or podcasting companies––or if you have your own story about music––please get in touch via info [at] investigatingregionalscenes [dot] org.

Thank you to Kyna, to Taraka and Nimai, to Michaela, and to you for your patience.

I’m Brendan Mattox, back soon with more stories about music.

[investigatingregionalscenes]

story about music #6

A story about love, music, Europe, and memory, sparked by a Winged Victory for the Sullen concert last March.

(above: the town of Well. below: Michaela, 2011; the Emerson College European Center a.k.a. “The Castle”)

music

00:00 | “Candy Shoppe” by Emeralds from Does It Look Like I’m Here?

03:14 | “All You Are Going to Want to Do Is Get Back There” by The Caretaker from An Empty Bliss Beyond This World 

05:16 | “Atomos I” by A Winged Victory for the Sullen from Atomos 

06:33 “We Played Some Open Chords and Rejoiced” from A Winged Victory for the Sullen 

11:36 | “Atomos VI” from Atomos 

13:13 | “Atomos I” (recorded live)

14:23 “Libet’s Delay” by the Caretaker from An Empty Bliss Beyond This World 

16:24 | “I feel as if I might be vanishing” from An Empty Bliss Beyond This World 

18:32 | “Strelka Update” by Trouble Books & Mark McGuire from Trouble Books & Mark McGuire 

21:41 | “Steep Hills of Vicodin Tears” from A Winged Victory for the Sullen 

26:46 | “Atomos V” from Atomos 

30:00 | “All Flowers” by Trouble Books from Love At Dusk 

links

A Winged Victory for the Sullen

The Caretaker (Leyland Kirby)

Emeralds

Trouble Books

transcript

music: “Candy Shoppe” | Does It Look Like I’m Here?

You’re listening to Stories About Music, a podcast on the subjects of music, journalism, and memoir, and how the line between those three things is often not as clear as I’d hoped. I’m Brendan Mattox

I avoid listening to some music out of fear that I’ll lose the memories I associate with it. Like this one, “Candy Shoppe” by Emeralds. It reminds me of the time I listened to it most, when I spent a few months living in a castle in a small Dutch town by the German border.  

I had a job chauffeuring professors to and from a nearby train station. “Candy Shoppe” reminds me of the countryside out there: the tree-lined highway through golden fields of dry grass, the sun on the water as the car rose over the river Maas. I was busy falling in love again, and as the cutoff filter descends, I remember just what that felt like.

This is story about music number six, “To Dream of Another Continent.”

music: “All You Are Going to Want to Do…” | An Empty Bliss Beyond This World

March 26, 2015: I’m sitting in the empty sanctuary of the First Unitarian Church. It’s a large room, made more cavernous by the haunted ballroom music playing through the P-A system.

A few feet away, four members of the R5 productions concert staff ignored me as they ate Chinese food. I’m used to this by now. My interview forgot about me, it only made sense for everyone else to do so.

I’ve been coming to shows here since I was 16, going on 17. I’ve been in every room in the old stone building, sat in its pews, slipped on its basement floor, stared up at its high ceiling in the darkness. I am now twenty-four.

And yet, I’m not bothered by that tonight. It’s a whispery evening in late March, cool air blowing in through the open doors. The sound guy is playing An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, an album by Leyland Kirby under the name “The Caretaker.” It’s a bunch of old 78s, looped and filtered to increase the pops and clicks, the signs of age. It’s an album about the way memory degrades, the way time slips out from underneath of us. I recognized it the second I set foot in the church.

I’d like to stay here forever in this moment, but I have a place to be and a job to do. Soon my girlfriend Michaela will be here, and then I have to make sure she can get in.

Through a doorway, I saw Dustin O’Halloran in the vestibule. Before the staff could say anything, I power-walked backstage.

Brendan: Peeling back layers of paint, I guess, do you think about the work that way? Do you see it like a painting? Dustin: Yeah, I think. Adam and I are never really... (noise, talking) Dustin: Uhm, they’re about to show up. (door opens) Dustin: Hey! We forgot about the interview! Adam: Lucky me, I got tacos instead.

Dustin is forty-three, and the voice in the background belongs to his friend, Adam Wiltzie, forty-five.

Together, they make music as A Winged Victory for the Sullen.

music: “Atomos I” | Atomos

Unless you’re into neoclassical or ambient music, you probably don’t know Dustin’s name, but you do know his work if you’ve ever watched Transparent or Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. He composed the original score for both, as well as a number of indie dramas.

He met Adam in two-thousand-and-seven, when a mutual friend introduced them at a concert Adam was playing in Bologna.

Dustin: And we ended up, sort of, bonding backstage over our illegal European status.

Dustin had moved to Italy in 2000, around the same time that Adam moved to Brussels.

Dustin:…the dream, the ex-pat dream– most people make it a year and then they go back home. I persevered. Adam and I have both been living out of the country for about thirteen years. I actually don’t meet a lot of Americans who have stuck it out, to where you really feel like you’re at home there.

And just to be clear––this was part of the reason why I arranged to interview a Winged Victory: to figure out how these two guys have managed to pull off something that I would very much like to do.

Dustin: Both of us lived under the radar for a while, and then we both got married and got visas, finally. Brendan: So it was like, uh, so you had, like, a couple years where you were, not outlaws, y’know, but illegal immigrants. Dustin: Yeah, we were, when you see a cop behind you, you started sweating a little bit. Brendan: So how did you say that you resolved that? You guys got married? Dustin: Yeah. Brendan: I mean, obviously not to each other. Dustin: Yeah, no, that would’ve done no good.

music: “We Played Some Open Chords” | A Winged Victory for the Sullen

Dustin was starting to pick up more film work and so he moved to Berlin shortly after he met Adam.

Dustin: I was living in a small town outside of Bologna, and it’s a pretty small place. It was really beautiful and idyllic. I had a studio in an old farmhouse, and, sort of living this really classic, Italian situation that people, sort of, dream of...but what I found was, for me, I just found that missed the ability to collaborate or have people come through––I started to feel very isolated.

They spent the next few years recording together between Berlin, Brussels, and Northern Italy.

Their self-titled record A Winged Victory for the Sullen dropped in September of 2011, just as I was returning to Boston for my junior year of college. It moves at the pace of a sleeper’s chest, rising and falling slowly. Ever since I was 18 I’ve had trouble falling asleep without music, and I ended up listening to A Winged Victory for the Sullen a lot at night, just trying to drift off…

I can’t remember if I latched onto A Winged Victory so heavily because I knew Dustin and Adam lived in Europe, or because it reminded me of the spring I’d just spent living there.

Brendan: Does it feel like A Winged Victory would’ve done quite as well as its done here in America, or do you feel like it’s something that Europe really helped blossom? Dustin:  Definitely Europe. We’ve had a lot more opportunities to play…Musically, y’know, we probably could’ve––well I don’t know if we could’ve written the same music. The states are––it’s marginal. There’s the coasts, there’s different places we can play. We’re not a rock band. There’s just pockets of places that really we can go. But the tour has been really good…

Tonight, A Winged Victory for the Sullen and is on on tour with a few string musicians from Brussels to promote the release of their second album, Atomos. The music was commissioned by a British choreographer named Wayne MacGregor, for a dance piece in 2013.

Dustin: He sent us a lot of weird old science videos…beautiful photographs of shapes changing to spectral lights and there was like a small inspiration from an 80s sci-fi film… The big concept is how atoms inside the body relate to atoms in space, and this interconnection to humanity and the cosmos and it…Brendan: That’s huge.

Dustin: Yeah, it’s kind of, it’s a heady project

Brendan: I mean you and Adam in your individual projects already make, like, music that goes for big feelings in a way, but did this feel like it was bigger? Dustin: No, I think that’s why he asked us to do it, because he listened to our first record and he felt that. Especially the first record, there’s a lot of human elements to it, but it’s also a lot of getting away from just individual feelings, if that makes sense?

It didn’t.

Dustin: At least for me and what I feel, I don’t feel that it’s–– people will feel alone in the music?

music: “Atomos VI” | Atomos

Dustin: It’s not going for the heartstrings or anything, to me. This is probably the most horrible reference I can make right now, but if the plane was going down, and you suddenly felt at peace…and that duality. Or maybe another feeling is the passing of time… and the passing of time is, when you’re in the moment, a really wonderful moment, there’s also the duality of a feeling that that moment is also now gone, because you’re living it.

Brendan: That–the Japanese mono no aware thing.

Adam: Excuse me…

And it was right here that Adam broke in to ask Dustin a question about something.

Dustin: You wanna just tie it up? Brendan: Yeah, let’s tie it up. Dustin: That was a good conversation. I thought that was solid.

nat | Violin warm ups

Back in the sanctuary, the concert was getting ready to start. I found Michaela waiting for me in a row of pews off to one side. The wet evening breeze was still wafting in, so she kept her jacket on.

The lights dimmed and A Winged Victory for the Sullen took their place at the front of the First Unitarian. Their concerts are subdued affairs, the only illumination emanating from from a stand lamp in the center of their equipment. It turned the shadows of the rafters into spider legs, like a giant arachnid watching from behind the altar.

As the music deepened, I closed my eyes and felt time slip backwards

music: “Libet’s Delay” | An Empty Bliss Beyond this World

Brendan: When did we meet? Michaela: Uhhh…we met four years ago studying abroad in the Netherlands Brendan: But how did we meet? Michaela: (exasperated laugh) How did we meet. We met at a bar, um, and we were listening to Kanye West and dancing in the local bar and I think, did I come up to you? Brendan: I think you came up to me. Michaela: I guess I picked you out because I’d seen you a couple days earlier hanging around the castle, so I asked if you had––if you listened to Sufjan Stevens. I suggested we go back to your dorm and listen to that instead of what we were listening to at the bar. Brendan: You’re such a floozie Michaela: (laughter) I guess, yeah.

This is Michaela, and to just save face right now, she is not a floozie. I was just very nervous about turning the mic on her.

We met while studying abroad in the spring of our sophomore year, at the Emerson College European Center, a fourteenth century castle in the Dutch countryside.

Michaela: I rented a bike, I don’t think you did. Yeah, biked around, and I got to see the fields and the farms. As you first come into town, there’s a bunch of little baby goats that will run up to you and bleat.

I grew up in the near suburbs of Philadelphia. The town of Well was and still is the most remote place I have ever lived. Life there moved at this unhurried pace that was so pleasant.

I thought Europe, as a whole, was a pretty wonderful place, and I often wish I could go back, something Michaela knows very well.

Michaela: Well I thought you might have some questions about your plans with Europe and then I could follow up on that. Brendan: What are my plans with Europe? Michaela: Your plans with Europe. It seems like you would really like to start a writer’s colony and get some friends together, get some people to write and, like, maybe put together a literary magazine or, like, compilation of things. So that’s your grand scheme. Brendan: And what do you think of my grand scheme? Michaela: It’s a little stressful to think about but it’s definitely a nice idea.

It’s a nice idea that I cling to pretty heavily, because I connected with a happier part of myself while I was in Europe. I’ve always felt like an outsider no matter where I’ve been; and while I was there, that was actually very true on a basic level––meaning I was able to find the things that made me belong much more easily.

As our short semester drew to a close I started to realize that there were places here where I might never walk again. I started creating mental maps, trying to remember every single detail about my time in Europe: every afternoon, every trip to the train station, every meal, and for the rest of the year, I gravitated towards music that reminded me of those things, like Emeralds, or A Winged Victory, or the Caretaker’s An Empty Bliss Beyond This World.

I was hoping to save some that warmth for myself…but only found myself progressively more miserable as the weather got colder and my friends started to drift apart.

music: “I feel as if I might be vanishing” | An Empty Bliss Beyond this World

This was the beginning of the second blue period.

It’s hard, even now, to describe what happened, but I feel like I’ve been living with it ever since.

I came out of high school eager to prove that he was better than everyone else by create some kind of grand powerful work and achieve success at a young age. Suddenly, I realized that the clock for being the first to succeed was starting to run down, and I had no idea what I was going to do.

And with this experience of a place where I’d felt more at home than ever before in the rearview, I suddenly saw my life stretching out before me: so vast, so many paths, none of which necessarily led back to the happy place I had been.

Finally, in what I can only describe as a concerted effort to hit the lowest point possible, I broke up with Michaela right as autumn turned to winter.

I want to explain that this kind of music I’ve been playing all episode, I didn’t listen to it until the blue periods came into my life. These albums provide a place to hide, a womb I can augment by pulling a blanket over my head, a place where I can dive deep into my memories as I drift off to sleep. I used to go to bed listening to whatever. Sometimes music that it’s kind of insane to imagine falling asleep to now. But as time went on, the practice became so utilitarian that I limited myself to quiet, ambient records.

Until one night, I really couldn’t sleep. I tried listening to a Winged Victory for the Sullen, I tried the Caretaker, I tried Emeralds. But nothing of it sounded right. Every time my head hit the pillow, I just lay there, thoughts racing, sadness building.

music: “Strelka Update” | The Trouble Books & Mark McGuire

Music has a mystical quality to me: it hides in plain sight only to emerge at the moment I need it most. That night I stumbled across a record I’d downloaded several weeks earlier, a collaboration the guitarist of Emeralds had recorded with an unknown band from Ohio called Trouble Books. And as I lay there, soaking it in I recognized the loneliness in the singer’s voice. It sounded like mine.

That night I found you out in the street, tearing through the trash near St. Basil’s Cathedral , your fur was filled with old coffee grounds. Half frozen in the five p.m. twilight…Oh Strelka, I made a huge mistake. I let those men send you up into space. The only place colder than the motherland…

Listening to Trouble Books, I realized I had cast Michaela off into space, and along with her, an optimistic part of me that I wanted to hold onto. And with that revelation, I finally passed out.

Oh Strelka I love the way. You push your face up against mine and how we both passionately hate...smoke alarms and cheap electronics.

Not long after, I reached out and pulled her back. And in the process, all that wordless music that I’d put so much of my energy in slipped from my rotation.

With all due to respect to Dustin’s intention that people feel interconnected when they listen to A Winged Victory for the Sullen, the way that I used it left me feeling very lonely. I trapped myself in my memories, building up a pressure of anxiety and sadness that I told myself I could use it to make something, only to never find the release valve.

And yet, music is plastic. My associations with it can change.

music: “Steep Hills of Vicodin Tears” | A Winged Victory for the Sullen

The room was warmer now. Everyone sat with their heads bowed while outside, the shadows of the tree branches danced across the stained glass. I put my arm around Michaela’s waist and gave her a squeeze.

Michaela’s been the closest person to me over a period where I’ve struggled between holding onto some romanticism and feeling crushed under the weight of my own ambition and lack of success.

While I was in Europe was I able to shut up this part of me that either lives too far in the future or too far in the past, chronically trying to rob myself of the joy of what’s in right front of me.

I was able to tap back into that after college by living here at home and giving myself over entirely to making art. But now, I’m starting to worry that, just like five years ago, the weight of what I want and what I have will never balance out. In trying to make something that captures these moments, I get lost in the process.

I keep hoping for some assurance that being able to create is enough, that making something that’ll outlast me will help me survive, and yet––what had I learned from all the people I’d spoken to that winter? Art resonates, but it does not guarantee food in the stomach or adequate vision care.

When I dream of another continent, I dream of a place and time outside of this one, surrounded by people I love, where I have figured out this adulthood thing to the point where it no longer feels frightening, where I can feel as unconcerned as I used to.

These were just some of the things I thought about during the show that night. And then they passed, and I was left with the moment, with my hand on Michaela’s side, and the warmth of the church.

Until that too ended. I sent Michaela back to the AirBnB. I had one last piece of business to take care of.

Brendan: I actually wanted to start with, why did you move to Europe? Adam: Better quality of life...taxes, healthcare, language...cultural significance, feeling detached, looking for a new life, lookin for something more than we were given here, as American citizens.

Adam Wiltzie and I sat in the side chapel of the First Unitarian Church, a beautiful, ornate space with absolutely awful seating arrangements. The resulting tape was very noisy.

Adam: Well personally, you just reach moments in your life where you need to make turns, whether it’s your living in Philly and you decide you need to move to y’know, East Lansing, Michigan.

Of every musician in this season of Stories About Music, the way I relate to Adam Wiltzie is perhaps the most intimate. Alongside of A Winged Victory for the Sullen, Adam is a part of a very influential ambient music project called Stars of the Lid, whose album The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid has been my number one sleep aid since 2011.

During the recording of that record, at the turn of the century, he uprooted for Brussels, Belgium, where he has lived ever since.

Adam: It was good for me, I didn’t know what was going to happen but now, y’know, I’m a resident, I pay taxes in Belgium, I’m quite content there. Brendan: Why did you pick Belgium? Adam: Over the years I’ve had––had toured through Belgium, and Brussels in particular––there was just something really strange, it reminded me of New York City in Seventies, which was kind of a dirty, gritty dangerous place.

I feel like this is one of the keys to Adam’s happiness with Europe: when he moved, he found himself in a city that was different, and yet, connected to his past.

Adam: I grew up born and raised in New York City, my parents split up when I was young, so I moved around a lot. For me in Belgium with all my friends, I’m a bit of an anomaly. You live in a country, it’s the size of the greater Philadelphia area, you go an hour and their parents feel like they’ve moved half-way around the world, so for how far I’ve come...I feel a little bit like an exotic pet.

I could devote an entire episode to Adam, and I hope to someday. But I only got ten minutes to talk to him, during which time I had to choose between reporting a straightforward radio story that I could sell, and making sense of the personal connection I had with his music.

Brendan: The emotion in Atomos, how would you describe the thing that you’re going for? Adam: I wouldn’t. Brendan: You can’t? Adam: nah, I can, I choose not to...I think that’s more of your, this is what you do, it’s not for me to say.

It was not going well.

It’s harder than I thought to become a music journalist, and not just because there’s no money in it. It’s that I’m trying to survive by making sense of this thing that I look to for continuity life and by interviewing people who are, in my view, living the dream. Sometimes I wonder if I’m going into an interview to get information, or find direction for myself.

But what was the first thing I learned, three years ago, when I went out to Akron and set off the chain of events that led to me sitting in front of Adam, on the verge of epiphany? As a fan, I see the things I want to see.

Now of course, Adam and Dustin are fairly stable, living well, integrated into the other continent. But of course, that glosses over all the other things: the sacrifices a person makes when they leave the world they know behind.

Again, Dustin O’Halloran

Brendan: Was it a long time before you actually felt like you were at home? Dustin: I don’t know if you ever feel completely at home, but then the idea of home changes, because when you come back to American after being away for so long, you think it’s going to feel like home, and then it doesn’t feel like home. Ultimately I’ve sort of found peace in just not looking it anymore, because it’s something you carry with you, and it’s the people that you love. So ultimately, that’s really what it is. You can go back to a city and when all your friends are gone and the people you love are gone, it’s not the same. Brendan: Hmm, have you had that experience here in America? Dustin: Well…most people have stayed. So all of my friends and family have stayed in Los Angeles, so it all feels really familiar.

music: “Atomos V” | Atomos

Brendan: Was it strange to come back to America after having been away for so long? Adam: I don’t know, I’m used to it, it’s fine. Not so much strange as depressing, sometimes. Brendan: Depressing how? Adam: Ha-Have you looked around? Have you seen the zombies in the streets?

While there are parts of me that agree wholeheartedly with Adam and Dustin, there is something––one particular person––that I don’t want to leave behind, the girl who was there to kickstart my dreams of another continent, who’s proven so much less disposable than I’d believed people would be.

I was forever worried that I was not making the right moves. That I was failing. But then Adam said something that–––I don’t know how to describe it.

Adam: Your whole life: it’s this giant arc, from the moment you’re born. Every single thing you do in life is all connected to what makes you, you know, whether you’re a used car salesman or some clown making ambient music like I do, y’know, whether it’s the first time I heard “Rocket Man” when I was three years old by Elton John, to listening to Led Zepplin, to being a huge fan of Brian Eno, to looking at Rocco paintings and having it just, totally fuck my mind, that’s just––it’s all the same thing. There is not one unit. People can make it seem like there’s just this one moment in time. Maybe it’s that simple for people, but for me, it’s everything is connected. They are connected with me, you are probably gonna be connected with me. I don’t know what kind of influence you’re going to have but...maybe none. There’s just so many of these seconds in life. I think about how Dustin and I met, y’know, this one moment in time in Italy that if...something happened and I didn’t make it to Bologna that night and play with Sparklehorse, and Dustin was not feeling good and didn’t come to the show, we never would’ve met and created all this music. I mean that’s pretty random. And that’s just...for me that’s just the essence of everything I see in myself and it’s all strangely connected. So I leave it at that. I’m done. Brendan: that explains a lot. Thank you!

music: “Atomos V” | Atomos

Outside, the rain had stopped, and I walked back to the apartment through the mist. Adam’s last comment had left me aware of the strange set of coincidences that pull people together in life: me, my friends, Michaela, the musicians I’d been reporting on all winter. I suddenly realized that all of these stories were connected, parts of a whole that I’d been struggling to capture for years: that when I talk about music, I talk most importantly about myself.

