Windy Day

It's that time of year again for the annual posting of one of the great animated shorts:

Some Questions for Sir Richard Bishop

Sir Richard Bishop is truly one of the most exceptional guitarists working today. He is best known for his work with the brilliant and inscrutable Sun City Girls, but his recent solo career is no less impressive. His most recent record, The Freak of Araby [Drag  City] is a wonder of technical virtuosity and authentic respect for his influences.

Bishop is currently in Southeast Asia (read his blog here) and was kind enough to answer some questions regarding his thoughts on the influence of occultism on underground music, his own thought on esotericism, and the difference between the inner and the outer. 

Questions for Jim Jupp (Ghost Box Recordings)

The British record label Ghost Box is something akin to a Wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities that contains things both fictive and real. But their proximity to each other makes it near impossible to sort out what is of the phenomenal world and what is inexplicable. Ghost Box (started by Jim Jupp and Julian House) is home to a number of remarkable musical groups, including Belbury Poly, The Focus Group, Advisory Circle, and Roj. Jim Jupp was kind enough to answer some questions about his work.

Your music plays with ideas of technological decay and natural technologies; the past haunting the future, the future finding its way back to infiltrate the past. What is about that tension that is so compelling as an artist?

You've hit on something there that I think we feel is an essential part of the labels aesthetic. Amongst the ideas that interested us when we started the label were EVP and the spiritualistic leanings of Jon Logie Baird and also Thomas Edison. There's something magical and plausible about that area where technology and spiritualism overlap.

Similarly we love the weirdness of the juxtaposition of ancient and modern, or the cosmic and the parochial. This is a common motif of British science fiction. In a John Wyndham novel, or a Nigel Kneale screenplay you will often find an archetypal English village where suddenly weird cosmic events break in, or a new technology will open up access to forbidden and ancient knowledge. Don't know if its known at all in the states but Nigel Kneale the creator of Quartermass wrote a one off "ghost story" drama for British TV in the 70s called The Stone Tape. In it a group of scientists trying to make a breakthrough in a new recording medium to replace tape realised that stone themselves store up a psychic imprint of events and sometimes replay them as ghosts. Its just the kind of thing that's a real touch stone for Ghost Box. 

White Rainbow: New Clouds

The fog over the harbor in Provincetown made it impossible to see anything beyond the crowd of fishing boats knocking up against the dock. Behind us, the Pilgrims Monument rose up and disappeared into the mist, ghostly, like it was both here and not here. Inside my heart was a dream I couldn't access because of all the other noise. I tried again when we were on the ferry just as the Harbor Islands began to emerge from the horizon. I went to the bow and let the wind push it all out of me. I wanted the fog and the mist and the sea to lift me. Gulls and cormorants bobbed along the currents until we got too close, and at the last moment, the precise moment, they took flight. I wondered why they wait so long, why I wait so long to allow these perfect moments to untie the knot that keeps me tethered.

Part of the trick, maybe, is finding that tension between being pulled and being grounded. Like the best kind of mystical experience, where you can't tell if you are moving towards the godhead, or the godhead is descending to meet you. In either case, it all happens in the halfway point, somewhere between the immanent and the transcendent.

Adam Forkner, performing as White Rainbow has hit on this beautifully with his release New Clouds [Kranky]. Lots of folks are using the essential grammar of rock and roll to sort out ideas about the ineffable (Om for example), but they often tend towards the metal end of the rock spectrum. Forkner is working from a different model, a little more Krautrock, a little bit of prog. While certain elements of those genres became the template for New Age Music, Forkner is able to find spiritual reflection without so much as a hint of saccharine. The production has a lovely fuzziness, not too produced, but lovingly put together. I imagine on vinyl this is the just the thing to get you through until 3am when sleep will pull you towards the rest of that half-remembered dream about cormorants and fog.

There were many paths in the forking road White Rainbow is going down on New Clouds. Forkner chose the middle path, somewhere between the world of loops, pedals and guitars, and something sublime where we are given the means to simply let go.


-- Tuesdays Rollers and Strollers [Excerpt]

Across 2 cities’ borders, a mystery of dislocation

My review of China Miéville’s new novel, "The City and the City," can be found here.

I recently interviewed Miéville in the Harvard Square haunt Casablanca, and had intended to post it as an audio interview. Here's what went wrong. I was using a hand held Sony digital recorder that was placed on the table between us. Said table acted a parabolic microphone and picked up every tiny sound in the restaurant except our voices. So I am having to transcribe the conversation. Hopefully it will be posted soon.

Stars of the Lid performing Arvo Pärt

Sort of speaks for itself.

Tim Cohen: The Two Sides of Tim Cohen

I have been habitually hard on myself lately, and it has to do with a struggle with my own skepticism. I have come to regard this part of myself as essential to avoiding what Umberto Eco has called "turning metaphysics into mechanics." But in doing so, I am becoming a detective with all the clues but nothing to investigate. Sometimes I forget that the answer has been, and has always been for me, in music and literature. When art aches towards transcendence, (and if George Steiner is right, all art does,) it is the ache that absorbs all the doubts, the loneliness, the emptiness. Somewhere along the way I forgot how much spiritual power exists in the longing, in the question. In the novel Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee, the titular character has a wonderful sustained argument with herself about the stories of gods and mortals couplings. Why, she asks, would a god want to bed a human? What about being human is attractive to them, would stoke divine desire. (desire that often has to be hidden in another form, such as a swan or a bull lest the mortal be destroyed by the pure form of the deity). The answer, she alludes to, is that there is something so unique and wonderful about the human desire for transcendence. It is our longing for them that makes them desire us.

Tim Cohen's album The Two Sides of Tim Cohen is a perfect antidote to my crippling skepticism. There is an unabashed calling out to the heavens, not for perfect answers, but because that is how we claim our own humanity. We reach out and we become more connected to the divine, not because something reaches back (although sometimes it does) but because that we are, like the gods, desirous of each other.

The title of the album hearkens back to the seventies, and while there is a bit of that decade winding its way around the songs, the album is not derivative. These are simple songs made complex by harmony and rhythm, and they carve themselves right into you. There is some texturing, a tiny bit of noise, but these are mostly stripped bare of anything extraneous. Everything sounds like it was recorded outside, in the hollows of a cave or under the bow of trees. Sounds echo from the hills, as Cohen walks along some sacred grove; grooving, dreaming, looking up, looking around, but never forgetting to look straight ahead.

--Take Aim Goliath