Gem Club: Christopher Barnes (voice/ piano) and Kristen Drymala (cello)
This year I resisted the temptation to put my cool-o-meter up for public scrutiny by compiling an end of year ‘best of’ list.
I do however feel the need to flag up an album that could easily be passed by and disappear without trace.
Gem Club’s Acid And Everything came out of nowhere (well, Massachusetts actually) and made big impression. I say why in my review for Whisperin’ and Hollerin’.
It’s a record that makes a nice dreamy soundtrack to the post Yuletide lull that hits most people at this time of year.
It is available to download here – last month you could have got it for free but it’s worth $7 of anybody’s hard earned cash. If you err towards caution, you could get two of the five tracks (six if you could 50 seconds of birdsong that opens the EP) for nothing from Last.fm.
Or you could also let the images and sound of the video for Spine wash over you :
I am ashamed to confess that I was, until recently, unfamiliar with the work of Anne Sexton.
That I have discovered her now is thanks to a remarkable album by Val-Inc which I have just reviewed for Whisperin’ and Hollerin’. This record uses samples from two of Sexton’s poems read by the author herself. The poems are ‘Music Swims Back To Me’ and ‘Her Kind’.
These, as with all her poetry, came about as a direct result of therapy. Sexton struggled with depression and obsessions with suicide. Her psychotherapists advised her to try and put her fears into words. The result they may have been cathartic but didn’t serve as a cure as she eventually took her own life aged 46 in 1974.
She has been called a ‘confessional poet’ because of the candour with which she describes her profound anxieties and related struggles to connect with other people.
Many critics questions the artistic merits of writing , many more were uncomfortable with writing that was so raw and personal. This didn’t stop her from winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1967. on the strength of her collection ‘Live or Die’ .
To see the world without a filter is liable to drive anyone crazy. What is regarded as conventional and ‘proper’ behaviour means to play along with forms of deceit that make the unpalatable bearable. For instance, most of us prefer not to think about death until the grim reality of it stares us in the face through the loss of a loved one. To refuse to go along with this pretence is to risk, at best, being labelled lacking in social graces, at worth being certified as insane.
Sexton’s inner turmoil stems from the fact that she could not live her life according to the surface ‘pleasantries’ Erica Jong, wrote that: “She is an important poet not only because of her courage in dealing with previously forbidden subjects, but because she can make the language sing”.
This is her poem ‘Her Kind’ :
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
Film of her reading her works show that she was also a very sensual woman and what a great loss it was that she died so young:
Mat Sweet, aka Boduf Songs, has just released a new collection of morbid tunes via the Kranky label called ‘How Shadows Chase The Balance’- a fascinating un-light journey into a nightmarish world of dread, death and despair. Needless to say that Mat is no party animal!
I talked briefly Mat in February 2007 after a gig in Ravenna, Italy where he played support to the lovely Josephine Foster (reviewed at last f.m) .
The interview is part of a now longstanding personal project to write a book about the strange mutations of what is loosely branded as ‘Folk Music’ yet dwells in a kingdom apart from the homely traditions normally associated with that genre term.
Until such time as my magnum opus sees the light of day, it seems timely to publish Mat’s illuminating replies to my queries:Continue reading →
Marco Mahler has generously offered (for a very limited time only) his excellent debut album Design in Quick Rotation as a free download*
In my December interview for this blog, Marco described his music (with tongue firmly in cheek) as ““stark natured mellow indie-pop with a sturdyundertow that rescues the music from the negative space of haunting” . I described it in my review for Whisperin’ & Hollerin’ as “a calming record to live with and love”.
Either way this is an unrepeatable chance to grab a fine album so get it while it’s hot!