Michaela lay awake in bed, waiting for me. I kissed her and we stayed up for a while, talking into the night. The rest of my life will come, and I will be there for it. 

music: “All Flowers” | Love at Dusk

Adam Wiltzie & Dustin O’Halloran live in Europe. Their most recent album as A Winged Victory for the Sullen is called Atomos, and it is out on Kranky.

You’ve been listening to Stories About Music. This episode was produced by myself and edited & approved by Jon Davies. Music in this episode appears courtesy of A Winged Victory for the Sullen, Leyland Kirby, Emeralds, and Trouble Books. For a list of those songs, in order of appearance, you can go to our website: investigating regional scenes dot org. Also at our website this week, a few photos of the Dutch town where Michaela and I met.

If you haven’t already, please follow us on your local podcast provider.

Our next episode is the finale of season one, if you’re just joining us now, you still have time to go back and catch up on everything that’s happened. If you or a loved one have your own story about music, contact me at brendan at investigating regional scenes dot org. You can follow us on twitter by searching for my name.

Thank you to Dustin and Adam, to Brian Foote and Norah Tahiri for setting up our interview and, as always, to Michaela. Once again, I’m Brendan Mattox, back soon with another story about music.

I know you say there is no one for you, but here is one. All flowers in time bend towards the sun. I know you say there is no for you, but here is one. All flowers in time bend towards the sun. I know you say there is no one for you, but here is one. But here is one. But here is one.

[investigatingregionalscenes]

Tyler Taormina out front of his apartment in Los Angeles, 2014.

story about music #5

I met my friend Tyler in the autumn of 2010 after we moved into the same dorm room. He was already a musician by then, making pop music that mixed in a variety of other genres: indie rock, world beat, classical, jazz, shoegaze, ambient-anything was up for grabs, really.

But those things have never been the central focus of the music Tyler makes under the name Cloud. At its core, Cloud is a project about friendship, ego death, and one persons' attempts to hold onto the memories that shape him.

Episode 6 begins with a call I made to Tyler in the weeks before his first vinyl release (on a real record label!) only to find out he wasn't as excited as I'd thought he would be.

This is a story about my friend Tyler and me.

music

01:22 "Song for Campfire" by Cloud from Zen Summer (free download) 03:15 "Du Monde" by Alone from Las Villas 04:43 “Appalusion” by Cloud from Elephant Era  06:58 “The Way She Wears Her Hair” by Cloud from Rocket  09:42 “Carolina” by Adam & Naive from Every Starry Night  12:49 “Blurry and Bright” by Cloud from Comfort Songs  14:06 "Boy Sees Mirror" from Comfort Songs  18:00 “Authorless Novel” from Comfort Songs 20:46 "Cars & It's Autumn" from Comfort Songs 23:39 "Sleepy Giant Speak" from Zen Summer  32:06 "Night Ride" from Zen Summer

above: Adam & Naive in the Practice Room, c. 2008. From left to right: Tyler, Konrad Kamm, Omar Saeed, Greg Salwen, and Kenny Korb. below: Tyler with Jamie Halliday in 2015.

links

Greg Salwen also makes music, under the name Sonoak.

Jamie Halliday owns and operates Audio Antihero, a record label established in London in 2009. They released Cloud’s Comfort songs in 2013.

Though Lorena Alvarado didn’t appear in this episode, she’s an important character. For more on her, listen to Episode 3. 

transcript

As I finished a final revision of the Trouble Books story in March, my friend Tyler sent me a message, asking when, or if, my radio story about him was going to be finished.

music |“Song for Campfire”

A few weeks earlier, I’d recorded an interview with him about the impending release of his fourth record under the name Cloud. That album, Zen Summer, is his first one that’s ever been released on vinyl, by a real record label. He was anxious about it, and he wanted to know if whatever I was making about him would be ready by the time the album was released.

I’ve always struggled with timeliness, and deadlines and on top of which: Tyler’s not exactly a well known musician. The whole thing felt kinda sticky to my overprotective sense of ethics about, of all things, music journalism.

music |“Song for Campfire” Hold on tight your magic mind will take you high and drop you down, and I’ll admit it makes no sense, the stigmas we give our hometowns ‘cause I like when a house is full of life and when friends stick around. But go your way I’ll smile today, my muddy feet grow flowers now.

You’re listening to Stories About Music, a podcast about music, journalism, and memoir, and how the line between those three things is often not as clear as I hoped.

My name is Brendan Mattox and, this is story about music number five, “My Friend Tyler.”

Tyler: How well researched are you in this interview? Brendan: I am so well researched, it’s like I’ve been studying this for the last, I don’t know, four years, five years? However long I’ve known you.

music | “Du Monde”

Five Years Ago

A regular listener might remember Tyler Taormina from story about music number two, he was the guy that introduced me to slowcore.

Through a series of coincidences too meaningless to describe here, we shared the same six-person dorm on the Emerson College campus in the fall of 2010, the beginning of the first blue period. I was so preoccupied by love, and spent afternoons in my head thinking about the end of a relationship I’d endured (gone through).

On a lonely Friday night in mid-September, I ran into Tyler as he came back to our suite. He asked if I wanted to go to a party.

Tyler: I remember just prefacing the walk with “bring your headphones, because I might not want to talk.”

Actually, his exact words were a brusque “bring your headphones because we’re not talking.”

Tyler: I just need someone to be with but I don’t necessarily want to talk them...

But the walk to the party was almost four miles, and a little longer than Tyler could keep his mouth shut for.

Tyler: What else? I mean, I was going through something with a girl, probably Lorena, and I was like “Fuck this.”

Yes, Lorena, the same Lorena from story about music number three. So sorry to put you on blast Lorena, but you’re very important to everything that comes next.

music | “Appalusion”

Tyler: I was attracted to her from the second I saw her. And uhhh, I became friends with her by, like, a series of me waiting by the elevator for her to, like, come into the building that we all had to take and I would go in there with her and overhear conversation or make conversation. And actually that didn’t succeed until uhm, I went to borrow magazines from a friend. I knocked on my friends door and Lorena answered it.

I met Lorena through Tyler.

I barely noticed her, but it turned out that Tyler’s entire year had been spent hanging around, trying to gauge her feelings about him without ever coming out and asking her.

Tyler: And then, one day I just said, fuck it.I was listening to the song “Work for Ariel” a live recording by Panda Bear where he says, “I really want to do one thing my body needs to” no that’s not the part that got me, “I really want to show to my girl that I want her.” And I was like, ok, I have to do this. I want to have that honesty.

So um, I sat Lorena down after we went skateboarding or something, and I was like, I have a joke. It’s not very funny but feel free to laugh...I’m crazy about you

And the look on her face was like, it was the weirdest way you could contort your eyes to be bug eyed. [...]

Tyler had mistimed his declaration, at least by a month or so.

Tyler: It didn’t seem like anything  was actually sprouting up. And then one day I was like, “let’s crash a wedding.” So we put on our bests, our Sunday bests, and we called up all the major hotels in Boston and we asked what time the reception is that night.

And um, I deleted my Facebook and I shaved my head shortly thereafter, and I was explaining to Lorena on the night of this wedding date, y’know, I’m shaving my head because I see pretty girls, and uh, y’know, I smile at them and they smile back sometimes. And I don’t want to worry about that stuff anymore. I want to just, like, shut off that part that is self-aware of, everyone is watching me.

music | “The Way She Wears Her Hair”

The night that Tyler shaved his head, everybody stood around and watched like it was a coming of age ceremony. Lorena was there too, and maybe I’m just letting history color my memory, but I felt like I could see that something had changed in the way she looked at him that night.

Shortly thereafter, I left early to go home and prepare for a semester abroad in Europe. The last email I received from Tyler before Christmas had the subject line “Lorena.”

The body read:

“Last night, she and I kissed, like, a thousand times. I’ll miss you.”

Smithtown

Tyler grew up deep in that appendage of New York City called Long Island.

Tyler: I come from a place called Smithtown, which, that name could wrap it up right there, it’s fuckin’ white people city. Ninety-five-point-five percent caucasian. It’s a cultural wasteland––very, very oppressive––and I don’t think it really started to suffocate people around me until we got a bit older and you have to make an identity for yourself. When you are on your own, it’s time for you to do something with your life quote-unquote.

There was this kind of zeitgeist of...of just bro.

Smithtown is about a long way out from the city, over an hour in really bad traffic. It’s spread out––there aren’t a lot of sidewalks––so despite the fact that it’s a suburb, it’s got more of a rural vibe to it. When you’re young, I don’t think there’s very much you can do.

What Tyler and a few friends did, was start forming bands.

Greg Salwen: So after a few bizarre incarnations beforehand, we ended up with Adam & Naive

This is Greg Salwen, guitar player and lyricist for Tyler’s first real band, Adam and Naive.

Tyler: Like a lot of bands when they first come about, they just try to make things that sound cool. Things they think could be like songs. But our songwriter, Greg, who is probably my best friend that I have, he wasn’t like that, he wrote things that were meaningful to him.

And that was a really big influence on everyone around him, that he was able to express himself. Even if...one of the words was “i’m trying to balance work and school and friends on this fucking scale. That’s like a funny lyric because a high school kid wrote it. But it’s not like, “you broke my heart, baby” because that’s what other songs tell you should be songs...y’know.

music | “Carolina” Stuck in Carolina, without a food supply, guess I’ll call my parents, let them know just where I am. Hope that they’re not mad, hope they understand it, when I tell them where I’ve been...I ran away with my friends down to South Carolina and we’re gonna buy a house and live there forever…

And even though Greg sings most lyrics, Adam & Naive was pretty much the utopian ideal of the word “band.”

Greg: The way that Adam & Naive has always functioned is that, we’re all sort of pretty good at our instruments but none of us are amazing necessarily[…]Whenever we make a song, it’s like five people each giving their own side of it and then it comes together to make something awesome and I mean that’s the classic idea of harmony.

I ran away with my friends down to South Carolina and we’re gonna buy a house and live there forever. Ran away with my friends down to South Carolina and we’re gonna buy a house and live there forever.

By 2009, Greg had moved on to college while most of the other members were still wrapping up high school. Adam & Naive went on hiatus, but everyone took what they’d learned together and started to make music on their own. Which led to the formation of the Practice Records Recording Collective.

Greg: I don’t know who exactly came up with the idea, I feel like it was always sort of brewing. Is that like, we want to put out all this music. We don’t care about putting them out on CDs necessarily, even though we did CD-Rs and stuff like that. We just wanted to put it out and, like, give it to our friends. We knew, we would play shows and some people would like, love it, and we were like, oh, they should have it, too. And we just wanted one place to put it all, and that was Practice Room Records.

I’ve been a guest at several Practice Room events since I met Tyler, and I have never seen anyone have the depth of emotion for music that Tyler and his friends have for each other’s work.

The collective takes its name from an unattached basement room under Tyler’s parents’ house. When Adam & Naive formed in 2005, everyone in the band helped clean it out.

Tyler: It’s funny we would practice, literally, five days a week in the summertime and when you didn’t make practice, everyone was pissed at you. Or if you were late, it was like, “what the fuck?? we were practicing today.” And it’s through that repetition that probably scared our drummer away forever.

Greg: we practiced there for years and it just didn’t matter at the beginning so much. But then we just started hanging out there, like, everyone came to hang out there. We would hold, like, big events at the Practice Room. Like, we did this thing called Pracstaurant––did you come to Pracstaurant?

No, I didn’t, and without fact checking, I would say it’s probably because I was still a hundred miles away, still a teenager in Pennsylvania having the exact opposite experience of the one Greg and Tyler having.

Listening to Tyler talk about high school, I often feel like he lived through a kind of beautiful, cinematic depiction of what it’s like to have friends.

Tyler: My graduating class in high school didn’t really have a popular kids circle, it wasn’t really like that.

While my own experience of those years was something more like a grim, if humorous, theatrical production.

I had a lot of friends of convenience, people willing to step on each other to make themselves feel taller. So when I first saw Practice Room Records, I wanted so badly to be a part of it.

Tyler is, and I say this as objectively as I can, one of the sweetest human beings I’ve met in my life. The way that he acts, and the music that he makes, springs out of his incredibly earnest adolescence. I think it primed him to see the good in things like hometowns and friendships and amateurishness, while mine––well, I am not exactly a sunflower.

 People flock to him. He’s positive, encouraging, and he seemed, at least back then, to never want for anything other than romantic love.

On Your Own Love Again

Tyler: I guess I’ll continue the Lorena story. We dated, we had a nice relationship. It was very innocent, it was very playful, it was very fun, It was based off our friendship.

And I was also very desperate. I was like a little puppy-boy. That never really went away.

music | “Boy Sees Mirror”

I returned to Boston after a few months in Europe. It may’ve been the contrast between grey New England and the warm, sunny spring in the Netherlands,  but upon landing I felt uneasy, like something had shifted underneath everything I came back to.

This feeling persisted all through the summer and fall, until one evening in November when Tyler gathered a few of us in the kitchen of a friends’ apartment. He put his hands flat on the tablecloth, looked at us in turn and said, “some days, guys, you wake up and everything is fine. Then other days you wake up and your girlfriend just doesn’t love you anymore…”

music | “Boy Sees Mirror” I know it’s fucked up, but I wish you the worst. How you call me your best friend, I called you my lover...so I’ll see you on Sunday, till then just fuck off.

Tyler: She couldn’t feel the same ways that I could, and it was frustrating her that she couldn’t, and we split. And there was a lot of resentment, and you hear it all on Comfort Songs, a lot of, uh,bad feelings.

Brendan: Did you have any other ways of coping with feelings, or was it, was this, like, the outlet that formed its way for you as you grew up?

Tyler: (pause) I suppose this is it, y’know?

Tyler and Lorena’s break up felt like the inciting event for a chain of missteps and failed friendships that marked our third winter away from home. I was not spared, either.

At the time, I was far too self-absorbed, and maybe inebriated, to see what was happening to Tyler, but I think it came down to this. Though he had friends in Boston, we weren’t the people who’d known him all his life, and as such, didn’t tether him to his past. Not in the way that the kids from Practice Room Records did.

Tyler: I feel like identity is something you cling to when shit is rough. And high school wasn’t like that, I had so many friends that I just loved and that loved me, and...I would say now I cling much more to music as an identity than I did then...I mean, the music that I make, that is.

A few weeks before he and Lorena broke up, Tyler had released his second solo album under the name Cloud, a love letter called Rocket.

Alongside Cloud, Tyler was still playing in a band with Lorena, and he was still hanging out with her even though this love that he’d built up had pretty much flamed out before he was ready for it. He played out more often, at bars and house shows, but even this only reminded him of the place he’d left behind.

Tyler: When you go to a show on Long Island, you’ll probably know most of the people there, or they’re probably friends of friends. It’s kind of like you’re all in the same boat, almost. And you go because you don’t want to be at the gym or at the bar, or, I don’t fucking know what people do, those are the two places people go to in Long Island.  

It can only exist in suburbia, this kind of music scene. Even if it’s a basement or a house show in cities, I feel like it’s significantly more fashion based.

For the first time in his life, Tyler was an outsider. And I have to say, I took a little bit of pleasure in that.

Mostly, because I am a petty, jealous monster. I felt formless that winter, my second Blue Period began when realized that I was closer to the end of college than I was to the beginning of it, and that scared me. A lot. I wasn’t sure who or what I wanted to have in my life, or what kind of person I was going to be.

I wanted to be the person who people asked about if I wasn’t at the party, I wanted to be popular, I wanted to be well-liked, I wanted to be creative, I wanted to be successful, I wanted to be attractive, I wanted to be witty.

Tyler seemed like everything I wanted be, and to know that he felt just as alone in their little bubble, well, it’s comforting.

But the way Tyler dealt with that isolation was so much more skillful than mine. music | “Authorless Novel”

Tyler: I was so immersed during the Comfort Songs period. I was so immersed in one feeling, one world. And you can be immersed in one world especially when you’re in college, because there’s not really that much that you have to do.

And I was so in the headspace of this love that I had, and this feeling that followed it of ego and it felt dirty, and I was really curious about what this feeling was and where it felt from. Like, “I can’t do this again, I’m going to prevent this.”

Reducing his ego became something close to an obsession for Tyler. He started going to to meditation and even, once, took a vow of silence for a few days.

By the time summer came around, he began to roll all of those experiences up into one new record. He called it Comfort Songs.

And I think it was here where the line separating music, journalism, and my personal life first started to grow very unclear.

Tyler had invited me to come down to Long Island that summer to produce a few slowcore songs in the style of Bluetile Lounge, as a kind of side project to my life.

Tyler: You should still do that, what have you been doing with your time?

I’d never been to Tyler’s house for longer than a few hours after Adam & Naive shows in Brooklyn. I’d never been there alone before, either. The trip gave me time to really take in the world that Tyler had grown up in.

We spent most of the weekend holed up in the Practice Room. The actual place is a monument to friendship, covered with inside jokes, equipment, signs from the Pracstaurant, and the little desk where every album Tyler’s ever made has been recorded and mixed.

At night we’d hang out with Greg Salwen, and the rest of his friends. Tyler had once said to me was that if I’d grown up in Smithtown I never would have felt left out. And while I was there, I actually felt like he was probably telling the truth.

One morning, Tyler taped up a sheet of paper in front of microphone.

music | “Cars and it’s Autumn” Cars and it’s Autumn, sometimes you get scared, and I won’t be ok till her hands’ in my hair, and sometimes though it’s futile, I fight the ghostly commands and I’ll scream at you, nothing, I sing loud with my friends.

Supposedly I’m singing in there, somewhere, part of his world. Though I’ve never actually been able to hear it myself.

Then don’t you think I’d pick it? And what I need is to sing alongside my band. It’s funny how I’m happy now singing about my sadness.

Comfort Songs was a high point for Tyler. Everyone who knew him, and even a few people who didn’t, liked it a lot. A small English label put it out on CD in 2013. That release attracted enough attention that two guys from Ireland to make Tyler’s next album the inaugural release of their new label. On vinyl.

Tyler: I was probably about 14 years old when I made my life goals. One of them was to, um, have my music pressed to vinyl, one of them was to tour around the world with music that I made and wrote with my friends, and and the other one was to have a jukebox full of seven inches I’d collected all throughout my lifetime.

Which brings us to the conversation we’re having about the upcoming release of Zen Summer, and how Tyler wasn’t as excited as I expected him to be.

Anxiety

Tyler: Part of me just wants it to be released already...considering its almost been two years.

Brendan: Do you worry about how the album will be received?

Tyler: I do. I mean, I do and I have yet to distinguish yet whether it is because worrying is a part of me, or whether it is something is worth it for me to worry about.

Brendan: What are you worried about.

Me too Tyler, me too. It’s just the burden of being an outsider to something I’ve devoted myself to. But I always assumed you had it figured out, at least.

Tyler: I mean, I grew up listening to so many guys and girls pave the way for me [...] It affected the way we grew up and the way our psyches work and the way we see the world. And it’s a conversation I was led into that has shaped, greatly, who I am, and I’ve always wanted to continue that conversation as I’ve gotten older and all righteous in what I believe in. I think there are things I could say.

music | “Sleepy Giant Speak” What if I’ve asked the wrong questions? What if I don’t know what I want? What if it hurts so bad I can’t feel my legs from my hips from my hands? Oh how I left humming songs, now I need a ride home...

Tyler: Y’know people don’t talk about a lot of things that are important, especially in the music industry, they talk about bullshit, it’s just how I’ve seen it. So I want to bring myself and my views and the reflection of what I’ve seen into this conversation, and it would be kind of heartbreaking if that was just...shat upon.

Brendan: Do you think that that’s a very real a possibility?

Tyler: I don’t know. Comfort songs, I didn’t think there was a possibility because it’s like a debut. Who cares? Who’s going to shit on the new guy? Not that it has such an acclaim to follow with, but I think the whole “this sounds like Animal Collective” or that kind of reduction...it could just be dismissed very easily.

