Sunday, February 8th, 2009 // Paperhouse
As of this writing it is 9 °F outside. According to weather.com, it “feels like 1°F.” The difference, at least to this author, seems entirely academic. On the bright side, we have only 49° to go until Celsius and Fahrenheit coincide and only 468° to go until the heat death of the universe.
Here are some of my favorite ice albums:
Terje Isungset — Iceman Is
So it probably won’t surprise you to find out that a lot of these albums are from Scandinavia. You know your geography. This one comes from Sweden. The group recorded in a studio carved beneath the famous Ice Hotel of Jukkasjärvi, which is sculpted entirely from ice every year and subsequently melts in the spring. All the instruments used in the recording were made of ice. The studio itself was made of ice. The album sounds like a gloomy pagan moon festival.
Elegi — Varde
Norwegian composer Tommy Jansen uses synthesizers, violins, and field recordings to represent the frigid travails of the first polar explorers. This is one of the bleakest things you may ever hear in your life besides, of course, the death cry your rabbit, Mr. Bingles, uttered when the formerly senescent family dog, Turbo, rediscovered his carnivorous impulses on a throw rug in the living room in 1993. The way Jansen toys with scale is amazing — sometimes you feel stranded amid expansive slurries and floes, other times it’s as if a spoon is tapping on a tin plate within the confines of your own tent.
Thomas Brinkmann — Klick Revolution
This album actually has very little to do with ice. It’s by a German who does peculiar things with turntables, most of which take away any desire you ever had to dance, or otherwise engage in club-related activities. Think of the sounds ice cubes make when you pour tap water on them. Now think of them splayed across a dark matrix of rhythm and radiant knife wounds. N-ice!
Douglas Quin — Antarctica
Quin got a grant from the National Science Foundation in 1996 to go to Antarctica. He used microphones and hydrophones to record Weddell Seals, Emperor Penguins, and the very glaciers themselves. This is a fieldwork of peculiar beauty and intensity. Sounds like ice because it is ice.
Sunday, February 1st, 2009 // Paperhouse
Dear David Berman,
It’s been over a week now since you said farewell to us all on the Drag City message board, and I can’t say that it’s been easy. You know, I feel sad about this, but it’s also hard to tell these days. Maybe it’s a door. But there are no doors underground, not in that cave where you’re going to sing your farewell songs tomorrow. I thought about meeting you there. But I don’t have much of a taste for spectacular tragedy these days.
I’ve been keeping up with the messages posted in response to your farewell. It’s kind of like looking at the Facebook profile of the kid in your hometown in the days after he was mauled by the lion escaped from the county zoo. You know what I’m saying. Everyone and everything comes out of the woodwork, blowing their noses and wiping their tears on the comfortless Kleenex of the Internet. They post public messages in the second person; they praise your deceased wonder. They reminisce over chance encounters and paint them as intimate portraits of a relationship strung through years of a one-sided infatuation.
And I wish I could say I am above those people, but publishing this letter to you proves that I am not. I have let the spit of your song fall onto my forehead so many times I thought I could claim baptism. When I last saw you in Pittsburgh, I confused our sufferings and walked away reminded of that inexorable sadness — maybe the same feeling you’ve come to call the burn for justice. Earlier this year you spoke of a crisis up ahead and you called for us to all assemble, you stepped up to be our hero. We got behind you in droves and waited for instructions to deploy.
But maybe you can only be everything if you reduce yourself to nothing. In the wake of newly formed absences, we will always try to hold onto whatever is left. So here I am on the highway, honking out of loneliness, and here I am on a chair floating in a sea of beer. Here I am, unable to believe what is at bay. Here I am, wearing my silly private’s uniform when my captain has long gone home.
Here I am, David, selfishly waiting for you to come back.
Yours in the Wild Kindness, MC
M. Callen | Special to The Tartan
Sunday, January 25th, 2009 // Paperhouse
New Orleans, perhaps more than any other American city, is a tottering coat rack of clichés. We hang all manner of cultural labels on the same rickety skeleton, some of them old and tobacco-stained, with holes in the elbows, others sleek and luxuriant, speaking to oily, Uptown affluence. Others still are flamboyant and rowdy, exploding with mismatched color. Jambalaya and Mardi Gras, jazz brunch and pirates, beignets and etouffée: there is no shortage of imagery the mere name of the place can conjure.
Well, I’m here to tell you that that rack of clichés is a lot like the coat check at a hot club. Sure, it holds a part of what’s happening inside, but it’s the least interesting, supervised part. In New Orleans, anyone with good sense scoots past the rack and penetrates the dark corners to find real action — they escape Bourbon’s lurid neon for the malt and miasma of Bywater dives and soul sets at Mimi’s. They leave Emeril be and slurp turtle soup at Mandina’s. They ditch downtown casinos for an oyster loaf, dressed, at Domilice’s. And maybe, just maybe, they forego “When the Saints” at Preservation Hall for sounds uncoiling in the shadows of the underground. Maybe, if they’re brave and clever, they flee the tired labels and find Backporch Revolution — a label, for true!
Backporch Revolutionaries don’t play standards: they filet them. Geisterfahrer’s ethereal drones and Archipelago’s swampy idylls bloom like toxic gas, sweet and vagrant as Binx Bolling’s malaise. Potpie splinters classic rock and then braids the strands into fugal loops, like a cannibal weaving jump rope from his supper’s locks. Other artists on the label record within beer distillery tanks, their bedrooms, and dilapidated studios. The lot of these weird experiments are then released on CD-R and occasionally spun on college radio. It’s all decidedly post-coat rack.
So whether you make a pilgrimage for the Gras a fortnight hence or remain cloistered on campus, I’m telling you: don’t get stuck fingering the coat rack’s glut. Stumble (or click) your way to the back porch. That’s where the revolution awaits.
