December 2021 – Page 2 – Plainly & Painfully

TRACK | Sibylle Baier – Tonight

Sibylle Baier’s Colour Green was “Recorded in the early 70’s in her home on a reel to reel recording device,” then sat unreleased for 40-50 years.

It is with a profound sense of dread that you consider this and realize that this set of tracks was one of the lucky ones. That most things of this caliber are, if recorded at all, languishing in moldy basements, storage lockers and landfills.

These were things that played live in a community, maybe, a handful of times, then had no outlet. Songs that the corporate scouting and release structure had no use for on commercial grounds, in a culture plagued by products. Ads on, in , and bracketing all media, like cancer in the body, determining what lives and dies. As artists or creators we have a responsibility to mitigate or eliminate this if possible.

Which is why Bandcamp is such a fine platform and model to emulate. Perhaps it will be bought out and crushed eventually. But for now it is the very best option available.

TRACK | Purple Mountains – All My Happiness is Gone

Howdy, friends, ever bought a digital album from a dead man?

“Lately I tend to make strangers wherever I go / Some of them were once people I was happy to know”

In my estimation, if you ever write a line that good for the rest of your life, it was more or less worth it. David’s death coinciding with the release of this album reminds me a bit of some anecdote from Camus about a young author who wrote a novel then (in part) killed himself to promote it. The joke is that it did get the attention of the newspapers but the work itself was universally panned.

Unlike this dead fellow, Purple Mountain’s self title release is superb. The parallel is only the timing, the creative act, and the demise. I also greatly enjoy Berman’s poetry, like this from 1999’s Actual Air:

“Snow”

Walking through a field with my little brother Seth
I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.
He asked who had shot them and I said a farmer.

Then we were on the roof of the lake.
The ice looked like a photograph of water.
Why he asked. Why did he shoot them.
I didn’t know where I was going with this.
They were on his property, I said.

When it’s snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.
Today I traded hellos with my neighbor
Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.
A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.
We returned to our shoveling, working side by side in silence.

But why were they on his property, he asked.

TRACK | The Worms – Quality Time

I have so many tabs open… I have not yet gotten to The Worms 2020 release Back to the Bog. But I did enjoy the holy hell out of 2016’s Everything in Order. So it would be no surprise if there are gems in there as well.

There is great buoyancy within this fuzz, and an elastic reverberation of muscle and meat. It is music made by humans and more or less for them. That is a compliment of the highest order, as I am also a man, of sorts, and prefer this type of music.

If you too make music for humans there might also be 5 Golden Merles in it for you. This is incentivization. This is priming the pump of the indifferent universe. I am accessorizing the void.

TRACK | Mar – Mother of Broken Men

Mar make excellent sludge metal and noise rock. This track is an aside, a kind of misrepresentative sampling of materials. But it is also my favorite track among many great ones and the one that fits best this kind of meandering assemblage of posts.

From John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards:

“There are no more secrets today than there were when Sun Tzu wrote. What we do have now is a worship of the idea of secrecy. The brief vogue of existentialism in the middle part of the twentieth century illustrates precisely what has happened. A philosophy which declares that people will be judged by their acts could not possibly survive in the West. (Instead) we believe that people are what they know and can be judged by their power; that is, by what they control. In a society based not upon action but upon systems, our place within the system determines our importance.

“The measure of our power is based upon the knowledge which either passes through our position or is produced by it. One of the truly curious characteristics of this society is that the individual can most easily exercise power by retaining the knowledge which is in his hands. Thus, he blocks the flow of paper or information or of instructions through his intersection to the next. And with only the smallest of efforts he can alter the information in a minor or major way. Abruptly he converts himself from a link into a barrier and demonstrates, if only to himself, his own existence.”

TRACK | Skeptics – Open Sea

Here I am quoting Toussaint on the Barcelona band and Orwell on the French one… the fact of the matter is that it doesn’t matter.

Both are flawed, heroic individuals disowned by the armchair left for impurities in their revolutionary action. One exiled to death and the other merely shot in the neck. From the cozy homes of the present, they were later deemed apostates, unworthy of the cause, as it develops in the void of the mind, pure, impossible, and bloodless.

What if you didn’t know the names of your own heroes?

“In the Ramblas they halted us while a borrowed band played some revolutionary tune or other. Once again the conquering-hero stuff — shouting and enthusiasm, red flags and red and black flags everywhere, friendly crowds thronging the pavement to have a look at us, women waving from the windows.”

“How natural it all seemed then; how remote and improbable now! The train was packed so tight with men that there was barely room even on the floor, let alone on the seats. At the last moment Williams’s wife came rushing down the platform and gave us a bottle of wine and a foot of that bright red sausage which tastes of soap and gives you diarrhoea. The train crawled out of Catalonia and on to the plateau of Aragon at the normal wartime speed of something under twenty kilometres an hour.”

Homage to Catalonia – G. Orwell.

TRACK | CHROMA – Por Llegar

Por Llegar is indicative of the sort of rage we collectively feel — or those individuals who are capable of feeling part of a collective — in the face of the overwhelming forces presently arrayed against decency.

As Toussaint wrote, “…that you should let yourself be deceived by our ancient tyrants who are only using one-half of our unhappy brothers in order to load the other with chains.”

“Nadie te va a salvar / No one is going to save you”

We are, unfortunately, the ones we have been waiting for. What else can you think watching teachers scramble on the floor as a sideshow in order to sustain themselves and provide basic materials for their students?

TRACK | The Caretaker – Hidden Sea Buried Deep

The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the End of Time is one of those beautiful, rare experimental audio art projects that breaks through into a more mainstream audience, somewhat similar to William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops or… I’m struggling to think of another example.

An irrevocable descent into dementia never sounded so good, for my money. The entire thing is engaging and grounded in a vision which holds up upon repeated listens, growing even, and asking difficult questions.

TRACK | Sheer Mag – Expect the Bayonet

Some of you latecomers may know this as the theme to Useful Idiots pod with Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper. But with great pride I say that I was among the billion people to have heard it prior to this exposure. Which still puts me in the top 12% of listeners. Not bad.

Sadly, such things are rare, this sort of lyrical content and impassioned delivery, in a format that is meant to be heard and not merely tolerated.

So before the worlds been reduced to soot
Solidarity for those underfoot
I better remind ya
Or you’ll surely regret
And if you don’t give us the ballot
Expect the bayonet

TRACK | Terrible Truths – False Hope

Teetering ideally between math and art rock, pop rock and garage rock, the core essence of it is simply good and engaging.

Rarely does it seem a song is written and recorded at such an optimal time for the elements that make up its composition.

This feels bottled at the right moment, excised from the aether more or less intact.

TRACK | Heaters – Levitate Thigh

For anyone who knows that hooks are made of metal and think that it’s high time they sounded like it.

In the writing I’d have probably lost my nerve and had that build successfully utilized once. But Heaters are wiser and more competent in their construction. And it is a thing of wonder.

Maybe this is all it takes to qualify the grand in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Lesser things have been given bigger honors.

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