Of course, Tyler wouldn’t be in the position of worrying about this stuff if it weren’t for the odd, unexpected intervention of one person.

No, not Lorena.

Me.

In 2012, I had my first, and last, public radio internship, at the BBC/PRI co-production The World.

Actually I shouldn’t have–I was the third best option for only two slots but, to my surprise, they called me back and offered me the title of music intern. It’s by the grace of other people that we really exist in this world.

I’m not sure if I was exactly what they were looking for. The World is really into, surprise, world music. Stuff that I am actually into now, but not when I had the chance to make an impression.

I used the access to their equipment and a BBC studio in London to construct my first story about music, on a record label in south London.

Marco Werman: The World’s Brendan Mattox has the story

Brendan: Croydon, just south of London, is a area that metropolitan Americans are painfully familiar with.

Jamie Halliday: It is grayness. If there was like, a fast-food abyss, I think it would be Croydon.

That cheery voice drifting out of the past is Jamie Halliday, owner, spokesman, and sole employee of Audio Antihero. The same label that released Comfort Songs in 2013.

Brendan: And how did you find out about Cloud? Jamie Halliday: I believe it was all thanks to you. Is that a leading question?

Yeah, it is.

Jamie asked me for some music recommendations once the story had aired, coincidentally, just as Tyler released Comfort Songs to his friends.

Jamie: I’ve got a terrible concept of time, but I’m gonna believe you when you say that. I don’t know, I liked it immediately. I think I must’ve sat on it or not made any kind of forward-thinking connection.

 For one reason or another, I was out late and listening to that album in full, and it just kind of clicked that “oh, I could release this.” And I never know if, when I think something like that, I’m thinking “I could get this album to more people” or “I could totally take credit for this.”

I called up Jamie because––well, actually, I don’t really know why I called Jamie, but I did. When he said this, a light switch flicked on.

I think what made this story so difficult to produce is not just that Tyler is my friend, or that I want to be an ethical journalist. that the whole story even arises because of a series of failures in trying to be an ethical journalist or a good friend.

In the process of failing, I managed to nudge open a new door Tyler, while simultaneously making him more anxious about what that means. And all of it is intertwined with this one-sided competitive streak my ego has been running for the last four years.

Brendan: To add this last little bit into the story is to almost be like, “hey, I’m part of this process too,” even though the truth is that I always feel like I’m kind of on the outside of this whole Cloud thing. Even when I’ve been a part of it, I’ve always felt like I’m being included as like, a courtesy for hanging around for so long….it feels so complex when it’s probably actually quite simple. Tyler is releasing music and that has something to do with…me.

Jamie: Do you feel happy or sad or something in between?

Brendan: I honestly don’t know, I feel, um, I feel very selfish for trying to say that out loud, kind of silly. And that’s like the whole point of this story, is kind of like um, so much of the first five episodes of this season have been about me talking in this very serious way about myself and then, through Tyler I can actually step back and see like, what a doofus I really am sometimes. Like who gets jealous over somebody creating great music? Well, actually, I guess everybody.

Jamie: Everybody!

Of course it’s a little more than that. I’m not just jealous of his talent, but his Tylerness, his people skills, the way that people ask about him if he’s not at the party.

But if I had to pick one, I would probably take his success.

Sometimes, when I listen to one of Tyler’s albums I’m imagine that I’m onstage performing the songs right alongside him, projecting my ambition to be recognized right on top of this thing he made to help him wrestle his ego.

It’s something that Jamie kind of understood.

Jamie: And with Tyler it’s weird, because–um, I don’t think I’ve made many relationships in music as positive as the one I have with Tyler. It goes deeper than worrying about press response to an album I didn’t release, it’s is Tyler going to be happy? Brendan: Why does your relationship with Tyler feel more positive? Jamie: Anybody who knows Tyler knows that a relationship with Tyler is more positive than any other.

In general, yeah. He’s always encouraging, usually willing to engage you in whatever weird place you happen to be in.

Tyler: he other night I was talking to a friend of mine, Holland. Or, do you remember Holland? Wali Hassan?

Brendan: I do remember Wali. Is his name Holland now?

Tyler: Yeah, he changed his name to Holland.

Brendan: Does he have a career in porn or something?

Tyler: (possibly serious) Yeah, he has a career in porn.

Anyway, I’m talking with Holland in the car till, like, three in the morning. We meet at a bar with Ben and friends, I’m dropping him off, he’s visiting town for one day. And we’re talking until three in the morning about really intense stuff. He doesn’t do small talk, he just looks you straight in the eyes and, like, he’s listening and it’s really crazy

And he was telling me about his fears in life, in terms of...exploring his mind. Which is...it was kind of him giving me the entirety of what’s going on for him. Fear is a big theme for him, and it’s a big theme for me too, and it had me so lucid and anxious, I was just feeling kind of on edge talking about all these topics like bad trips or whatever.

And I remembered why I wrote Zen Summer, which, I don’t remember often. Zen Summer is an evening during magic hour in summertime, when you realize that you’re alive and that’s magnificent, it’s enormous. I thought, “fuck it, I don’t care what anyone says about this, it is what it is. And I hope people see that and not the other part of it...which is “There are synthesizers here that do E-A, which is a common theme in the album,” y’know? Or y’know, “this sounds just like something off Person Pitch…”

Like I said, it’s through the grace of other people that we actually exist. There’s an inherent futility to what Tyler and I do if it never expands outside of ourselves. And if there is somethingI should be jealous of Tyler for, it’s the small head start that he’s made in breaking through that barrier.

Luckily, I think I have time to catch up.

Credits

Tyler Taormina lives in Los Angeles. He is working on his fifth album as Cloud, tentatively titled, Plays With Fire. His last record, Zen Summer, was released on Paper Trail.

You’ve been listening to Stories About Music. Our program was produced today by myself, and approved by Kyna Doles. Songs in this episode appear with the generosity of the Practice Room Records Recording Collective. A list of those songs, in order of appearance are available at our website, investigating regional scenes dot com, where you can also find this and other stories about music.

You can find Stories About Music on your local podcast provider including on Stitcher. Hopefully the few people who asked about Stitcher are still listening.

Thank you to Tyler, Greg Salwen, Jamie Halliday, and to Lorena Alvarado, who declined an interview but graciously permitted us to talk about her behind her back. And thank you, as always, to Michaela, for her patience.

I’m Brendan Mattox, back next week with another story about music.

Promo

Next time on Stories About Music...

Dustin: Hey! We forgot about the interview! Adam: Lucky me, I got tacos instead.

A Winged Victory for the Sullen plays at the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, and Adam Wiltzie gives me some career advice.

Adam Wiltzie: Your whole life: it’s this giant arc, from the moment you’re born. Every single thing you do in life is all connected to what makes you, you know, whether you’re a used car salesman or some clown making ambient music like I do

This, Love, and Europe, all in the next story about music.

[investigatingregionalscenes]

Linda Lejsovka & Keith Freund in the small greenhouse attached to their kitchen, 2013

story about music #4

Episode 5 picks up after the concert that ended episode 4. Keith and Linda let us stay in their basement that night after a chance thunderstorm rained in the tent we’d pitched in their backyard. As my friend Ricco slept on the couch, I lay on my back on the floor and wondered if I wasn’t just a little in over my head.

I wanted to be like them, but maybe more than that, I wanted to be them––to settle in some forgotten corner of the U.S. and never worry about having to “make it.” But I also didn’t want to be unknown like them. At some point in the night, one of Keith and Linda’s cats wandered past and I wondered, were they happy here? And more importantly: was this the life I needed to live?

music

all songs by Trouble Books, except where noted. Most of the records these came from are available to download, for free, at Keith and Linda’s personal press, Bark and Hiss.

00:00 “Unfolded” from Love at Dusk

02:17 “Hedgehog” from Endless Pool

05:39 “Pteradon Nocturne (Two Moons)” by Keith and Jacob Feige, from The Bellona Museum of Natural History

09:13 “He Noticed I’m Alive...and other hopeful signs” by Keith Freund, from Constant Comments

12:23 “Dead Bee In A Golden Bowl” from Concatenating Fields

17:14 “All Flowers” from Love at Dusk

18:10 “The Very End, Again” from Love at Dusk

20:00 “Fake Fern Shadows” from Love at Dusk

23:51 “Dusk Accelerator” from Gathered Tones

26:00 “Houseplants” from Gathered Tones

29:53 “Ah Shit, My Heart Is Full” by Lejsovka & Freund, from Mold on Canvas

above: Linda and Keith in the small greenhouse next to their kitchen, 2013 

below, left to right: Iffy, Linda, Pearl Harbor, and Keith, c. 2008

transcript

music: “Unfolded” | United Colors of Trouble Books

Keith: I don’t know, eventually we started dating, and took a trip together to Europe.....and we didn’t plan any of it. I think we just thought we would just walk around and we brought a tiny tent that like, packed up to the size of a football, so all we had were- you can’t even call them backpacks, they were knapsacks, the size of something you would take to school as a kid. We each had one of those and a sleeping bag. I think we just envisioned this idea of just pitching a tent anywhere––there’s so much space in the States here, there’s so much empty space and like, empty lots where you could pitch a tent, sleep, and no one ever knows you’re there. But in, especially in Germany where we first were, everything is really used. So we didn’t see any “dead zones.” The only dead zone we could find the first night we were there was like right next to some train tracks that were constantly being used (smile in his voice), and the whole night it was like raining, and I was panicked that all of the sudden the sound of somebody yelling at us in a language I didn’t understand was gonna be like,  “what are you doing here? get out of here?” And then we would have nowhere to go. 

But it was like, getting through that sort of high stress of traveling and, having, y’know, no money and nowhere to go, that we sort of realized we worked really well together, and then we talked about getting married at that point. So a year later we got married, and, and then a few years later we just–uh, decided to, decided to have uh-a baby.

Brendan: And here we are now.

Keith: And here we are now.

music: “Hedgehog” (reprise) | Endless Pool

You’re listening to Stories About Music, a podcast on the intersection of music, journalism, and my life.

My name is Brendan Mattox and this is part II, of story about music #4, A Story About the Trouble Books.

Well I followed a hedgehog through the leaves, an island outside Avignon. You were asleep back in the tent, I wondered if when I get back home, I could take this gentle night and apply it to my overdraft notice.

We crashed in Keith and Linda’s basement that night. I turned over the trip, and what I even thought I was doing there any more.

I wanted to be like them. But I also wanted to be them. But I also want didn’t want to be unknown like them. That motivating force of recognition burned strong, had propelled me across four hundred miles in the first place. It felt so depressingly aspirational to be making a documentary with no conflict, so sad to try make my name with their life.

And yet I still still had some hope that I could pull this one out of the gutter. I stayed up late, trying to delicately word my next question, inspired by something that their friend Jacob had said.

Jacob: I actually think that their personalities, as people, I think they probably take more risks in their music, or the music is a venue for risks in a way that, uh, their day to day lives or social interactions aren’t. That’s true for a lot of artists, they save the uncertainty in their lives up for their art. Brendan: hm, is there a lot of uncertainty in life in Akron? Jacob: Hmph, No actually. I mean there’s as much uncertainty as there is anywhere... I have found personally, in a small to midsize city like Akron, stagnation is really your enemy, y’know, complacency and deciding it’s just easier to like, I don’t know, watch a tv show than go listen to the mix you made and keep working on it.  Um, that’s the enemy in a place like Akron.

Keith: It’s interesting I would completely disagree with Jacob...Not that it’s not a problem here, but that it would be exclusive to here at all.

music: “Pteradon Nocturne” | The Bellona Museum of Natural History

Akron is an important part of Trouble Books’ history.

Keith and Linda have had the free time to make music because of the city’s dirt-cheap prices–a positive side to the otherwise lackluster economy, bad safety record, and shrinking population.

But it could also be said that their isolation from mainstream counter-culture kept them from ever achieving something more.

When I arrived, the former rubber capital of the world was really empty, too much so for a warm, Saturday afternoon in August. Driving west on Market Street from one end of town to the other, we passed industrial buildings, close-packed residences, cracked shopping centers and the outsized Arabian dome of the Tangiers nightclub.

The drive looked felt eerily symmetrical to the Philadelphia suburb where I grew up, right down to the main road that split the middle-class families from the low-class.

Dave Ignizio runs Square Records on that divide. He, and Keith and Linda have all lived in Highland Square for close to a decade.

Dave: I don’t think Akron ever really changes too much. In a way it’s like there’s a lot of people who are from Akron but people are always looking to move on, so...It’s, it’s where I meet a lot of cool people but unfortunately you have to say goodbye to a lot of people at the same time, so... Brendan: Do you have any idea why Keith and Linda may have stayed? Dave: Um, I used to talk to Keith about that, several times, and the idea of moving to a big cities never really appealed to him, or trying to like, make it in, y’know,  New York or whatever like that. Like just, it’s never been an interest to him or anything like that. Pratically, for the same reason I don’t really want to kind of go to those kind cities. It’s just––we’re all kind of comfortable here, y’know, it’s not necessarily the being the “big fish in a small pond type of thing,” it’s just...this is kind of a nice place to be. It’s affordable and enough people have stayed around that you can create like really good friendships and communities around here, so.

The next morning, Keith and Linda took turns interviewing while the other watched their daughter, Evey.

Brendan: Your house, I would say, is different from most American households in that, one, you don’t seem to have a television. So my first question is, what’s wrong with you?

Keith: We do have a television, it’s upstairs...we just haul it out when we have people are over to watch a movie.

Brendan: But life for you both seems to be more about, um, these more analog things that hang out around here.

Keith: Yeah, um.....(thoughtful) I like the- act of putting a record on, I think it keeps me focused. I find the unlimited choices of um, a Terabyte worth of music to be ..sort of..paralyzing.

But um, the records. We were both always interested in records and both Linda and I had collected records. Yeah we had some money left over and decided to do United Colors of Trouble Books and um, our friend mike’s Talons’ record Songs for Babes, and we just put it up on our website with a paypal button and then, yknow, eight dollars. Dropped a couple off at local records stores and um, and then would just ship them out. We’d package them in old pizza boxes from- Mike and I worked in a pizza place, uh, we didn’t want to buy record mailers ‘cause they cost like a dollar each to buy the “official” record mailers.

And I really just thought with the Internet that would become this new way of doing things, that bands, you would- Bands would put something out themselves, they would print the jackets themselves or do whatever they could to keep the costs low, y’know- People would run blogs and websites that would find interesting, exciting new music, they would mention it, and then other people would go to that bands website and purchase the music but- I guess maybe people don’t have enough time or attention to do that, so it’s still a thing, I feel like, where need a label and you need to pay a, y’know, promotion company and a manager just to get, just to get places to pay attention.

music: “He Notice I’m Alive, and Other Hopeful Signs” | Constant Comments intercut: audio of Linda, Evey and Keith

In going to Akron I wanted to be a “journalist,” observant and detached––but I was starting to question if the ship hadn’t already sailed. From the beginning I hadn’t been impartial to their ideas, I idolized them.

Many of their friends described a similar envy. One of Keith’s closest collaborators, Mike Tolan, described the world of the Trouble Books––an impulse to surround yourself with art and beauty and making nice things––as just who Keith and Linda are as people.

The more I looked at it, the more I wanted their life, because my other options weren’t looking so good.

Keith: Like some of our most creative and ambitious friends have used their ambition to take their energies to somewhere they thought it would blossom, you know, New York, most specifically for a while would draw all the, everyone with a fine art degree. Honestly, they’re all wonderful people that I love, but my– the impression that I’ve gotten is that their work died there. They went there, you’re forced to work as hard as you can to pay your rent, and you take a forty-five minute train ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and then back, and then you come home and your tired, and you don’t have space, and you end up just watching Netflix. I don’t have a lot of acquaintances that have done work, or much work, after they’ve left here.

But the setting––Akron and all the suburbs like it––just felt so wrong. It felt like giving up, backsliding from the life I wanted...and I was about to fall headfirst into it once my trip ended anyway.

In some ways, I identified more with the person that Linda used to be. Before settling down with Keith, she’d spent a lot of time traveling, just to get away from Akron.

Linda: I guess it was just this place that I’d been in for so long, and, like I said, I felt like I was having a crisis where I needed to move somewhere else. I think a lot of people go through that, where they think they’re just going to move somewhere and everything is going to change and really you just bring whatever it is with you. So, I didn’t realize the subtlety of staying in a place and learning maybe just even how to be, like, closer friends with people and kind of growing up a little bit? So I had some of that to go through.

music: “Dead Bee In A Golden Bowl” | Concatenating Fields

The answer I wanted wasn’t in sight, just another post-grad dichotomy. On the one hand, they are a very happy couple, living off the beaten path and making something totally unique while still managing to live a middle-class life in the twenty-first century. On the other, they’re living an anonymous middle-class life, which is nothing like that one I fantasize about.

I want everything I do to be as thoughtful as the Trouble Book’s record, but I want people to notice me.

Brendan: With the Trouble Books, did you ever have any grand plans like, be famous sort of thing or has it always been…? Keith: No... Brendan: Why don’t you explain. Keith: My fantasy for our band has always been that we would be able to sustain the interest of people enough so that we could sell out of as small of a pressing as a plant is willing to do for us of records...I wouldn’t be motivated to like, throw some mp3s up on Soundcloud and that be the end of like, what that is, that just feels cheap and meaningless to me. So what I’ve always wanted is to have a hundred or three hundred or two hundred and fifty–whatever a pressing plant is willing to do for me– that amount of people be willing to pay like, ten dollars, whatever the cost is per record so that I can keep making them. And so that Linda and I can work together on these things, y’know, or I can put out something of a friend of mines that I like. And uh, that be that. That people would enjoy it, that it would improve their life, even if it’s just like thirty minutes in an evening that they listen to it and like it, is enough.

Brendan: So when I was talking to Jacob, he said that the thing with Akron was that, um, more than anything else, more than worrying about somebody taking your wallet or something, you have to worry about, uh, stagnating in some way...Either just, like,  coming home and watching television, versus coming home and playing music. Um, Linda: Yeah... Brendan: Do you guys ever feel like you’re working up against stagnation in Akron? Linda: Um, a little bit...A lot of it’s more, um, stagnation in the form of busy work for me, where...I’ve been getting frustrated, yknow,  coming home having limited time and there’s dishes to be done and all the house maintenance sort of, daily life background kind of stuff that, when I had more free time, I would get done and then have time to do other things, and...I’m still now learning how to do that and not make it into a big deal, yknow? Like, “oh my god, the bathroom’s a mess I have to clean the bathroom” and then noticing like, oh yknow, like there’s mold on the wall in the closet stuff like that that um...I guess...feels like it gets in the way and makes me feel like we’re stagnating...But not in that way where I get bored. Like I don’t feel like either of us are people who get bored. Where you come home and it’s like, “I have no idea what to do, let’s watch a tv show!” I don’t think either of us really gets that way... Brendan: How much longer are you both planning on keeping up the Trouble Books? Linda: I don’t know...I really don’t. Brendan: Has it ever felt like, oh, “maybe we should stop now?” Linda: Yeah probably...I think Keith goes through that more than I do, where, y’know, he’ll say, “this is probably the last album that we’ll do...” And then... I think he’s said that after a couple of them now, and it’s never been true, so...Yeah, I guess I don’t really think about that. I sort of just figure, if we end up doing something else than we do, and if not, then it might just be on a long hiatus.

IV

music: “All Flowers” | Love at Dusk

I moved back to Pennsylvania and tried to piece together a radio story from what I’d collected. The results were flat and unconvincing, a portrait of two pious saints that I was trying to live up to. My attempts to sell the story before it was finished went pretty much ignored. The few producers I did get a hold of all said the same thing, “sounds nice, but not interesting.”

Discouraged, I took a job ripping out the window frames in an old folks home. I spent November mornings trying to tease out a big revelation we could all walk away from this story feeling good about. I stared hard into the abyss of white plastic siding, mentally replaying interviews I’ve heard so many times that I could speak them back to you.

At the same time, Keith and Linda released their fourth full-length as Trouble Books, a short little record named Love At Dusk.

There’s much less singing and a lot more static. The album passes like an unsettling dream that’s punctuated, as Keith notes, “by frequent sonic and lyrical apocalypses.”

I spent my evenings listening to their catalogue, trying to find a direction for both my story, and my life. On close inspection, things didn’t seem so good in Akron. I could hear fear lurking in the words that Keith had written: a fear of loss, of boredom, of aging. Did I not dig deep enough? Was their life in a peaceful new world actually not so peaceful?

music: “The Very End, Again” | Love at Dusk

I worried about my bad intentions sabotaging a good thing, and about whether or not I could actually make a living doing this.

