Spring Leafs

A Poem.

Clouds imperfect, blue-eyed by sky
    Try to soil my mood as they pass by
O, you! Spring,
    sneaking in patches of sunlight
    like an underaged kid on clubbing night,
    caught red-eyed
    caught tongue-tied
Which just goes to show –
    You can never really trust a season
Instead! Look down below –
    For the trees do not know treason
    and the fidgety leaves do not lie,
    stony-eyed (o fie!) as they waltz by

Heart/break

The close-harmony hymn set to a pulsating synth loop that kicks off Muchacho, Phosphorescent’s latest record, caught me off guard. This was an artist of the warm and full Southern sound, in my head, and this track is very minimalistic. Luckily, he pulls it off well. One song later, everything is back to normal with the long-winding Song for Zula. His previous record has been described as country soul, which made me realize that I really like country soul (or country funk, for that matter). It is a combination unlikely on first glance, and very reasonable upon the next. I would even propose a new genre for Muchacho’s Song: country doo-wop.

You have to really follow the words closely to realize Zula is a song of heartbreak. Of general heartbreak, I think, of something lost beyond a single relationship. “I saw love disfigure me into something I am not recognizing.” He goes on to say love trapped him, and that he has become suspicious, less open to it. It’s a beautiful, smooth song, which makes it all the more tragic – the oldest trick in the book, it puts me to mind of Eleanor Rigby for instance, which is also a string-laden tale of disillusion, but it still works wonders.

Right On / Ride On is really the kind of thing I was expecting here, a continuation of his last record. A sort of straightforward, funky Americana with a lot of heart but not necessarily the storytelling aspect that is so important to the genre. Alternating Right and Ride as the title suggests, I also hear both ‘ain’t nothing will last’ and ‘nevertheless’, and both ‘hate’ and ‘hey you’ to ‘turn him right/ride on’. I am not sure if those quips are on purpose or just ambiguity introduced by my own mind, but I like the idea of it.

This theme of duality, of one thing replacing the other, and back again, is further developed in the next song. ‘I was the wounded master, then I was the slave / I was the holy writer, then I was the page.’ That is what has passed, but what is yet to come can also go both ways: ‘I could be forever or just a couple of days’. And after this, if only to prove my point, we are launched right into another doubly named song, viz. A Charm / A Blade.

The theme of heartbreak introduced in Zula is omnipresent. When it comes to the heart there is no hiding behind metaphors.

Cut my heart but do it fast

You’re telling me my heart’s sick,
and I’m telling you I know

The reference to anhedonia suggests an apathy of sorts has followed from the heartbreak. ‘All the music’s now boring to me,’ is how you know you’re really in trouble (I worriedly call to mind The Libertines, who preached that ‘if you lose your faith in love and music, the end won’t be long’).

The album is bookended by two tracks that sum it all up, that have both the duality and the heartbreak, and show very clearly that this album, as is often with artists, is a psychological process, is about shaking off his blues. Whereas the introduction is an invocation for the sun to rise, a plea, a good forty minutes later the sun is, in fact, rising.

Ease, be easy, oh.

Stones and Oceans

Excerpt from Kleinzeit

Sister stood holding the helmet, listening to the clink of money falling into it. I don’t know if this is right, she said to God.

What’s wrong with it, said God.

Is it, I don’t know, heathenish? said Sister.

You’ve got to move with the times, said God.

Are we talking about the same thing? said Sister.

One usually does, said God. I mean how much is there to talk about really. It’s pretty much all one thing, isn’t it.

I said is it heathenish, said Sister.

I know you did, said God, and I said you’ve got to move with the times.

Thank you very much, said Sister. It’s been a great help talking to you. I really mustn’t keep you from your work any longer.