I started having nightmares, including a very disturbing one in which Linda berated me for ruining their life while Keith cried.

I called Keith one night when I finally felt brave enough to hash out the finer points and frustrations of their life. But then I got nervous, so instead I talked to him about his, friend, cover artist, and recurring minor character in this story, Jacob Feige.

Keith: Y’know I never really––we never really actively went crazy pursuing the idea of, like, getting somewhere with our music or touring heavily, or anything like that. But at the same time, there was always kind of this wish like, maybe it would be cool if like, you know, we could do more. Y’know, if I knew that we could sell more so that we could make more, etcetera etcetera, and uh...I think he always had that kind of thing. He wanted to just––to just be a painter, and now he’s painting and teaching and such. 

I’ve seen other friends come through that rejection and feel so embarrassed that they tried at it they don’t want to go back to doing that art any more, y’know. They see it as like, basketball tryouts, and now they’re just too old to even enjoy shooting around, that sort of thing...y’know whereas Linda has always pursued her art and music making with just like, without any thought or concern for anybody else, it took something for I think both Jacob and I to get over that and I think it’s just sort of part of...I guess it’s just sort of part of...as awkward and cheesy as this sounds, I think the fatherhood thing has a lot to do with that

music: “Fake Fern Shadows” | Love at Dusk

It’s only now that I realize that my visit to Keith and Linda had come at the end of their own tumultuous year.

Their daughter was been born a few months before they moved. Linda was still between careers, and Keith had to find a new job after the grant funding his work in the Art Museum ran out.

I just need simple things, clean socks, a warm bed, an extra comet to destroy this shitty planet.

The rhythm they had settled into, of releasing a record each year and living in Akron’s creative underclass, had skipped a beat just like my own.

Keith: I always have this thing where, when things are really good, I have this nagging feeling of “and they’re just gonna get worse after this.” just, this is the peak of something, and then disappointment comes next and etcetera etcetera. So when Linda and I would take trips to go tour or something, I would think, do I want the plane to go down before or after the tour, which would be preferable? Because just, the idea of going out with her was just like, sort of what I wanted to do.

A disappointing sketch more comfortable hiding in fake fern shadows, fake fern shadows, fake fern shadows.

Keith: Like, this is the height, avoid any disappointment, avoid, y’know, a widow or widower, and all that awful stuff, clean break.

But how did Linda feel about having to sing those lyrics?

Linda: I think Keith gets more pessimistic or feels more anxious about big things in life or...I already, I mean I knew that about him, so the kind of apocalyptic outlook, um, it’s not something new that I thought “Oh my gosh, what’s wrong, like, what’s happening?” (laughter) I’m gonna have to check him in or anything like that.  

I don’t know, when I was in high school I was really fascinated with morbid things, and I’d make my little angsty collages and stuff like that, and it was all, y’know, pretty morbid, horrible imagery and injustices and y’know that sort of, trying to make sense of the world? And so, I did a lot of work to try and navigate how I felt about things like that.

Y’know, and then here I am freaking out about trying to make dinner when I get home from work, but um. I don’t know, if he wants to go there then, to me, that––it’s not scary, it’s like–“oh, so we’re gonna go there, huh?” It feels like, this could get interesting. I don’t know, I don’t find it, um, I guess I don’t find it alarming or anything like that.

music: “Dusk Accelerator” | Gathered Tones

Hadron Collider let me down. I could’ve used a black hole right now to turn everything inside out.

Keith: Even as like a teen, y’know, any sort of like crazy thing that could happen, I welcomed it, be it war or whatever, ‘cause it just seemed like it would shake up everything that seemed boring to me. 

And then you go through this phase of thinking that you understand everything, that you know what’s going on and then I feel like you, as you get older, you just sort of realize that everything is grey area and all these sort of different lives and different experiences, can totally exist at the same time and have their own reasons for doing things and then you’re just, not sure how you fit into all of it, you just try to be at peace with whatever it is and do what you feel is right. 

It’s a lot of weird shifts between like sixteen and twenty-six? Or something, I don’t really know. Probably never ends, huh?

music:  “Houseplants” | Gathered Tones

And so I ended in the place that I started. Only now, when I lay on my back and listen to Gathered Tones, I no longer envy the people in the music.

Because I’ve always been just like them. I spent a long time trying to make it sound bigger than that, hoping that if I just made this story perfect, it would be something undeniable, groundbreaking. I’d be launched into a successful career making radio, and Keith and Linda would start making money for their art, and everything would just be great…

But finishing meant confronting the possibility that no one gives a shit. It’s a possibility that Keith and Linda had already confronted with their own work and they’ve accepted it. It didn’t change how they treat their output or the pace with which they do it––and the result is somehow more true to them and their relationship and their effect it had on their world.

I’m starting to see where I fit in, and where this piece floats in the vast sea of information. Because whenever I spent hours writing and rewriting, worried that it wasn’t smart enough for some imagined audience, I couldn’t finish it.

But if I stop trying to explain the connection and just play the music, I think you’ll understand me just fine.

I can figure out how to sell the next set of stories. This one is just for me.

I can’t save the trees from power line protectors, or fix all the stray cats on my street. I can’t orchestrate all the kids with bottle rockets, but I can’t help wishing that I could. 

So I push my worries deep in this arm chair. Where change slips and spills down, or my keys are somewhere. Put a record on and consider the houseplants. How they toiled on, despite my negligence.

I laid the Trouble Books story aside for a few months, unsure of what to do next. It was spring time in Pennsylvania, I had a girlfriend to visit. I found the rhythm of being a suburban boy helpful, at least for while.

When summer returned, as I got ready to pick it back up again and I checked the Bark and Hiss website. The “Trouble Books” page had been changed to an epigraph: “2008 to 2013.”

Linda: Keith just said, y’know, “I kind of want to just do something different and, I don’t want it to be Trouble Books, and I pretty much just said, “yeah, I think, I think, I’m there too.”

A new project appeared, bearing their last names: “Lejsovka & Freund.”

music: “Ah Shit, My Heart Is Full” | Mold on Canvas

Linda: It wasn’t anything real dramatic. We did talk about it though, because it’s important...For me, it would feel kind of sad to maintain what we were doing with Trouble Books when that’s not how we’re living right now, and that’s not…almost like trying to fit into old clothes, you know what I mean?

Keith: I’d actually say that, with every single time we were recording a record, I always felt like it was the last one. Like even when we were doing CD-Rs, before we did the set of what I consider “canon,” if I can use such a pretentious word I guess. But I was always begging my equipment, “don’t die, I just want to finish this one thing and it’ll be the last thing we do and then it’ll be done.” Because I always kind of assumed that, whatever our next record would be, it would be the one where, nobody would really care, y’know, and then I’d have a couple boxes of records leftover and then I’d say like, “alright, y’know, this is probably it.”

But this time, we had new ideas and they just felt like they were something different. And I felt a sense of closure with the entire project. I felt, not quite yet, I think it’s too fresh, but I felt like there would be a time where I could listen, front-to-back, probably not without falling asleep, but from the beginning of United Colors to the end of Love at Dusk and feel like that was a, like, “thing.” Y’know?

Their new endeavor, which Keith calls DIY shitty classical, is more minimal, sparse. But between the lines I an still hear the simplicity thrum: Keith putting on a load of laundry as Linda practices piano in the living room and another Saturday afternoon turdns to evening.

Credits

Keith Freund and Linda Lejsovka, still live in Akron. Their second record as Lejsovka & Freund, Fatal Strategies, is available digitally at lejsovkaandfreund.bandcamp.com. Their website, where you can find the entire Trouble Books catalog, is barkandhiss.com.

Our show was produced today by myself, Brendan Mattox, with editing suggestions from Patrick Stocks, Michelle Ciccarelli, and approved by Kyna Doles. Our driver and companion for this story was Anthony Ricco much to his mother’s displeasure.

Our website is investigating regional scenes dot org, where you can find this and more stories about music. All songs in this episode were written by Keith and Linda; except for Pteradon Nocturne, Two Moons, by Keith Freund and Jacob Feige. You can find a list of those songs and links at our website, investigating regional scenes dot org.

Thank you to Keith, Linda, Jacob, and Dave, and to Michaela, for her patience.

I’m Brendan Mattox, back soon with another story about music.

Promo

Next time on Stories About Music...

Tyler: And then one day I said, “let’s crash a wedding” so we called up all the major hotels in Boston and asked what time the reception was that night. and I think this was around the time, my birthday was either coming up or just had passed, and I watched the film The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky, and there’s a line in The Holy Mountain where it’s like, “we know that people prefer to be loved by how they appear to be and now they are, so we provide the masks.” And I was like, This is Facebook! This is that bullshit! So I deleted my Facebook and shaved my head shortly thereafter, and I was explaining to Lorena on the night of our big like, wedding date, you know what, I’m shaving my head because…y’know, I see pretty girls, and I smile at them, and they smile back some times. But like I don’t want to worry about that stuff anymore.

My friend Tyler, in the next story about music.

[investigatingregionalscenes]

story about music #4

In the summer of 2013, I was on the edge of moving back to Pennsylvania. In a last ditch effort to be a real journalist, I drove out to Akron to find the couple whose album kept me company on a lonely night in July.

Once there, I started to question everything from my ambitions as a journalist to the happiness Keith and Linda had found in Ohio.

music

many of the tracks found here are available on Spotify/iTunes.

00:00 “Houseplants” from Gathered Tones

03:22 “Night of the Pelican Street Sweeper” from United Colors

05:12 “Hedgehog” from Endless Pool

07:06 “Shaky Science” from United Colors

09:13 “Endless Pool” from Endless Pool

11:09 “Past the New Parking Deck” from Gathered Tones

13:55 “From Colfax Place” from Gathered Tones

15:40 “Floating Through Summer” from Trouble Books & Mark McGuire

19:25 “Lurk Underneath” from Concatenating Fields

22:22 “Live Intro/Stacking Spheres”

27:53 “Unfolded” from Love At Dusk

transcript

music: “Houseplants”

Everything you’re about to hear started one night in mid-summer, shortly after I graduated from college.

The events are separated in memory, but it was most likely the same evening my girlfriend accepted a job in New Hampshire. I already knew that I couldn’t be able to put my journalism degree to good use in Boston, so I went back to my apartment that night fully aware I would soon move back to the Philadelphia suburbs.

I like to listen to music when I have a rough day, and my chosen record that night had this one part, on last two tracks, that just cut through me.

Houseplants I can’t save the trees from power line protectors, or fix all the stray cats on my street. I can’t orchestrate all the kids with bottle rockets, but I can’t help wishing that I could.

I listened to the album six times that night. I’m not even really know where the record came from, like it was just sitting there on my iPod, like, waiting for me to hear it. It felt so rare and personal, so true to the moment I was living in, and––because I had little else to look forward to––I wanted to figure out where it came from.

You’re listening to Stories About Music, a podcast on the subjects of music, journalism, and memoir, and how the line between those three things is often not as clear as I’d hoped.

My name is Brendan Mattox, and this is story about music number four, A Story About the Trouble Books.


Brendan: Why Pearl Harbor? Keith: Oh I don’t know, I just thought it was funny I guess. Brendan: The cat doesn’t look amused. Keith: (laughs) no, she never does.

I’m sitting in Keith Freund’s living room, somewhere in Akron’s Highland Square neighborhood. It’s a beautiful room, a rectangular space with a small greenhouse at one end and a porch at the other, overlooking a wooded backyard. It’s August, and the 17-year cicadas are at their peak.

The room itself is sparsely decorated, with paintings by friends and half-full bookshelves––not in a “minimalist” way, but suggesting that its new owners are taking their time to fill it. Keith sits on a couch that’s covered in patches, quick fixes to the spots that his cats Iffy and Pearl Harbor have torn away. His wife and collaborator Linda Lesjovka joins us after putting their nine month-old daughter down for a nap.

Keith and Linda are more publicly known, though not by much, as the band Trouble Books.

music: “Night of the Pelican Street Sweeper”

Brendan: So, ahm...what’s a good place to start. How’d you guys meet? Keith: We met, through friends...at a house show a few blocks from here. Brendan: And was the attraction immediate? Keith: No. (laughter) No, I was out of my mind at that house show.

For the better part of the last decade, Linda and Keith have been making some very unique music in the time outside of their day jobs.

Brendan: And what were your first impressions of him? Linda: Well at the party, on his birthday, I thought he was nuts.I actually thought he was on something (laughter), and um...I don’t know, but I liked him. And he used to come over and hang out with me and at the time, I felt I was like in the crisis mode, where I felt like “I just wanna be alone! I’m gonna be alone for the rest of my life!” 

And it was kind of this weird, ongoing, he’d come over, I’d do something with him and have a great time, but then, each time I would tell my roommate, “I don’t know, I don’t feel like doing anything, I don’t feel like hanging out. And then eventually...um, I ended up going on this bike trip with a friend of mine...”

music: “Hedgehog”

Keith: I didn’t really know a lot of people while I was in college, and then right as I graduated from my undergrad program, I met one or two people through the record store, and then sort of met this entire, huge group, and Linda was part of that. I was just working like fifteen or twenty hours a week. She would go from one job to another. She would go away and travel for a while and come back...so we both had a lot of time and we just kind of like, sit around and hang out...

Keith got to know Linda because she was a frequent flier at Square Records, the neighborhood music store.

At the time, Akron was her home base while she looked for other places to live.

Keith had settled there after graduating from the local university–he’s four years younger–and began recording music as the Trouble Books, inviting anyone and everyone he knew to play along. Soon after Linda moved into the same art-house as him, he convinced her to join.

Linda: I feel like it started when Keith wanted to go on a tour and I was available, I wasn’t really working full time or anything, and Keith was like, (excited, hopeful) “Would you go with me? I can teach you the songs on the road!” And for some weird reason I went with him, which is really strange because I didn’t even sing in the car. I didn’t even do that because I felt like I had a terrible, weird voice and everything....I was really self-conscious, and then when he asked me, for some odd reason I went.

Keith: We had a pretty disastrous U.S., like, little tour. It was four of us in my station wagon, um, and we showed up for one show in Burlington, Vermont. Nobody’s there, we play and the guy who booked it, he’s like, “Oh, where’s your next show?” And our friend Mike was like, “Oh it’s in Philadelphia, we’re not sure if we should just drive through the night to get there,” like hinting, like waiting for a “no or, you could stay with us.” But the guy just says, “yeah, I’d do that.” So we drove all night, slept in our car at like a Dunkin’ Donuts, somewhere.

music: “Shaky Science”

Linda: The first show that we were going to play was in Rochester, and it was me and Keith and Mike, and I got really nervous and I asked Keith if he would practice out in the car with me. I think we were at somebodies’ dorm or something, we sat out in the car and it was February and freezing, and he just played a little mini-acoustic guitar and went over the songs with me, aaand...I don’t know, I think it was then that I sort of felt like, yeah I could be with Keith for a long time.

Linda doesn’t have much of a musical background. She started out playing drums, followed by bass, before finding a home on the keyboard in their early days.

Their first album, The United Colors of Trouble Books, came out on the Luxembourgish label OWN records. Domestic distribution was, and has always been, handled by through their personal imprint, Bark & Hiss.

Shortly thereafter most of the collaborators moved on to other projects and Trouble Books became the duo it’s been ever since.

The music changed too, losing some of its ramshackle indie pop flair just as that sound went mainstream. 
And while their early music was hardly frenetic, their new sound was even more patient.

music: “Endless Pool”

Keith: our records are us working the songs out as we record them, and writing them as we record them. Y’know Linda approaches it much more feeling wise and she just feels a part out, writes it down, records it and that’s it. we don’t have practice night twice a week, ever. Because of that it’s really like the record is the final product. It’s strange to me that that seems to catch people off guard, still. It’s like...you don’t force a painter to like, go up onstage and paint for you. Brendan: You’ve never seen anyone live painting before? Keith: Yeah, I have, and it’s terrible

“Then I wake up startling the cat, I hear your car pull in, and my life’s last wish is that we all die at the same time.”

Keith: Yeah, ah it sounds pretentious to compare ourselves to a painter or something, “serious artists.”

Let’s dwell on that comparison for a few minutes though, because it’s actually a good one.

Keith and Linda don’t make songs so much as landscapes. Their second album, Gathered Tones, was the one that had caught my ear several weeks earlier,with its description of a day in their life.

music: “Past the New Parking Deck” “Finally sunlight and caffeine cut through the clouds, my morning slowly sputters and gets off the ground to the sound of “Diggin’ On You.”

Keith: It’s been interesting when, um, I hear people talking about our stuff and they’ll describe it as really banal lyrics or like “they aren’t saying anything.” Which I think is sort of funny, like the idea...there’s a lot of work that goes into them and the idea is like, sort of, expressing the simplicity of yknow...yknow...gardening or doing the dishes or whatever it is Linda: Kind of like little snapshots. Keith: Yeah.

“And I stay under the blooming dogwood trees, ‘cause they’re selling crack out on Crosby Street, and you’re stuck in at work. Should I pull the fire alarm or call in a bomb threat? Meet me behind the loading dock for a quick kiss and a sandwich.”

I loved these snapshots because they captured some sense of inner peace that I lack. I have this desperate fear that I’m never going to stand out in the vast sea of information. Which is probably a side effect of my chosen career as a journalist.

My world feels totally foreign to the one in Gathered Tones. As though Keith Freund and Linda Lejsovka had found some enlightenment that the life I was pursuing could never hope to match.

But at the same time, I saw a chance to exploit something. In my eyes, succeeding in journalism has always been tied to this burning need for recognition, to bring home the story no one else could.

Trouble Books felt like just such a story, in that they weren’t trying so hard to be different.

My first email  had about as much professionalism as I could cram in.

Brendan: Dear Keith and Linda, My name is Brendan, and I would like to produce a radio story about the two of you and your music. You don't posture or overreach by trying to tackle "big" questions; your music is intimate, mundane, and powerful, as if the listener is sitting at your dinner table. I would like to do a thorough profile about you both as a couple and individuals.

In the past, I'm aware, you prefer to keep a low profile, so I would do my best not to disturb your privacy. My hope is to pull back the curtain, only briefly, on two artists whose world seems to be contentedly small.

Sincerely, Brendan Mattox

music: “From Colfax Place”

The very next day, Keith sent me a one sentence reply: “Sounds cool to us.”

Before I set out for Ohio, they directed me to their cover artist and friend Jacob Feige, a painter living outside Philadelphia. They’ve known him for about a decade.

Jacob: I’m pretty sure, I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that I met Keith and Linda at,um, at the house where my wife was living at the time in Kent, Ohio.

Jacob’s work adorns every Trouble Books record starting with Gathered Tones.

Brendan: Which painting was that? Jacob: That is a painting, well I’ll describe it– It’s a snowy mountain peak in Colorado, um, with various kinds of geometric forms and blobs invading it, for lack of a better term heh, when Keith asked me to use that, that was the first time we’d really worked together in any way

Keith: I’d actually known that he was a painter for a couple of years before I actually saw his work. And then finally I got a chance to see it and it was just this thing I was totally into. And I thought fit what Linda and I are doing.

Jacob: There’s a literal representation of space in my paintings, I paint landscapes for the most part but then I deliberately try and pull away from that by layering these things that pretty flat. Some of them sit in the space of the viewer you could say, they’re right on the surface of the painting so they break down that illusion of space. 

Definitely the Trouble Books do that with the way they’re creating different kinds of textures and difference, um, difference in implied space y’know, you can do that with, probably the most straightforward way is to do that with reverb but they do it in a lot of complex ways that I don’t even understand, um, but then it goes back to a recognizable time signature, even back to pop. So in a way you could say that the representation in my work is like the pop in their work, it’s an established genre and it’s–it’s something to push up against. And you play this game with how far you move away from it.

To break that down, both Jacob and Trouble Books create a real more lifelike, exciting new world by combining familiar idea with abstractions.

After Gathered Tones, Keith and Linda kept coming back to modern art as a recurring touchstone, recording a collaborative, self-titled record with cosmic guitarist Mark McGuire.

That record, released in 2011, split the difference between where Keith and Linda came from and where they were headed: beginning with sweetly obtuse pop songs that, by the second side, are swallowed in the squall of ambient electronics.

The lyrics remain bright, beautiful and modest.

Well I know that I should mind this light, this heat, save the surplus in empty silos September-February. The sun is bludgeoning the blacktop, and it seems to be rippling––so unless you’re more determined than me, let’s just stay in this shade and sleep.

music: Floating Through Summer

The next year, alone again, the duo released their third album, Concatenating Fields.

That record stands at the other side of the divide, almost purely synthesized and influenced by minimalist painters as well as the art-school textbook Interaction of Color.

They insist that it’s not super conceptual.

Keith: Y’know, like, Linda will be working and I’ll give her an idea based on colors of what I’m thinking it needs...and she’ll usually completely understand that, somehow. Linda: yeah and it’s hard to put into words, your question makes me think of like, that trip that we took to...shoot...The Rothko exhibit. Keith: at Tate modern, Linda: yeah, that was at the Tate modern, that’s where it was. But um, he had an exhibition there that was just one room, and I felt really, kind of overwhelmed emotionally and I thought, oh well I’m just, y’know, that way or something...and that when we were leaving, Keith was a all, um, sort of a little teary-eyed and we both kind of had the same reaction.

music: Lurk Underneath

Jacob: Keith worked at the Akron art museum and, um specifically he started to get into 20th century abstract painting, he got into op-art, in particular, there’s a painter...his name is Julian Stanczak, took me a second there, he’s originally from eastern Europe. Makes this really meticulous geometric abstract paintings, Keith got really into those, and in a way they’ve got a rhythm to them, they’re a lot like music.

Look out the window into the constant night that surrounds me, descending slowly.

Keith: yeah Julian Stanczak is this, he actually lives outside of Cleveland, and I got to meet him a few times through working at the art museum and Linda’s gone to some of his lectures and stuff...his house is like...when I went the first time, it was just like this fantasy of like how I wanted life to be. Y’know, I guess like some people imagine themselves as like as like this famous New York person or y’know, cool, LA thing or whatever...but he’s this guy living outside of Cleveland in this split-level house that is just, like, filled with art that him and his wife make, with like, cat doors cut into the door. And they just seemed, like, content and happy, and  it was just like this...oh this is...Paradise.

The irony of Keith’s monologue was not lost on me, sitting in his brilliant, modernist home on a secluded acre. Because while I have pictured myself as a famous New York person, (Ira Glass, for instance) part of my experience of the Trouble Books had been imagining myself with their life: reunited with my girlfriend, living in a quiet place, with cats, synthesizers, and a small art project that made me feel content.

We wrapped our first interview and had dinner, a record spinning in the background. Keith gossiped about the break up of a friend’s band, Linda talked about her new job as a rehab counselor. Afterwards, Keith’s parents picked up their daughter and my companion and I left them alone to prepare for their first live show since two-thousand-twelve.

The venue, Musica, was packed. Tonight’s show celebrated the tenth anniversary of the neighborhood music store where Linda and Keith met, Square Records.

Keith: Hello? We’re going to play for fifteen minutes. Audience Member: Play for twenty! Keith: We don’t have twenty minutes, we have fifteen. (audible displeasure) Keith: Dave...Dave told us we were only allowed to play for fifteen minutes. (boos) Keith: Just kidding, he’s a nice guy. He yelled at me when I told him it was going to be ten minutes, actually, so, so we’re gonna play. Thank you.

The decision to sandwich Trouble Books’ more delicate synthesizer music between two super loud and sloppy indie rock bands felt kind of weird, as though even amongst their friends, in the outsider city of Akron, they were still just a little bit different.

Before his set, Keith introduced me to their friends Charlie and Katie.

Brendan: So, Charlie, when I was talking to Keith, um, setting up all the interviews and stuff, I asked, like, people who I could talk to. Keith said you might be interesting to talk to because you feel they may not have gone as far as they could’ve with the Trouble Books. Katie: (distant) what?? Brendan: Is that, uh...? Charlie: Oh I don’t know about that. Um, I’m gonna guess that that is rooted in...several times I’ve kind of suggested like, “hey, why don’t we print up a run of t-shirts for your tour,” or, “why don’t you let me design some sort of, yknow, not middle-school html website for you to sell your records on.” And he’s just always kind of maintained like, ‘ah no, I just want to do it myself.’ Katie: (in background) he’s not a businessman... Charlie: Right, exactly, he’s not a businessman. But um...That being said, I definitely like them more than most Akron bands. I also...(laughter) Brendan: What do you guys think sets them apart from most Akron band? (long silence) Charlie: I don’t know, I’ve got to think about that...they definitely take a different approach. And they...tonight was the first show they played in over a year. They don’t particularly care about trying to become famous. I think a lot of Akron bands try to piggy back off the idea of, “the Black Keys from here, they’re from Akron, they just started out in a basement, we can be big like they can be! And Keith just, I mean, Keith and Linda definitely don’t, they’re not interested in that. They’re not interested in something like that. Brendan: Why do you think they aren’t interested in that? Katie: I don’t know, I think a lot of that is, bullshit? Charlie: (in background) Can you say that? Can we say that? Brendan: I don’t care, sure, why not? Katie: I don’t know, who cares about any of that stuff? Y’know, it’s not real life, no one cares.

Keith: You know, we don’t like being on stage, um, I don’t really want to travel all that much and do that. If we sell like five hundred records or five thousand, it doesn’t really make any difference. You’re not gonna get health insurance via selling, even, ten thousand records.

“Stacking spheres is for young hearts, I’m too tired now honestly”

They hiccuped once or twice but couldn’t have cared less about whether or not anyone paid attention. Even onstage, Charlie pointed out, they focused on the other. Again, their friend and cover artist Jacob Feige.

Jacob: You know, Keith has kind of a modesty and humility. and an even-keeled nature to him that I think is admirable. He also doesn’t have, like, really high expectations for his art but he still strives to make it better or more particular...he’s invested in it without thinking like, I’m doing this because it’s my ticket to some fame or ambition. And I think that’s really hard to do. I think most artists in a variety of media, you have your sights set on some sort of credit for things, acknowledgement as one of your motivating, uh, forces, and I don’t think that really is one of Keith’s primary motivating forces.

They were everything that their music had indicated they would be.

And until now I’d felt satisfied with proving that thesis, but I was suddenly disappointed. A good story, I’ve been told over and over and over, hinges on characters changing over time through conflict.

And yet here in Akron were these two people, without any sort of tension or anxiety, making the most sublime, unique music I’d ever heard. Had they ever wanted to be anything more?

Or was it wrong that I wanted them to be?

I was lost in these thoughts, watching them play,  when my companion tapped me on the shoulder.

He whispered my ear: “I think we might be watching their last show.”

Keith: Thank you, that’s all for us... Linda: Thank you! Keith: Thanks so much to Dave & Juniper! Linda: Yeah!

[investigatingregionalscenes]

story about music #3

In pursuit of an interview about Dirty Beaches, I send a friend to Alex Zhang Hungtai’s apartment in Los Angeles, and end up learning as much about her as I do about him.

links

Alex Zhang Hungtai’s discography as Dirty Beaches and his new project, Last Lizard

Lorena Alvarado’s website.

(correction: In the credits, we listed Alex’s soundcloud page as “Last Lizard 808″ it is actually just “Last Lizard”)

music

00:05 “Displaced” by Dirty Beaches from Stateless 

02:00 “True Blue” from Badlands 

06:19 “Horses” from Badlands 

07:49 “Sweet 17″ from Badlands 

11:40 “Lord Knows Best” from Badlands 

14:00 “Casino Lisboa” from Drifters/Love Is the Devil 

15:09 “Au Revoir, Mon Visage” from Drifters/Love Is the Devil 

16:17 “Alone at the Danube” from Drifters/Love Is the Devil 

18:17 “Mirage Hall” from Drifters/Love Is the Devil 

21:30 “Time Washes Everything Away” from Stateless 

24:19 “Pacific Ocean” from Stateless 

26:45 “Ciao, Beñi” by Alone (Lorena Alvarado) from Las Villas

33:00 “Time Washes Everything Away”

38:00 “Night of the Assassins” by Les Rallizes Desnudes, from ‘77 Live (sampled for the Dirty Beaches song “Hundred Highways”) 

Or listen to all songs as a YouTube playlist.

(above: Alex, photo shamelessly stolen and uncredited. Below, Lorena, no details provided).

transcript

music: “Displaced” | Stateless

Brendan: I guess start at the beginning, where were you born? Where have you been, in your life? 

Alex: It’s quite a long list, so I’ll just name the cities, so we can just go over it fast: I was born in Taipei, Taiwan. My family relocated to Etobicoke, Ontario, which is like a suburb of Toronto. After that I was briefly in Queens, New York, and then Honolulu, Hawaii for ten years. San Francisco for a brief period of time. Shanghai, I was working as a real estate agent there, then Montreal, Canada and then Vancouver, Canada. Uh, Berlin for a year, Lisbon, for a year and now I’m in LA.

Alex Zhung Hungati has been drifting for a long time.

Brendan: and how’s that life been? Alex: I mean as an adult now, I appreciate that, but obviously when you’re a kid it’s just like, the most horrible thing that can happen to you, it’s being kicked around like a ball, y’know. Brendan: What was the reasons, why was your family moving so often? Alex: It was just, like, family dramas. So, I had to be placed and looked after by my uncle or my cousin or my aunt, and so forth. So you get the drift, I don’t need to go into details.

He’s a man of few words.

For nine years, Alex created a soundtrack for the life of the lonely wanderer under the name Dirty Beaches. Until late last fall when he announced, abruptly, that Dirty Beaches would release its last album.

nat sound: tape deck click, shuffling, etc.

music: “True Blue” | Badlands

Afterwards Alex packed up his gear, got on a plane, and moved to Los Angeles.

Alex: I dunno, it was really weird because I haven’t put my name down on a lease for, like, over five years now. Brendan: Did that make it harder to find a place to live? Alex: Definitely, ‘cause I alway had to print out my bank statement. ’Cause they’re always like, what do you do for a living? And I’m like, “oh, self-employed musician” and they’re like, “mmmmmmmmm.”

I happen to know some people out there, and one of them is a premier sound recordist.

Lorena: So I’m–– my name is Lorena Alvarado and I, I guess I’d consider myself an artist.

In radio, a tape synch is where each person is recorded separately while talking on the phone. Being a low-budget production, Stories About Music has had to rely on these for the past few episodes. Being a no-budget production, we’ve also had to rely on musicians who know how to mic themselves. But not this time. My name is Brendan Mattox and you’re listening to Stories About Music, a new podcast on the subjects of music, journalism and memoir, and how the line between those three things is often not as clear as I’d hoped. I met Lorena in college. She studied film.

Lorena: I’m from Venezuela, I grew up in Caracas. I lived there until I was 18 and then I went to school in Boston.

Things weren’t, and aren’t, great in Caracas right now.

Lorena: the economy is on the floor, there’s a lot of violence and insecurity, so really anyone could get murdered or kidnapped or mugged. And it’s just sort of permeated to overall, like, even if you’re not involved in politics, everyone is affected by it.

But she can’t stay in Los Angeles much longer, either. The U.S. government has been especially tight in issuing the H1-B specialized worker visa to graduated international students. Last year, the number of approved editors for film and video? Six, according to the Foreign Labor Certification Data Center. Since moving out there, Lorena has been studying graphic design at UCLA.

Lorena: Right now since I’m a student, I’m good until my program ends. But then I either have to find a job that will sponsor me, which is pretty difficult, or, there’s a couple of other visa options but...it’s not the easiest thing.

And it was at this moment that I asked her to do me a favor.

So no matter the weather, wherever you are, sit back and follow us on a journey that begins in the eternal summer of Los Angeles.

This is story about music number three, “Alex & Lorena.”

music: “True Blue” | Badlands

...and if I have a chance, I’ll never let you go...and doll, if you haven’t called back, I’m beggin’ you, please...

Alex

I sent Lorena to meet Alex Hungtai at his apartment in El Sereño, on a hill at the eastern edge of LA.

Lorena: Actually, the first thing that I thought was that it looked like Caracas. Caracas is all valleys, so the houses are in between the hillsides...and immediately as I was driving towards the house I had this image or deja vu of being back home.

He invited her up to the patio, where they could sit in the sun, and from where they could see the skyscrapers downtown.

Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, I sat in the little office next to my bedroom, watching the wind shake the trees outside in the late winter sunlight, and wondering, what the hell was taking so long.

Lorena: We actually talked a lot about what a lot of his work is about, which is feeling torn between two places and two cultures, and not feeling like you belong anywhere and fractured identity. Brendan: Did you guys just jump right into that after you got there? Like, “hey, I’m Alex. would you like some coffee? So how about the diaspora?” Lorena: Well no we didn’t jump into it! We sort of like, introduced each other and talked about L.A. and the sunshine and how nice it was, and him telling me that winter in Berlin horrible and...that transitioned into me telling him where I was from…and, I guess that naturally transitioned into that conversation...it was pretty quick.

music: “Horses” | Badlands

Alex’s life since 2011 has been one long tour. And in a way, his life before that was one long tour as well. At the very least, it’s a far cry from the geographically static childhoods Lorena and I had.

Brendan: If you could’ve had that kind of life, do you think you would have preferred it? Alex: Nah, that’s a very good question, actually. Like, obviously I’m really really envious of people who have these claims to, y’know, where they’re from. Like, I meet some people and they’ll be like. “Yo! Detroit, born and raised!” And I don’t have that. (laughs) Y’know? I don’t have that.

And I can’t stress enough the difference that exclusive club makes on the psyche. Our families came from the countries where we grew up, lived in the same metro area for the majority of our young years, where everyone else was a long time citizen. In a word, we belonged.

Alex grew up around North American, usually in neighborhoods filled with first and second-generation kids like himself.

Alex: There’s a lot of people I’ve met, growing up, we all have the same problem, it’s like....you were born, let’s say, point B, and your parents which are from point A, keep telling you, no, you’re from point A. Point A is your motherland. This who you are, this is who you’re supposed to be. And when you actually go back to Point A, and all these people are telling you, like, no, you’re not one of us, you’re from point B. That creates a weird, shocking reality, y’know?

Alex has played music since he was a teenager, but the events that set him on a collision course with Lorena and I begin in his early twenties, after he dropped out of college in Hawaii to be a full time musician. His visa expired. He ended up homeless in Vancouver for a couple months and finally, he gave up, and called for help. His parents had settled in Shanghai, so he moved there to be with them. He took a job in real estate.

music: “Sweet 17” | Badlands

He didn’t last very long. Within a year, Alex had quit his job and moved to Montreal to make music.

Brendan: Has it been easy to live off music? Alex: It feels great now. It’s a lot of hard work, and it was a lot of hard work for ten years before all this. Like, working in a restaurant or doing minimum wage jobs, and everyone is younger than you at, like, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29...and then hitting thirty and all your coworkers are nineteen or twenty-one, y’know. It’s not a good feeling and You go on tour and you don’t make any money, instead you max out your credit card, come back home minus $250 bucks or something. A lot of times you ask yourself, “why am I doing this?” Brendan: What was your answer, when you’d ask yourself that? Alex: It’s the only thing I know how to do, it’s the only thing I love doing. I made more money working in real estate, but I was suicidal every day.

I’m gonna make a ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-move...Sweet 17. Sweet 17. SWEET 17

He had a slow build up to his first full record. And while it’s difficult to characterize the early work as this or that, one thing that it all had in common is that sounds haunted, coated with that analogue sheen that old recordings have.

There are a lot of reference points, if that’s your thing. Proto-punk electronic music like Suicide or some of the No Wave bands from 70s New York. But it also reminds me of the rock music that came out of Asian countries in the middle of last century.

This was back when the U.S. cultural hegemony was alive and well. After rock’n’roll conquered the world, its icons and its style left a huge impression on Japan, Taiwan, China, Pre-Khmer Cambodia, and Indonesia.

Alex’s first album as Dirty Beaches, Badlands, sounds like a close cousin to those recordings, a document of the tensions between that history and his own.

Dirty Beaches

Alex: Being a North American kid and Asian, you only see Asian characters playing, like, people who work at grocery stores, or laundromats, or, like, Kung Fu dudes. Hired as a comic relief, y’know, making fun of yourself in Hollywood movies.

As teenager, Alex fell in love with the films of Wong Kar-Wai, the Hong Kong auteur who makes films outlaws, drifters, and people at the edges of “polite” society.

Alex: I came across Wong Kar-Wai and there was all these people that look like me, longing for a place or moving to a place, and they’re like, smoking, and they actually look fucking cool. They’re not like derogatory caricatures, y’know?

You can see that vision reflected on the cover of Badlands. Alex looks like a Dion from hell in a plaid shirt, his hair-slicked back, his face distorted by cigarette smoke. It would be easy, as an outsider, to chalk all that up to aesthetics or a simple matter of taste.

music: “Lord Knows Best” | Badlands

Alex: It’s a lot more complicated than most people think. It’s not really an academic thing, but it’s more like a personal, emotional choice? In a way, that’s my way of trying to reach out to my dad.

A lifetime ago, before Alex’s father settled down, and took his own job in real estate, he sang lead in a Doo Wop cover band.

Alex: He looked like that in his teens. But he hated the experimental music that I did. He just knows that I’m not going to be able to support myself doing this. Living this life.

They’ve had a strained relationship, at times, at least partially over Alex’s career choices.

Alex: To prove him wrong, like, I made music that he could understand, like,  this oldies, fifty rockabilly stuff that he loved when he was a kid. So I was basically playing my dad and touring as my dad. Y’know, fulfilling something that he couldn’t achieve when he was a kid.

But you know well that I don’t give a damn about anything but you.

Alex: And then after that I got lucky, y’know? Like the album got some attention and I quit my day job, and it was that album, y’know, that album where I tried to reach out to my father that helped me get to this place.

But during interviews, obviously, this is a really boring thing to talk about, y’know, when they’re like, (white person voice) “who are you Dirty Beaches? Tell us more about yourself.” And I don’t want to go into a twenty-minute mental breakdown about me trying to reconnect with my dad.

Brendan: It’s not something that I guess is easy to relive over and over as you go from place to place as you meet...journalists.

Alex: Yeah, and I don’t want to tell that story every time people ask me that, y’know. Now I have some distance from it, it’s been three or four years, that I feel like it’s ok to talk about it now.

Brendan: Did retelling that story change your relationship to it?

Alex: What do you mean by that?

Brendan: Did you start to see your own history in a different light, just by the virtue of having to repeat it? Like did you, did you feel distanced from it? 

Alex: Oh yeah, definitely. No, I feel very far from it. As I’m saying it, I see the words coming out of my mouth.

music: “Casino Lisboa” | Drifters/Love is the Devil

I won’t call Badlands a hit, but it was modestly successful. Alex pulled in high praise from the internet zines, think pieces that dwelled on the timeliness of his aesthetic but not necessarily the personal struggle beneath it.

For Alex the success just gave him more opportunities to travel.

Alex: I think for me, touring is having the opportunity to go places you never imagined you could go, y’know? Three years ago, it was Europe.

Extensive, short-stay touring, for those who’ve never done it. Is both the greatest and worst thing imaginable. On the one hand, you’re exposed to an overwhelming amount of new people and ideas, which can be very stimulating, as it was for Alex.

But when you’re on the road  for months on end, playing a character who is an amalgamation of yourself, your father, and the movies you love, not quite real and yet also not fake––

Alex: I think it’s important to know the danger of playing with identities. In that process, you could really easily lose yourself, and I did that during the release of Badlands and the construction of that character.

Drifters/Love Is The Devil

By the winter of 2012, Alex had reached the end of his time in Canada. A relationship had fallen apart, he’d never really learned enough French to get along in Quebec––there were a lot of reasons, but they don’t matter so much as what the double-album they resulted in.

There’s a beautiful progression within the eight songs that compose the first part, Drifters. Alex begins with that cracked, sinister rockabilly he made his name on but as the songs drift, there are fewer and fewer lyrics, until Alex sings in foreign languages, before he goes silent altogether.

music: “Alone at the Danube River” | Drifters/Love Is the Devil

He relocated to Berlin before finishing part two, a set of eight more instrumentals titled Love is the Devil. Quickly thereafter, he has said, he lost himself completely in the eternal nightlife of Berlin.

Alex: That kind of hedonistic lifestyle takes its toll on you. This German friend of mine put it best when, we’re at a club, it’s like, 10 am, and he just puts his hand on my shoulder and he looks at me and he says:

“Alex, the freedom here is nice, yah? But it’s not to be abused.” And he smiled at me.

Drifters/Love Is the Devil landed at the end of the spring in 2013, to higher praise than Badlands. I missed out on it. That period of my life felt totally out of my control as I tried to figure out where I would go in the summer after graduation.