I welcome interruptions really, said God. Creation isn’t the cut-and-dried thing people think it is. You don’t do it once and then it’s all done, like in that Haydn oratorio. It’s a day-in, day-out thing. You stop for the blink of an eye and it’s all come undone, all to do again. And goodness knows I’ve blinked from time to time. And of course there are bad days and good ones just like what goes in a world. Some days I don’t get a good idea for millennia. But you were saying.

I was saying Goodbye for now, said Sister.

Till soon, said God. It’s always a pleasure chatting to you. As people go you don’t talk badly. Mostly all I get from people is nonsense. For anything like reasonable conversation you have to go to stones or oceans.

- Russell Hoban

Between Insults We Performed Art

[1]

In 1917, in reaction to the horrors of the First World War, a group of young and confused artists came together in Zurich to try to make sense of it all. Though now regarded by some as a significant and important art movement, Dada started as the very opposite: an attempt to make anti-art. To break it all down. They were nihilists. Dada performances in the Cabaret Voltaire, in the tradition of de Sade and Lautreamont, attempted to shock and scandalize the audience. Many times they ended in a riot. It's easy to see why. For instance, they would announce a Bach concert, only to create a large cacophonous hullabaloo on stage. The crowd naturally protested. Other times they would all get undressed on stage, or all talk at the same time. They bet they could empty out a hall in twenty minutes, and they did.

[2]

In early 1984, four young twentysomethings from Scotland formed a band and started playing live. They called themselves The Jesus and Mary Chain. The guitarist was out of tune, the drummer's kit was limited to two drums, and the bassist's guitar had only half its strings ("that's the two I use, I mean what's the fucking point spending money on another two? Two is enough.") Because the band, due to their rambling and noisy sound, struggled to get gigs, they would show up early at venues and announce themselves as the support band. Then they'd play a very short set before quickly getting out. This set consisted mostly of twenty minutes of guitar feedback, and the band playing with their backs to the audience. The crowd would throw bottles at the stage and riot. When mainstream media like The Sun got word of this, they ran headlines on these occasions, calling them the new Sex Pistols, and subsequent gigs would attract people simply looking for a fight. It was partly on the attention out of this, that the band would become famous and attain the cult status they now have.

[3]

In 2006, The Guardian ran a piece on a new phenomenon called Wyatting. It was elicited by a new line of jukeboxes that was connected to a large archive of all sorts of music, instead of the limited choice old models used to have. Some people saw this as an interesting opportunity to annoy a large number of people at once. They would put on a long, experimental piece - often of the minimalism, free jazz or noise variety - and watch on in amusement as people gradually got up to leave. The phenomenon was named after Robert Wyatt who, when asked about it, said: "I don't really like disconcerting people. Although often when I try to be normal I disconcert anyway".

Alone Again Or

The opening track of Forever Changes is such a remarkable thing, the more I think about it. It's so delicately arranged, with that wonderful Mariachi-styled trumpet solo - you'd almost miss the sadness that permeats the song.

The thing that defines it is schizophreny. The title already suggests a lingering, an uncertainty, and the lyrics bring it home. A line as wonderfully optimistic as I think that people are the greatest fun is followed up, oddly enough, by and I will be alone again tonight my dear. The conjuction there suggests there is an obvious causal relation, but I don't quite see it.

Interestingly enough, the double feeling of this, their most famous, song, is symbolic for the band. One of only two songs on Forever Changes written by Bryan MacLean, yet sung by Arthur Lee. MacLean was the outgoing one of the band, and was deeply immersed in the West Coast hippie scene with The Doors and The Beach Boys. Arthur Lee, on the other hand, spent the summer of love as a recluse in his mansion on the hill: sitting on a hillside, watching all the people die. Because of both his distance and proximity to the scene, he foresaw more than anyone how the counterculture movement would implode. It is almost as if MacLean gave Lee part of the lyrics, and the latter appended his own grim observations to it. It's both the beauty, hope and optimism of the idealogy of the times, and the paranoia and disillusion that would follow, all wrapped up in one wonderful three-minute song.