I discovered in the fall of 2014, long after everything had been settled and I’d moved back to Pennsylvania. I’ve always had a thing for records that exceed the 70-minute-mark, and I fell in love with that album, especially the drawn out selections like “Alone at the Danube” or the knocking, creeping “Au Revoir Mon Visage.”

Drifters/Love Is The Devil appeals to that part of me that feels displaced, that longs for the attendant darkness of old city streets. As I do, I wanted to talk to him about these things. I tried to get a conversation going as winter arrived. But Alex isn’t the type of guy to worry too much about responding to an email or having an internet connection.

By the end of February, I’d pretty much forgotten the whole thing as I slipped into my fourth Blue Period, listening to slowcore records almost exclusively.

But then...I took the long route home from Philadelphia one night.

music: “Mirage Hall” | Drifters/Love is the Devil

Driving home from a friends’ apartment, one of the high-rises in the “heart” of the city, I made an impromptu left onto Twelfth and followed it down through the Gayborhood.

In high school I used to love hanging around the city. It felt like it belonged to me, and me to it. But since I moved home from Boston two years ago, I’ve realized that Philadelphia is much bigger than I remember it.

My drive took me past beautiful, gentrified brownstones and green little squares, into South Philadelphia, where the scenery gives way to squat, dark row-houses; ones that have been in the same Italian families for decades.

Twelfth bottoms out on Oregon Avenue. The buildings here get more industrial, more run-down, as you skirt the city limits toward the Auto Mall: a stretch of dealerships, junkyards, and strip clubs along a vast, marshy field. In the distance, oil refineries burn through the night.

This is the true heart of Philadelphia, the dirty part. The part that reminds me that, just because my family has lived in the neighborhood for four generations, doesn’t mean that I belong here any more than the kids who drag race and go caterwauling into lane dividers on cold nights.

I was listening Drifters/Love Is The Devil: it reflects that boulevard, and these moods I get into, where I just want to kick the city’s teeth in. I want to be able to disappear like I used to, drive through it until I no longer recognize my surroundings. It is better to feel like a stranger in a strange land than a stranger in a place you know so well.

I kept driving down the Auto Mall and then––I realized that I  no longer knew where I was. I smiled , and turned a corner near some housing projects that glowed in the darkness, and rose over a concrete drainage ditch on a  bridge that seemed more beautiful than all the bridges I’d crossed in Europe. I was basking the beauty of disappearing again. And then I saw the CVS on the corner of 70th and Limburgh Blvd, and I knew exactly where I was.

I can’t get lost in this city if I try.

But when I got home, I felt convinced that this time, I could get Alex on the phone.

Stateless

Early in 2014, Alex resurfaced from a year of nightlife and another set of grueling tour dates, to slow down in Lisbon.

Alex: Because I was moving around so much, I literally felt nauseous, like, seasick. Brendan: Is that part of the reason that what came out of you were these long droning tracks? Alex: Yeah, because their kind of meditative…It has healing aspects to it. When I listen to it, it heals me.

music: “Time Washes Everything Away” | Stateless

While in Lisbon, Alex put to tape his third record as Dirty Beaches, using a friend’s studio in an abandoned office building along the waterfront.

Alex: When I go in at night, there’s no electricity throughout the building except on the third floor, I would have to use my phone to turn on the flashlight and walk up these wooden stairs that are really creepy.

The view is great, it’s got these really big windows and then when you open them, there’s a balcony walkway that you can just walk along, and you oversee the bridge and the river, the Tagus river. The bridge looks like the golden gate bridge in San Francisco.

He recorded most of it after dark, while the mist was coming in.

Brendan: What’s the city look like at night? Alex: It’s really quiet, uhhm, with dim orange lights, really old buildings just crumbling and falling apart. I don’t know…It’s a really strange place. There’s a lot of old ghosts and zeitgeist, lingering around in the city. Their colonial past––kind of being ashamed of it, but not really. That was the time when their country was in the most power.

Much like what he recorded in Berlin for Love Is the Devil, the new album was wordless.

Brendan: It’s interesting that you recorded these more instrumental records in places that have a long, defined history, do you feel like working on these albums also gave you a sense of your own, personal history? Alex: Yeah! That’s actually, that’s very good insight. I definitely felt that way. That city made me realize that you have to move on, that you can’t just linger on in the past. That city is beautiful, Lisbon is beautiful, but that’s also why so many people have left.

The idea that a city or place can represent a person, and vice versa, is something that Alex shares with our first subject on Stories About Music, Phil Elverum. They’re both in their mid-30s, but where Phil explores different parts of himself without leaving the region where he’s lived his whole life, Alex, by contrast, has gone to the ends of the earth just trying to put together one version of himself.

And like Phil a decade ago, Alex’s time away from the world ended with his decision that the time had come to end a project that meant so much to him.

Alex: There’s a lot of reasons why, but not to get into painful details, it’s mostly about trying to move on. It’s not about forgetting the past, it’s keeping that with you and venturing that on.

He named the final Dirty Beaches record Stateless.

The four tracks are slow-moving meditations, like being adrift in a boat on great wide ocean, on the move between here and there.

The cover of the record is its own piece of art: a photograph of Hong Kong that Alex took while on tour. A blue sky is framed by several enormous glass skyscrapers, which form a groundless canopy. The earth, or anything like, is out of sight.

Alex: I don’t know, it’s just this kind of hologram reflecting all these multiple different angles of reality and hitsory, and my personal history is also reflected in that,…(51:53) When I look at that photo, it makes me feel like, where the fuck am I supposed to be? All those buildings, where do they come from, why is it here? Do I fit into that? Do I want to be in that? No. I don’t think so.

Each place that Alex has gone, he’s refined his identity a little bit more with each stop.

Lorena: I guess for him, every time he goes somewhere else, that’s like a confrontation with himself. He talked about the mirror. Like, when you go to a different place there’s this mirror that reflects things on you, and you have to be willing to see them.

In case you forgot about her, this is Lorena, who’s been quietly holding the microphone the whole time.

Lorena: That confrontation, and that sort, of, realization that there’s things beyond how you grew up or where you grew up...I felt that when I moved to the U.S.

Lorena

One thing I didn’t expect to happen when I asked Alex for an interview, was to learn more about Lorena.

I was wrong by the way, when I said earlier that both Lorena and I grew up purely in one place. That’s mostly true, but when she was twelve, Lorena’s family moved from Venezuela to North Carolina for six months.

Her short time there might sound familiar to almost anybody who’s moved at a young age, but with the added stress that she wasn’t just moving one state over.

Lorena: I remember the first day I, sortof, arrived a little bit later and  someone brought me to, like, math class, and they introduced me as the new student and no one even looked up from their desk, to look at me in the eye.

And I thought that was–that just–my heart sank...and then I went into the dining room and I remember that I was super shocked that everything was so clearly defined. There was a table of punk kids, there was a table of cheerleaders, there was a table of nerds, there was––and everyone was just so segregated into their group, and I had no idea which group I should be a part of.

music: “Ciao, Beñi” | Las Villas 

And yet when they returned to Caracas, Lorena didn’t really feel particularly Venezuelan either.

Lorena: I went to a very small school and, in general, the people I met were kids that were more interested in going to parties and getting drunk and socializing and who knew who and the sort of social games and y’know, My dad had a bookstore growing up. So I would spend every weekend reading books and not going to parties. And I just felt like I was a weird nerd, y’know? I just wanted to watch movies and listen to music, and my friends thought my music taste was weird

I am suddenly, uncomfortably aware of just how little I actually know about my friend Lorena.

Before I sent her to meet Alex, I can’t say that Lorena and I had really spoken in close to two years, and even then, the longest conversation I can remember us having alone was about a song her ex-boyfriend wrote about her, in two-thousand-and-twelve.

But I’m starting to realize that I should’ve asked her more about herself when I had her in front of me––because her mindset about where she came from and where she ended up, just feels so familiar.

Lorena: For me once I was 18 it was shockingly easy to come to the U.S. I never felt even homesick.

When I moved away for college, I felt like I was cutting off a tail that I had outgrown the need for.

I quickly formed this idea, that no person should go their whole life living in the same place. And now that I think about it, I can understand why most of my family thinks that I’m a condescending jackass: my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles––at least 95% of my family has never lived outside the Delaware Valley.

In retrospect, my hypothesis probably says a lot more about my own thoughts of a what “a life well lived” means, but in Lorena, I see that part of me reflected.

Lorena: (pause) It’s kind of weird to feel like I have this urge to always keep moving, because I’ve never really found the place where I feel totally comfortable. I don’t feel comfortable at home, I don’t feel totally comfortable here, so…I think for Alex it’s the same case. It’s a little bit like you’re a foreigner wherever you are, because you don’t feel like your identity really matches anywhere.

I picked Lorena be my tape-sync-er not just because she has experience doing sound from college, but because she was the only person who I emailed who was also a fan of Alex’s work.

Lorena: I really like Dirty Beaches, but I had never taken the time to look into his personal life, or...his voice as an artist, like, I had just listened to his music and loved it....It wasn’t actually until a couple days ago when I knew this was going to happen that I sort of like, looked into his blog and read some of the things he was thinking about and some of his poetry, realized that this was a big theme for him and, yeah, it was a surprise for me.

An op-ed in the New York Times last month called twenty-fifteen the year that identity politics took center stage, the year that we started asking ourselves, “who do we think we are?”

But I think everything: protests over racial inequality, the European migration crisis, Donald Trump’s fear-mongering nativism––they could also boil down into a similar, but different question,  the same question that Alex, Lorena, and I have been asking ourselves.

“Where do I belong?”

When you live in the same general area your whole life, the answer to that question feels easy. But the more of the world you see, the smaller you realize you are, the less certain your identity feels. Lorena got a small dose of it when she was twelve, I didn’t see it until I was in college.

But Alex––Alex has had to live with it since he was eight and his Chinese family left Taiwan for North America.

Lorena: I thought something was really funny that I wanted to mention––that he said that, he felt like he didn’t have an identity. Because––I’ve never met someone that’s willing to say that, like that seems like such a self-deprecating thing to say, like I-I though it was interesting that that was his conception of himself whereas me as a stranger I thought––total contrary.

I know that, for me, and maybe for Lorena too, the failure to figure out who we are or where we belong is the most frightening thing in the world. That, almost on accident, we could find ourselves living in some godforsaken place like Akron, Ohio, without an inkling of how we got there.

But for Alex, after Lisbon, none of that seemed to matter anymore.

Alex: I’ll tell people in Europe that I have a Canadian passport, that I’m from Canada, when they ask me where I’m from, but they always want to know, but where are you really from? And I’m like, what do you mean by that? I just told you where I’m from. And they’re like, “ No, where are your parents from?” “Oh you mean my ethnicity,” they’re like, “yeah,” “Well I’m Chinese.” “Oh so you’re from China?” “No, I just told you where I grew up.” I was not born in China––I’d like to be––but I was not, so I can’t claim that.

...and I go to China and people are like, “you’re American!” And I’m like “no, I’m Chinese,” and they’re like, “No, you’re American! I can smell it from you. Look at the way you dress, look at the way you talk, you’re American.” So I’m kind of fucked on either side, y’know haha.

And yet, without putting Alex in a box, I want to say that he is definitely, unequivocally, a North American. I would go so far as to say a red-blooded U.S. Citizen, if not legally, than at least in the way that he’s striven to carve out an identity not based on his past or present, but his plans for the future.

Alex: To me the American Dream is not forgetting where you come from, but also not trying to trade one identity for another...recognizing and accepting Point A, and then arriving at Point B,  and then...not worrying about the authenticity of being between those two points, and creating a third point of identity. ...(24:27) Brendan: Is there a way that you could possibly define that third point? Alex: Well that is the whole point, isn’t it? Brendan: Yeah. Alex: It’s more about defying definition, than trying to be defined. It’s a very defensive position, unfortunately… Brendan: Alright Alex, thank you so much. Give Lorena my thanks again. Alex: Cheers, you as well Brendan. Woo, that was a long one.

I hung up and looked at the trees outside my office for a little bit longer. Lorena and Alex had some water, chatted for a bit longer––I’m not sure about what––and then she got in her car to go home.

Lorena: The traffic was really insane. The sun was coming down, so the sky was just beautiful colors and I was listening to his latest Dirty Beaches album and...I don’t know, I just respected him so much...The car is a good opportunity to be contemplative, so it was just a really nice experience. Brendan: What were you thinking about? Lorena: hmm. I guess everything and nothing. Just, like, specific things about my life but...my mind was also wandering a lot.

Mine was too. There are so many things to think about once you finish an interview. How did it go? What was a good moment I can pull away from it? Was that wind I heard on the phone going to be on mic too?

But I also thought about Lorena, and the particular position that she’s in that made her so perfect to send in for this interview.

Lorena:  Venezuela, our particular country is going through a huge exodus right now, so this sense of displacement is something that a lot of Venezuelan’s feel. When I go home, there’s so many people that have left and that are visiting. The sense of being here and not being here is something I can share with other people which...it’s such a strange thing.

I was honest to god worried about this interview before it, and even during the first few minutes of it. Alex can be so intimidating, mostly because his music sounds like it’ll be on while I’m getting my teeth knocked out in a bar fight.

But Lorena sees this whole different side of the work, one that I could not before she told me about it.

Lorena: He came across as someone that’s willing to experience things, and change his opinion, and to be uncomfortable.

Brendan: Do you feel like that is a good description of you?

Lorena: I would want to be more like that, but I feel like I have a tendency to create opinions or have more, like, dogmatic approaches to my life. Whereas I would want to be more fluid. Like, I felt like he could leave tomorrow and move to a different country and be totally fine, unphased, whereas, I would want to be like that but I...don’t have that sort of freedom.

Brendan: What do you think is keeping you moored?

Lorena: I guess it’s just fear...of feeling, like, you know, life could get out of your hands. And in a way, I shouldn’t feel that way, because the moment where my life was most out of my hands, when I moved to Boston for the first time, it ended up being the most wonderful change in my life.

Brendan: You know, if I could do this over again, I would’ve just sent you there with a microphone and a couple of topics to hit, and just let you do the whole thing.

Lorena:...I think it worked out really well though. I was happy to sort of be, like, this invisible listener.

Music, like traveling, is a mirror. The reflections that Dirty Beaches created for me when I took my night drive out of Philadelphia are gone. But now when I listen to Alex’s music, I can also see my friend reflected more clearly.

In the months since then, Lorena and I kept in touch––sporadically, but more than we have before. Not long after, she got a fellowship with a research center in Italy and left the United States before her visa expired to go traveling with her sister.

Spring slid into summer, and as I began to edit down the audio I’d collected into radio stories. I realized only then how lucky I’d been.

From the outset, I knew that without Lorena, I wouldn’t have had the chance to get the interview or the sound quality I wanted. But if it weren’t Alex, Lorena would’ve stayed a distant acquaintance, someone to be jealous of when I saw photos of her living out my dream life in Europe.

And without either of them, I don’t know if I would’ve had this moment that followed, during a party with the great, big Mattox family in July.

Looking into my uncle Mike’s bathroom mirror I realized that I from this place, of this place, but the place is not me, my family is not me.

Outside, it was starting to get dark. I became part of the summer evening, the fireflies rising off lawns up and down the block. Soon, I decided, I will leave.

But first, I want to show you how I ended up here.

Credits

Alex Hungtai lives in Los Angeles. His new project is Last Lizard and you can find some early demos on Soundcloud under that name. He’s on Twitter and Instagram Last Lizard eight-oh-eight.

This month, Lorena Alvarado moved to Treviso, Italy, to begin her fellowship at Fabrica, a communication research center. We wish her the best of luck. Her work is available at Lorena-Alvarado-dot-com

Our show was produced today by myself with help from Lorena, and edited and approved by Kyna Doles and Jon Davies. All songs in this episode were written and recorded by Alex under the name Dirty Beaches, except for one or two. Links, and a list of what we used can be found at our website, investigatingregionalscenes.org.

If you haven’t already, please follow Stories About Music using your local podcast provider.

It might be a little early in our relationship to take this step, but if you like what we’ve been doing so far, leave us rating on the iTunes music store. If you’ve got the time and inclination, write a review.

If you or a loved one have your own story about music, please email me at Brendan at investigating regional scenes dot org.

Thank you to Alex & Lorena, and thank you also to Michaela, for her patience.

My name is Brendan Mattox, back next week with another story about music

Promo

Next time on Stories About Music.

nat: cicadas

Brendan: So what’s a good place to start...how’d you guys meet? Keith: We met through friends at a house show a few blocks from here...

music: “Past the New Parking Deck” | Gathered Tones Finally sunlight and caffeine cut through the clouds, my morning slowly sputters and gets off the ground to the sounds of digging on you.

On a reporting trip to Akron, I find my own mirror in the music of husband-and-wife duo, Trouble Books

Brendan: and was the attraction immediate? Keith: No (laughter) I was out of my mind at that house show––it was my birthday.

[investigatingregionalscenes]

Bluetile Lounge (clockwise from left: Alex Stevens, Howard Healy, Dan Erickson, and Gab Cotton) in 1996, taken by Pierre Toussaint. 

story about music #2

I trace the history of slowcore, from when I first heard it, through the guy who accidentally coined the term, back to an indie rock scene in early ‘90s Perth that has all but disappeared.

Alan Sparhawk of Low

music

“Ambered” by Bluetile Lounge from Lowercase

“Shifty” by Bluetile Lounge from Half Cut

“Realize” by Codeine” from Barely Real

“Words” by Low from I Could Live In Hope

“Stay” by Low from Long Division

“Wriding” by Bluetile Lounge from Lowercase

“Figure Ground” Bluetile Lounge from Lowercase

“Lazy” by Low from I Could Live in Hope

“The Weight (and the Sea)” by Bluetile Lounge from Lowercase

“Ambered” by Bluetile Lounge from Lowercase (reprise)

links

Bluetile Lounge have no website, but you can listen to their performance from the Summersault Festival mentioned at the end of the story here.

Low’s website; their latest album is Ones and Sixes

For more about Tyler, listen to episode six.

further listening

Bluetile Lounge – Half Cut: Low – Curtain Hits the Cast; Red House Painters – Down Colorful Hill & Rollercoaster; Codeine – Frigid Stars, Barely Real & The White Birch; American Analog Set – The Fun of Watching Fireworks & From Our Living Room to Yours

also mentioned: Duster, Idaho, Spokane, and Galaxie 500 (proto-slowcore)

Dan Erickson and Howard Healy performing at the Paddo in Perth, 1996

transcript

Dan: Hello, Brendan? Yeah good, how are ya? Yeah I’m ok, a little bit tired actually, should be ok.

Dan Erickson made one of my favorite albums when he was my age, while living in the  early 90s indie rock scene of Perth, Australia.

Brendan: Where are you now, and what do you do? Dan: Eh, I’m in Melbourne, I work a pretty boring job, and I’ve got three kids. I’ve tried to play music here and there, but haven’t really got back around to it but want to. So I just need to do something, before I get too old.

Oh, I’m sorry, you haven’t heard of Perth’s thriving early-90s indie rock scene? That’s forgivable, since the only easily accessible piece of information from that time is the album that Dan made, Lowercase. He recorded it with friends, under the name name Bluetile Lounge. Released in ’95, Lowercase is now championed as one of the classic of the non-genre known as slowcore.

(beat)

Do you know what slowcore is? Maybe I should give a history lesson.

In any case, the place and context from which Lowercase, Bluetile Lounge, and Dan Erickson emerged? That’s all gone now.

Dan: There’s not much, no reviews. They were all in street press at the time, and all the zines were handprinted, so there’s no record of them. Yeah so it’s funny, It’s sort of a lost era.


And while this in itself is not unique, Perth, in the 90s, was. As is the fact that the indie rock bands that used to play in the pubs every week were swallowed up just before the Internet would make the concept of ever losing music completely unthinkable.

My name is Brendan Mattox, and you’re listening Stories About Music, a new podcast on the intersection of music, journalism, and my life

This is story about music number number two, “The Tragic Fate of All Hidden Scenes.”

My Blue Wave

About once a year, I go through a blue period. Some would call it seasonal depression, but technically, it can strike at any time.

The first time I can clearly remember it happening was five years ago, during the autumn of my second year in college. For four months, I wore almost exclusively the color blue.

music out

From toe to head: royal blue converse high-tops, skinny blue-jeans, a robin’s egg t-shirt, and an American Apparel hoodie in...blue.

And while the complementary colors certainly made my eyes pop, the monochromatic effect was pronounced.

Around the same time, I moved into an ensuite with a kid named Tyler.

Tyler: Whenever there’s an album by a band, there’s always, like, the one ballad, the one slow song, the one mellow one. And that’s the one I always loved.

There’s a lot about Tyler that I don’t have time to explain, but I think that the best way to define our friendship is that, for ages 19 to 22, he was my musical guide.

Tyler: and um, when I found bands that had the whole album like that, I was like, “yeaaah!” even bands I knew, I was like, “yeah make a ballad, do a slow song, it’ll be so cool.”

It was through him I first learned about slowcore.

Tyler himself first learned about the genre while waiting on his deferred admission to college. He moved to school in the middle of winter. And while he didn’t have trouble making friends, he’s always been a bit of a loner.

Tyler: I would walk around those cold winter nights in Boston and I would listen to, um, these albums on repeat. They would the theme songs to, uh, to my melancholy? Even––I won’t say that. I listen to this music and it makes me happy, and I listen to this music when I am happy as well. It was just the theme songs to my days.

music: “Shift” | Half Cut

Later that year, Tyler passed on his love for slow music through a mix CD.

I’ve still got it in my car, the words “Lackluster 90s” scrawled across it. On that collection of languid songs I first heard the slowcore heroes: Red House Painters, Codeine, Low, Galaxie 500.

Bands that Tyler had mostly heard about from the internet.

Tyler: That’s how most people find their music today. It’s just such a vast pool of information right there.

If you go to the semi-obscure music social network last.fm and look up any of the artists we talk about in this story, you will probably find Tyler in the comments section.

Tyler: The thing is, there aren’t that many slowcore bands that I like. I mean, there’s not that many that are even pegged with the genre, “slowcore.” But y’know, the ones that I found and the ones that I, y’know, have grown to love, are truly gems that never get old for me, they don’t get old.

And for better, or worse, what Tyler considered canon, became what I consider canon. This is one of the magical things about myself that I don’t realize until I’m composing these stories: a large piece of my identity is really wrapped up with what appealed to Tyler in thirty second audio clips on an algorithm based website in 2010.

music: “Realize” | Barely Real EP 

And yet, when Tyler talks about these records, it still feels so much more romantic, so much like fate, that he should discover them at all.

Tyler: The other day...or, the other week, I-uh-got high for the third time or something like that...I don’t really do drugs a lot...but when I did I was listening to music, and I came upon the song “Realize” by Codeine. That is what Slowcore sounds like to me. They pretty much are the ones that really nailed what it is.

And I think the listening experience really recontextualized what is so great about slowcore. And I felt like...it really brings you into slow motion, and you are forced in between every hit, y’know? Which, they come, they really take their time with it You are forced to kind of move in slow motion with the song, and that movement, is the same movement I feel when I’m having a really stimulating conversation and I want to just slow it all down and say, y’know, “I’m right here.”  It really calls you to be there.

Boston was so grey that autumn. Still reeling from a break up, I too had begun to take long walks through downtown and along the Charles River. The indie pop that I had held close for much of my teenage years had begun to sound deliriously hopeless. Slowcore guided my rapid, anxious heartbeat into a sedated 4/4 time.

Of course, I prefer the softer side of the genre. Codeine has always felt a little too brittle, like scraping the inside of my skull clean of all bad feelings. And they’re like, “pre-slowcore” anyway. The name wasn’t coined until after Low released their first album, I Could Live In Hope.

music: “Words” | I Could Live In Hope

And so without further ado, I give you the man who accidentally invented a whole sub-genre.

Slowcore

Alan: My name is Alan Sparhawk, and I sing and play guitar in a band from Minnesota called Low. Brendan: And you guys have been doing this now since nineteen ninety three? Alan: Yeah, ‘93, thereabout.

music up

Alan: We came along right at the peak of that kind of, what is this? We need to label it! Yes this is great! We can all keep track of what we’re doing. It’s an exciting time and people wanted to know what was gonna hit next because “grunge this” and “post-rock that” and you know, what was going to be the next catchphrase that’s going to make someone millions of dollars.

No “slowcore” band never fully endorsed the label. But Low have never quite escaped it for one very good reason.

Alan: Yeah, slowcore, yeah. The problem...so the irony of that is that we essentially brought it on ourselves.

One of the first interviews that I ever did, I mentioned that a friend of mine who worked at a record store, was a typical record “fan,”...when we first started and we did our first show, he was at our first show. And he was joking with me the next day when I saw him and like, “I got it, I got it! Slowcore!” Y’know, and it was sort of a laugh.

I mentioned that to the first interview and I think what happened was, because that was the first interview, that got referenced before anybody else would interview us, so it got picked up. Or if they were just doing a little blurb about it.

And then it just kind of blew up from there became this thing like, “oh! they don’t like being called slowcore!” I’m not even sure when that came along.

There aren’t many things to unite the bands under the banner of “Slowcore” other than a general feeling of “being down,” or nostalgic longing.

Alan: It’s funny. At the end of the day, I think it’s probably the perfect description of it. At least, for the most part, things are slower, and there’s something about using that word “core” that references hard core, or sort of this idea of there being an anchor, a weight to the word core. Something sort of a vision, it evokes that there’s a central vision to what’s going on. At least in my idealistic vision of who I’m trying to be, who I wish I was, that probably is a bit more complimentary than negative.

Slowcore never blossomed in the way that similar sub-genres like shoegaze or post-rock did; it’s just a word that applies to a handful of records from the mid-nineties and anything that imitates that sound

Low is one of those lucky bands that were both impressive and stable enough to survive the last two decades. Most of the others––Codeine, Red House Painters, The American Analog Set, Galaxie 500, Bedhead, Duster, Idaho, Spokane––have not. But this thing that they did, is pretty well documented because they were American bands, with American labels, touring through America.

During a conversation with Tyler about music journalism several years ago, I observed that, since the late 80s, the majority of indie rock journalism is based around local music scenes. In order to give context for music, you have the make connections between bands, and the easiest connection is, typically, geographic location followed by vibe.

These bands were all tied together by the word slowcore, but were also part of a much broader movement in American underground music that rose out of the great plains, the Pacific Northwest, Texas and Boston.

What’s infinitely more curious, is how a group of Australians ended up getting thrown in with the rest of them.

Bluetile Lounge

Now that the slowcore era is around twenty years old, the bands from that time are starting to pop up again. Codeine recently reissued their very small catalog, and Red House Painters’ frontman Mark Kozelek released two critically acclaimed records and started an internet flame war in the course of a year. But not many people are, or have been, talking about Bluetile Lounge

Tyler: Mmm, of course. That’s definitely a deeper cut. You don’t first stumble on Bluetile Lounge, for sure...

And then, at the end of last year, I turned twenty-four.

In January, I was going through a very different sort of blue period. Depressed about the state of my career and unsure if I was ever going to get my shit together. I found myself once again lingering over Lowercase. 
Tyler, again.

Tyler: It’s like this beautifully nurturing...kind of like this friend that’s like, “I get it, I get it.” Y’know, that’s kind of how I feel. Just that friend who’s on the same page as you.

A good way to waste time but feel like I’m working is to open a new case file, on a different band, and claim that I’m just starting “another story.” Despite a pile of un-transcribed Phil Elverum audio I decided that, if nothing else that afternoon, I would get in touch with Bluetile Lounge.

And to my great surprise, I did.

Brendan: I just spent about twenty minutes trying to figure out where the name Bluetile Lounge came from. Dan: I was and, sort of still am, was a skateboarder. I think it’s old california skate slang for pool skating.

Of course we didn’t actually speak till, like, a week later. Daniel Erickson lives in Melbourne 15 hours ahead of the eastern seaboard.

Dan: I skated right through the-the dead time, when hardly anyone did it. You felt like a pariah. Brendan: Was that how you met Howard and the other members of Bluetile Lounge? Dan: I went to school with Howard, but I met Alex through skating, yeah.

To explain how hard it is to coordinate with someone from Australia at my present level––it’s been six months since I started working on this story and I’ve only been able to work out getting Dan on the phone. Which is good enough for now, but someday, I hope, there’ll be a nice two-hour radio documentary that includes the voices of Howard Healy, Alex Stevens, and Gab Cotton,  who, along with Dan, made up the most slowcore band ever to exist.

music: “Wriding” | Lowercase

Dan: I think we had decided to start playing together before we met. I didn’t play guitar until we––I think I started as we were finishing school. I think I can remember Howard and I buying guitars and, he bought a bass...I knew Alex, and I think I knew he was a drummer...and he’d said, cause we’d said, “you want to play in a band together,” he said, “Ah I got a friend Gab who plays guitar.”...We sort of wandered around a bit. It’s not like we got together and straight away it was all happening. It sorta, lacked direction.

They met in 1991 but wouldn’t record their first album, Lowercase, for four more years. Mostly it seems like they just played shows and hung around Perth.

Perth

Dan: It’s a nice place, but it’s quite quiet, relatively. The weather’s really good...but it was just a city. The city was deserted at night, there’s nothing much to do. There was a few pubs that had shows on, and that was ok, but your indie rock music scene was really, really small. Just a couple hundred people, basically.

Dan and his friends fell in with a group call Jacuzzi International, a bunch of alternative rock kids whose best shows were the house parties after the gigs.

Brendan: could you describe where the name “Jacuzzi International” came from? Dan: I think the guys that sort of set it up––if you can call it set up, because it wasn’t really––just came up with it. They had a series of parties which––this seems really cheesy now––they had a series of parties where they’d have a jacuzzi at the party. So it was kind of a bit sleazy, probably.

Perth is the largest city in Western Australia, and the only city by our definition for close to two thousand miles in any direction.

Australia itself  is about the size of the lower forty-eight states, 3 million square miles give or take.

But while most people merely think that the interior United States is uninhabitable, the vast majority of inland Australia, is actually dangerous.

Brendan: Was Perth’s isolation ever a drag? Dan: Aww yeah, all the time. The only place you could play shows was in Perth...every now and then people went on tours to regional towns, but there’s hardly anyone in them, and definitely not anyone really into slightly arty rock. At the time, it cost quite a lot to get over east to Melbourne or Sydney.

We weren’t very organized either.

The famous Outback has a reputation for eating any unprepared motorists alive. Go to any local house shows, and tell me if you think those bands could survive crossing the desert.

Meaning that, and its rare anyone can legitimately lay claim to this, Dan and the rest of Bluetile Lounge might have been the hippest people west of Melbourne.

Dan: Perth’s pretty small––well it was, and, probably still is...the things that got more prominence in the Perth music scene at that time was, like, that really eclectic funk music. Where the bands do everything all at the same time and, I dunno, we didn’t want to play that.

What they did come up with is very, very slow music. Their first album, Lowercase, exemplifies perfectly. Five tracks, most of them over nine minutes long, that just steep in radiant, golden ambience.

Dan: Nothing particularly like a vision...almost ripping off bits of other things I liked and putting them together. It’s kind of like that story where you hear these really influential bands and thirty seconds of a song becomes a whole genre.

Around the same time, in America, Alan Sparhawk and Low were headed in a similar direction with a similar reasoning.

Alan: It wasn’t so much that we didn’t like what was going on––I was into Nirvana, I was into a lot of these bands, I guess it just to me...I didn’t feel like copying that was the point.

The fact that it would grate on, we knew right away it would probably grate on the audience...there was a little bit of pleasure that came from that, even. My favorite punk shows are shows where the band came on and people freaked out because it was not what they were ready for.

Dan: We didn’t call it slowcore––I dunno, we just called’em slow songs, I think. Some of it was just being a bit of shit, y’know? Let’s just play really really slow.

Alan: Y’know, if it’s only a joke, then you can only do it for one show. There’s something pretty magical about presenting something that you believe in so much and you know, “there’s something valid that we’re doing here,” and not in a “hey! you listen to me.” It’s more just like, “I know you’re not listening but there’s something going on here, and I know if just a couple people pick this up, it’s going to be totally worth it, y’know what I mean?”

Brendan: Did you think of yourselves as an indie rock band? Dan: Yeah, but you didn’t say to yourselves, “I’m indie rock.” You knew you weren’t heavy metal...It wasn’t supposed to be ambient music. We were trying to play songs. It wasn’t post-rock. We weren’t trying to be post-rock because I didn’t know what that meant anyway. You aspire to something, you get a style and then you work on it. Can’t pretend that it wasn’t contrived, you’re thinking about it all the time.

In 1993, just as Low were releasing I Could Live in Hope, Bluetile Lounge finally put down a few demos. Their drummer, Alex, sent a copy of the tape to Alan Sparhawk.

Dan: I just can’t remember why he did it. He got some inclination that it would be received well, and I don’t know where he got––I can’t remember. So he wrote a letter and did a little tape.

Alan was driving a van back then, making deliveries for Sub Pop.

Brendan: Do you still have a copy of it? Alan: Aw, jeeze. Let me look in here, there’s one spot where the CD might be, in which case the letter might be there with it.

sounds of Alan moving around

The just had a lot of vibe, they were, kind of early on, the camaraderie of another band who was playing something a little more spaced out and drawn out. At first that’s reaffirming. And the fact that they reached out to us was just icing on the cake

Alan listened to it, a lot, although the intervening two decades mean that the tape and the letter have moved several times, off to that place that all forgotten items go.

But in the nineties, he made a copy and sent it to another Sub Pop delivery guy named Jason Reynolds, who owned his own label in Australia, called Summershine.

Lowercase

The band had already paid out of pocket to record Lowercase at a Masonic hall in Fremantle, on the south side of the Perth metropolitan area. They recorded in a large room, with lots of natural reverb, and a picture of Queen Victoria on the wall.

Dan: You had the amps set up really far away from each other, um, there was a funny old tonky piano that we used. I don’t know why we didn’t take photos. I thought we did but we don’t have any left. Y’know, You’ve got all the cables everywhere, it kind of looks cool and rock’n’roll, which we weren’t.

music: “The Weight and the Sea” | Lowercase

This track, above all, is the one that I love the most. When I’m in the depths of a Blue Period, it’s one that cycles through my head over and over again.

Tyler: I won’t forget listening to that album for the first time and being so disoriented by it. I feel like it has very little for you to grab onto, for an early listen...Slowcore does not make me sad, music like this does not make me sad I would say, but I think they have that ability. Brendan: Like that album can make you sad, to listen to. Tyler: Yeah, it has a very bleak sound to it, for sure.

Dan:...we wanted to make music that sounded sad...Contradicting what I said before about just trying to make things, I wasn’t just blurting it out...I really liked that kind of music.

“The Weight (and the Sea)” exemplifies what I think of Lowercase as: it’s the sound of rock songs coming apart, stretched and slowed so that you the see the seams and hear each chord change.

Brendan: is it easy to keep time when the beats are so far apart? Dan: Not for us. Maybe if you’re good musicians.

Feel the weight and the sea...ride. Breaking over me...

Dan: We always had a reasonably definite plan to somehow get released on a label from somewhere else, and really wanted to get released by American labels.

And this is where Bluetile Lounge becomes the luckiest band in existence.

I’m not sure if many you remember 1993. I certainly don’t, I was two. But a dusty bookshelf in my parent’s basement tells me one thing about that era: it was a great time to by a cassette.

Tapes are enjoying a recent boom in popularity amongst the ~art crowd~ similar to the vinyl revival of last decade. But in Perth in the early 90s, it was pretty much the only way to get your shit out.  

Dan: Can’t quite remember but I think the smallest run of CDs you could is five hundred, which is quite a lot in Perth, and it cost quite a bit to do it. So a lot of these guys we knew, they were doing tapes. And some of these tapes are some of my favorite, favorite recordings. But, y’know, they’re on tape.

And if Alan Sparhawk hadn’t found the similarities between his band and Bluetile Lounge so endearing, it’s likely that Bluetile Lounge would have released Lowercase on cassette as well. It never would have left Perth and might still be undiscovered.

Dan: When we did it in CD, it was definitely in the knowledge that you almost couldn’t do vinyl, in Perth and in Australia, pressing was really bad quality. So vinyl, sort of, wasn’t an option. You could still buy records but in Perth, you just couldn’t make them.

You see, tapes are really good for bands who need to make a small run and make it fast. They’re also a hassle to transfer to MP3. Even now, there isn’t an easy way. CDs, with their awful, soul-killing digital technology that every audiophile rails against, have always been easy.

Summershine released Lowercase sometime in late ’95, around twenty years to the day from when this episode dropped.

Dan: Our friends liked it, or they were nice.We got a really funny review in the local press where, I dunno, some guy reviewed who didn’t know. Which is often what would happen in the Perth local press. People would go and review bands with no, sort of, knowledge of the context. So we got compared to Pink Floyd, which is pretty weird.

And then a bit later we did Summersault.

Summersault was a traveling festival that came to the Fremantle Oval for one day only in January of ’96.

Dan: You’ve got all your touring acts and then whatever city they go into, you pick some local acts to go and play, and I think they picked their local acts and we weren’t one of them (laughter) and then, um, and then we got a call from the promoter. And I think that I remember, I might not be right, but he seemed a bit annoyed because, y’know, he’d been almost directed to put us on the bill.

Y’know thousands of people, I think that was our biggest gig by far. And I think we played two songs ‘cause they were too long. Sonic Youth, and Pavement, and someone else were standing on the side of the stage while we were playing.

I was always nervous playing, so I was sort of always looking down at my feet and facing backwards all the times. I have to sortof make an effort to look up, to look up at the crowd. So I sortof forced myself a couple of times, otherwise I was looking down at my guitar pedals and turning around.

And from there? Alan Sparhawk:

Alan: Like I said, I think I vaguely remember just, fleetingly, meeting one of the people in the band at a gig over there, but that could just be wishful thinking in my mind. No, I haven’t run into them since... What are they doing?

Brendan: So I guess this brings us towards the end here, which is, how did Bluetile Lounge finish? Dan: Sort of petered away, like the end of a song, from memory.

The Tragic Fate of All Hidden Scenes

The release of Lowercase brought on a little press from Australia, but again, Perth is isolated and without a major label to fund you, you weren’t going anywhere fast. 

And in all honesty, times were changing.

Dan: I sorta seem to remember the late nineties and maybe early 2000s as being really terrible for playing guitar-based rock music live. When we started, that kind of music and that kind of scene was kind of an arts scene, y’know. Whereas a few years later it seemed like it wasn’t. No one else was going. The crowds really thinned out.

Dance music exploded, and took with it Perth’s rock music scene.

Dan: I remember being a bit resentful about it. I wanted to see live music, and there wasn’t much around at all.

They were however, able to make a second record, one one I didn’t even really know it existed until about a year ago. It’s called Half Cut, and it was their first, and only, full release on an American label.

Dan: We did Half Cut, and Gab went to London almost straight after recording. She was going there on a, like everyone does––goes somewhere in their early twenties. She left, I think, pretty quickly.  Things have their life, I guess.

music: “Ambered” | Lowercase

I should note that Dan seems pretty happy and nostalgic about all of this now, it’s just very hard to make anything sound chipper over top of Bluetile Lounge.

When I listen to Lowercase, it’s easy to understand why it didn’t blow up in the nineties. But it’s harder still to understand why it’s remained the only window into a place and time that’s completely untraceable. Even until recently it was only possible to listen to Lowercase by downloading some very suspicious looking zip files.

Which is how it found its way into my hands, during my second blue period in the winter of 2012.

I had just started playing guitar and writing songs, and after debuting one in front of Tyler, he said “I have a band I think you should listen to.”

Tyler: I dunno, because no one makes music like that. If you were to make a band like that, you would be chiming into, like, a very quiet conversation

And since then, Lowercase has meant something very personal, my only connection to a group of kindred spirits who felt the same need for sad music

Tyler: A-a lot of people would appreciate it, that uh, they have a hunger, we want more of it

We’ll stay hungry.

Credits

Dan Erickson lives in Melbourne. Bluetile Lounge have been talking about a reissue for Lowercase, though no plans have been made. Until then, you can find Lowercase on Spotify, or  out there, in the aether.

Our show was produced today by myself and approved by Kyna Doles. Our website is investigating regional scenes dot org where you can find this and soon, other stories about music. You can also find the list of songs in this episode. The song “Realize” appears courtesy of Codeine, the songs “Words” and “Stay” appear courtesy of Low. You can also find the names all the bands that Tyler and I mentioned. If you haven’t already, follow us with your local podcast provider.

Thank you to Alan for his contributions on the creation of slowcore, Low have a new album out on Sub Pop called Ones and Sixes my friend Nina says it’s really good. Thank you also to Tyler Taormina, for more on him, stick around for episode 6.

Thank you to Michaela, for her patience.

I’m Brendan Mattox, back next week with another story about music.

Tyler: There’s this band, Love, Claire, and uh, that’s like a super gem of the internet, for sure, there’s almost nothing found about them, and I’d challenge a listener right now to look them up. I don’t know where you’d find anything, but email Brendan, he’ll send you the songs.

Promo

Next time, on stories about music

music: “Displaced” | Stateless

Alex: I think it’s important to know the danger of playing with identities. In that process, you can really easily lose yourself, and I did that during the release of Badlands and the construction of that character.

Lorena: He talked about the mirror. Like, when you go to a different place there’s this mirror that reflects things on you, and you have to be willing to see them. That confrontation, and that sort, of, realization that there’s things beyond how you grew up or where you grew up...I think we both experienced that, going to different places. I felt that when I moved to the U.S.

The life of Alex Hungtai and the end of his band Dirty Beaches.

[investigatingregionalscenes]

story about music #1

Why can't one musician escape an album he released fifteen years ago?

A conversation with Phil Elverum about Twin Peaks, Anacortes, and his history with music journalists suddenly gives me an idea.

(full transcript & songs below the jump)

music

00:00 “Floating Through the Summer” by Trouble Books & Mark McGuire, from Trouble Books & Mark McGuire

02:21 “Wind’s Dark Poem” by Mount Eerie from Wind’s Poem

03:37 “Between Two Mysteries” from Wind’s Poem

06:25 “III. Universe” by The Microphones from Mount Eerie

09:49 “No Flashlight (drums)” from The Drums from No Flashlight

11:25  “The Moon” from The Glow, Part 2

12:49 “I. The Sun” from Mount Eerie (note: contains whole album)

15:20 “I’ll Not Contain You” from The Glow, Part 2

18:00 “Through the Trees, Pt. 2″ by Mount Eerie from Clear Moon

25:46 “Spring” from Sauna

31:00 “Sauna” from Sauna

Or listen to them all in a playlist here

“If I pretend airplanes don’t exist, and cellphones don’t exist, the distance I can walk on my feet in a day and the distance I can see, that would be the universe for most of human existence.” – unused clip from interview with Phil Elverum

transcript

please note that Stories About Music is meant to be heard more than read. all transcripts are only approximate. 

music: “Floating Through Summer” | Trouble Books & Mark McGuire

I don’t really feel like a professional, so it surprises me when musicians who are speak to me.

Like last December, when I found myself talking with Phil Elverum. The music Phil has made under the name Mount Eerie has floated in and out of my life since two-thousand-nine.

Phil has a long history of making music, but my safest guess is that if you know his work, you know it under the name The Microphones. His two-thousand-one album The Glow Part 2 often gets named as an indie essential. 

Most articles and interviews about Phil are required to mention this fact and that, in two-thousand-three, he stopped recording as The Microphones.

Phil: I-I really, I hope I never do that again, just because it was such a pain in the ass to have to  answer questions about “Why did you change your band name?” for over ten years. Like, literally every single interview. So I really don’t want to change my band name ever again.  Brendan: How has that stuck to you for so long? Phil: Maybe because there was no explanation really, it wasn’t a satisfying reason? I was just, “I don’t know, I wanted a new thing.” Which actually is a pretty great reason.

Since making the switch to Mount Eerie, Phil’s released a long string of material in the last decade, each album more critically acclaimed than the last. And yet, he’s never quite shaken off his legacy as the Microphones.

Phil: It sort of seemed like it became the thing that people knew about me, that I had two band names. “Oh he was this guy that used to be called this and then he was called that.”

But after today, hopefully, we can leave this past behind us. My name is Brendan Mattox, and you’re listening to Stories About Music, a new podcast on the subjects of music, journalism, and memoir, and how the line between those three things, is often not as clear as I’d hoped.

This is story about music number one, Between Two Elverums

music: “Wind’s Dark Poem” | Wind’s Poem

Between Two Elverums

Our paths first crossed late in October of two-thousand-nine, during a concert at Mass Art. I had recently moved to Boston for college, just as Phil had released a harsh, cavernous record called Wind’s Poem.

That era marked a turning point for Mount Eerie as well as myself. The music that Phil made shifted, from hushed folk to a point somewhere beyond easy description. Wind’s Poem was the first of several records to be named for an immutable natural force that will outlast the scale on which we live.

Oh voice of wind, the air in the branches sound like words whispering a spell on...

But Phil has toyed with that kind of subject, and its personal meaning, for most of his career. What really stood on Wind’s Poem is this one song, “Between Two Mysteries,” which adapted “Laura Palmer’s Theme” from the TV show Twin Peaks.

And while there’s a similar vibe to both the show and the Mount Eerie, it should be noted that by 2009, Elverum had a reputation as a neo-luddite. TV show references are not common in his work.

music: “Between Two Mysteries”

Brendan: Have you had a moment with Twin Peaks where that became important or imprinted on your memory, in some way? Phil: My dad was really into it. I was just barely allowed to watch it, because my parents knew that it was scarring. Yeah, I think I was in sixth grade, and I remember it vividly. Yeah, it really marked me. Like, I had nightmares for a long time...

We lived in this house that was still being constructed. Well, we lived in this shack, and the main house was still being constructed. Mostly we hung out and watched TV and lived in this small garage building. But my room was the first room to get finished in the main house. So, after watching Twin Peaks, I would have to walk down the trail in the dark to my room and it was exactly like, Leo and Shelly’s house, this like, bare stud wall, tarp flapping––it was so scary. And then also not to mention the pine branches blowing in the wind and actual owls hooting.

 It was very much like living in the show.

It’s rare to hear Phil tell these kinds of stories to a journalist. I felt excited, even a little smart. One could draw a line between those nights in the dark, and Mount Eerie’s focus on nature and mortality.

Brendan: The scene you just described sounds like one of those things that when you’re thinking about, “how do I view the woods?” in a way that, while I’m writing songs about it, “well it was a scary, dark place when I was younger.”

Phil: Mmm. No. Not at all. I do remember wanting to run from one house to the other because (we used to have our tv) we kept our TV room in that smaller garage building, and it was down a little trail. So walking back and forth between the main house and the TV shed every night, I do remember sprinting. 

Brendan: The fact that your family kept its television in a completely separate building down a dark trail, I feel like that’s somehow significant.

Phil: It doesn’t mean we watched any less TV, like we were fully...we watched all the TV.

It’s strangely intimate to imagine a pre-teen Elverum huddled in front of the TV on Thursday nights with his family, because the picture that journalist after journalist has painted of Phil is that of a wide-eyed woodsmen with little use for modern touchstones. I had imagined his childhood would involve a lot less electricity.

Phil: It was a pretty fairy tale-like existence, we were up swimming in a lake and running alone in the woods.

music: “III. Universe” | Mount Eerie

Still, I felt more successful than the first time I interviewed Phil, in an ambush I sprang after the show at Mass Art.

Phil: I think you asked if I viewed them as this dark scary place but, I definitely didn’t and don’t. It’s more complicated than that. Brendan: Then how would you describe it?

Anacortes

Phil: A large section of this island is preserved forest land. It hasn’t been logged in a hundred years so it’s pretty much grown back and the trees are big and there’s lots of different kinds of moss and stuff. I guess I just see it as a complex place. You see these different types of decay and life happening on top of each other, and it’s sort of like, um, looking at a system that works well without interruption. Brendan: Looking at that and then thinking about yourself, how do you see yourself with the woods? Do you see yourself as part of that natural world or separate from it? Phil: Separate...because...I am. I’m there walking with my neon orange coat and my iPhone.

Except for a few years in his late teens and early twenties, Phil has lived in the town of Anacortes, Washington for his entire life. 
Anacortes sits on Fidalgo Island, it’s more of a peninsula, really, in the Northwest Corner of the Northwest Corner. It’s an hour and a half drive down to Seattle.

Phil grew up on the outskirts of town

Phil: Growing up was a transition from being aware of my, like, forest and lake existence as a child out there to hanging out in town more, getting my driver’s license, being fascinated with the world outside and just expanding. It was a gradual transition to appreciating (things like––) hanging out in Tokyo, or whatever.

He moved down to Olympia, Washington for college. After two semesters he dropped out to become a full time member of the city’s insanely prolific arts community.

Phil:  Basically the only thing I did with my life was go to the studio every day, all day––or go on tour.

With the backing of K Records, he crossed this great country of ours and the oceans that border it.

Brendan: You’re a really world-travelled person and you chose to settle in Anacortes...why? Phil: Well, I guess I haven’t been to the place that felt more like home. I’m open to the idea but nowhere has grabbed me more than this place.

Like Phil, I spent my late teens and early twenties somewhere else––college––and then moved back to the place I grew up, a town in the Philadelphia suburbs.

There is something unique about it...but I don’t know if I find it as engaging as Phil finds Anacortes.

Phil: I also just sort of...uh, ethically believe that people should identify with where they’re from or be proud of where they’re from. Like, regionalistic pride is a good thing and something that’s pretty thin these days. Brendan: Was there ever a point where you felt like you weren’t, I guess, proud to be from Anacortes? Phil: Yeah. I don’t know if I’m proud now. I mean it’s a weird place, we’ve got problems. But uh, I just am from here, and I guess when I went to Norway I was like, maybe it will feel more like home when I get there.

music: “The Moon” | The Glow pt. 2  

When Phil was twenty-five he, left the country.

But during his time in Olympia he recorded four albums as The Microphones, including his albatross, The Glow, Part 2.

This small, unknown web magazine called Pitchfork named it their album of the year in 2001. It was the last hairy, experimental record to win the honor, which in recent years has gone to Vampire Weekend, Kendrick Lamar, Bon Iver, and Kanye West.

Phil himself barely noticed the praise. He was in his own world, recording the next Microphones’ album.

Phil: I do remember a shift from the songs I was writing during The Glow Part 2 and before then being more about, like, people, basically and interpersonal relations. And also, like, the Moon, the sky, and stuff like that. But still using those symbols to describe what’s going on between people.

The Glow pt. 2 is kind of a break up album that winds through a messy, scatter-brained twenty tracks to a distant foghorn bleating in the darkness, which is where the sequel picks up.

music: “The Sun” | Mount Eerie 

Phil: I feel like I just wanted to go bigger. I wanted to go beyond human...these emotional songs of torment or whatever were kind of adolescent. Not to be condescending toward them, ‘cause...I don’t know I wanted to...theres’ more to life than if you’re sad about a girl.

The sequel to The Glow pt. 2 is an immersive record about confronting the universe that, I’ve come to find, is my favorite thing that Phil’s former project ever made.

He called it Mount Eerie.

Then he left the country.

Brendan: Can you explain again exactly why you decided to move to Norway?

Phil: At the time I didn’t know why. I didn’t really have a reason. It was only in hindsight that I understood that the reason was to, um, grow up, basically.

It was sort of a fantasy I had since I was a teenager of, just like, moving somewhere. I think a lot of people have this fantasy, moving somewhere where you don’t know anyone and reinventing yourself, or just being unknown. And I had never been to Norway and so I thought, “ok, I’ll go there forever.”

His exile last for six months, during which time he lived in a small cabin outside the Norwegian town of Bodø.

His experience there tapped into what he’d been searching for while writing Mount Eerie.

Phil: I just view it, nature, as a blank piece of paper, a beautiful and complex blank piece of paper.

And when he returned, he took Mount Eerie as the new name for his recording project. If you’ve wondered what the significance of that name is for the last fifteen minutes, it’s a real place, and it shares Fidalgo Island with the town of Anacortes.

He settled there and founded P.W. Elverum and Sun, his private press for all of the things he’s makes: records, art books, packing tape, posters, zines, friends albums, and one-off CD-R mixtapes.

And it’s here where most profiles of Elverum run out of space.

music: “I’ll Not Contain You” | The Glow pt. 2

I’ve been getting frustrated with music journalism lately.

Like all forms of the fourth estate, it’s suffering from clickbait and accelerated news cycles, but few people care enough for Stories About Music to question this problem. I have a hard time not getting self-righteous about this.

The lack of focus has led to some shoddy work, especially on the bands that I love. It happens to every musician in the public eye, but there is something about Phil in particular that makes him easy to misconstrue.

Phil: Maybe, I complain about it a lot too, though.

And let he who is without sin cast the first stone. I myself have written dozens of awful, lazy profiles...my original sin being, of course, a story about Mount Eerie that I wrote six years ago.

When I first realized I was making Stories About Music, I knew that Phil would be a good place to start. It’a do over for my whole career, a chance to explain how Mount Eerie and Phil have evolved beyond the certain few details that are repeated over and over again.

music: “Through the Trees Part 2” | Clear Moon

This change began in two-thousand-twelve, when I also started to shift away from focusing purely on angst about girls, and started adding in a daily dose of existential anxiety to my life. At the same moment, Phil released a new album called Clear Moon. The opening track “Through the Trees, Part 2” took another left turn.

Brendan: It feels like something drastically changed. For the first time I felt like you were looking at the woods in a different way. Most of the early Mount Eerie stuff is exploring the inner self through the woods or, like, the woods are a metaphor for both the Universe and the inside of a person which, in a way, is also the universe. 

And I think that’s a really great moment because the sense that I get from listening to that song is this sense of...utter existential terror, is a good way to describe it. All of the sudden the primary metaphor that I’m used to from Mount Eerie has disappeared and the things that were once in harmony, are not in harmony any more.

Phil: Huh. I wonder what part of the song, specifically makes you feel that way.

“Misunderstood and disillusioned, I go on describing this place, and the way it feels to live and die.”

Phil: I think part of that is...I tend to talk about mortality in a way that I forget that it’s heavy, or sad. ‘Cause I honestly think about it matter-of-factly most of the time. Even when close ones to me die, family members or whatever. Of course I feel those things, and they’re very sad, but also, for whatever reason, it’s also on the forefront of my mind that, “that’s what happens.” That’s, uh...“no biggie!” Even though it’s like, the biggest biggie. 

Yeah, so, I wasn’t feeling dread or terror or existential heaviness with that song. I was trying to just, like, be as direct and factual as possible.

“I meant all my songs not as a picture of the woods, but just to remind myself that I briefly live.”

Phil: That song I almost felt like, I was trying to...almost like the album doesn’t officially include that song. That song is almost like a mission statement or a preamble or something. Like, ok, I’m about to sing these songs, but just to set a few things straight, here’s some information for you.

I remember writing that song actually, um, a day or two after doing an interview with somebody that was particularly...um, I just was left with this feeling of like, man, they...they didn’t get what I was trying to say, at all. I better try harder to say it more clearly.

“Can you see the river in the branches, and know that it means you will die, and that pieces are churning?”

Phil: I really sat down and was like, basically wrote a letter to the interviewer. I was personally thinking of this exact person, at least as a starting point, and just trying to spell it out, what my relationship with nature is, which maybe did change with that album.

“From now on, I will be perfectly clear: There’s no part of the world more meaningful, and raw impermanence echoes in the sky.”

I didn’t realize this before, but the natural world that Phil writes about isn’t an abstract. He’s just writing about home.

Phil: And it was really refreshing actually, to give up on metaphor and poetry and, uh, double-meanings and stuff, as much as I could. Just try and say the thing as directly as possible.

Brendan: While I was researching this, I found an article I wrote maybe five, six years ago, and rereading it and then comparing it to the notes that I’ve been taking and I guess the way that my relationship to your music has changed...I was like, “Wow, I feel like I didn’t get any of this right.”

Phil: I should be clear, I don’t blame anyone––It’s my own fault for all these misunderstandings. I shouldn’t take it for granted that I’m being clear. It’s not the responsibility of the listener to get these abstract and subtle ideas I’m trying to say.

Brendan: What drew you to the abstract ideas in the first place, if you wanted it to be incredibly clear?

Phil: My main goal is to say something true and not...empty. That’s pretty hard to start with. So if I wanted to be totally clear, if my main goal was being totally clear, then I would write songs about simpler things like...uhh...love. 

I guess Love’s not simple. But there are less abstract ideas to try and tackle but, uh, I’m trying for something bigger I guess.

Brendan: It’s interesting though, that, when you wanted to go bigger you ended up going more inside yourself, in a way. Pre-Mount Eerie, the band, you were talking about nature imagery as separated from yourself, but now it became a way of exploring your internal thoughts and feelings. 

Phil: Well I think also around that time I was reading more buddhist poems and this idea that the external world is actually just created by our own sensory organs. Everything is...solipsistic? I’m not sure if that word means that thing, but this idea that our...ourselves are actually seeing the world into existence, or thinking the world into existence at every moment. That chimed with me, that made sense with me. I think I still kind of write from that personal zone.

That personal zone, like the Anacortes forest lands, is murky. As an outsider, shining a flashlight on Mount Eerie once every album cycle, I can only see parts of this leviathan that Phil is wrestling with.

Leviathan

Brendan: Why do you want to try for something bigger? Phil: Well because we’re all going to die pretty soon, why not try and do the best possible thing while we’re alive? Brendan: That’s a good point. I guess...what I would like to know is, why this particular set of questions is important to you? Why is this the thing you want to explain before you die? Phil: I guess I don’t know what it is I’m trying to explain...I’m exploring it at the same time for myself. In a lot of ways, just describing my experience and the parts of my experience that feel like they tap into something bigger.

music: “Spring” | Sauna

Brendan: Do you feel like you have moments, often, where you’re able to be completely clear, like, completely in the moment or tap into existence? Phil: Yeah, sometimes. It’s been a while––but I used to have more regular routine of having really long breakfast coffees and reading books of poems out on the porch. I would give myself a lot of time to have these moments of blankness, like, blank clarity. But lately I’ve been swimming laps at the pool, like, deeply into swimming laps where I forget about everything other than this focus thought. Brendan: Early on, is that what recording in a studio felt like as well? Phil: No, and it still doesn’t. Recording is a complex and sloppy exercise which is super fun, but it’s more like creating worlds with clutter. To maybe, like, lay this little razor sharp idea on top of this cluttered world.

Complex and sloppy is exactly how I’d describe my experience producing radio stories and Phil’s purpose, to lay a razor sharp idea on top of a cluttered world, sounds very similar to mine.


Across fifteen years or more, Phil has mapped his internal and external landscape so well that I can see myself within it. By documenting my own experience with music, could I understand it better, explain it more clearly?

Could I understand myself?

“Mind falling like a flower blooming only to be known, borne across the sky unknown. Living life as if its not a passing animal dream, a poem, a brief shelter seen as home...a pool of placid water pours in the window. Nothing is impermeable the basements flooded, the walls are groaning in the wind...”

Phil: I’m not satisfied with any of them, actually, I don’t think there are any moments of clarity in any of them. I think that’s why I keep making records actually. I keep thinking, “no wait, let me try one more time.”

When we spoke, Phil had just finished preparing his new record, Sauna. Like “Through the Trees, Part 2” it pulls back far enough from the forest to see the town, and Phil, as well.

In the press release, Phil called “Sauna” the “ultimate” Mount Eerie record.

Brendan: Does that mean it’s also the last Mount Eerie album? Phil: I...didn’t decide what ‘ultimate’ meant. I left it open, and that’s the truth. I don’t know, I don’t know what the future is. But it does feel like I’m so satisfied with Sauna that if it were to be a stopping point, I would be satisfied with that. But...I’m not being coy right now, I actually don’t know what’s next.

While he figures that out, I’ll be right here, trying to figure out him, and so many others like him.  

music: “Sauna” | Sauna

Credits

Phil Elverum lives in Anacortes, Washington. Sauna is out now on P.W. Elverum & Sun.

You’ve been listening to Stories About Music. Our show was produced today by me, Brendan Mattox and approved by Kyna Doles. Our website is investigating regional scenes dot com, where you can find this and, very soon, other stories about music. If you haven’t already, subscribe to us using your local podcast provider.

All songs in this episode were written by The Microphones or Mount Eerie, except for the opening track “Floating Through Summer” written by Mark McGuire and Trouble Books.

The most helpful piece of research for this story came from the podcast The Wandering Wolf, by Yoni Wolf of the band Why. It’s a fascinating diary of a musician digging through his past to find his way forward. His interview with Phil Elverum from two years ago is fantastic, and fills in a lot of Elverum’s history that we didn’t have time to go into here.

Thank you, also, to Michaela, for her patience.

Promo

music: “The Weight (and the Sea)” | Lowercase

Next week, on Stories about Music.

Dan Erickson: I skated right through the dead times.

The story of Australia’s Bluetile Lounge and the subgenre that is Slowcore.

Alan Sparhawk: Yeah, slowcore, the irony of that is that we brought that on ourselves.