R.I.P. Utah Phillips, 1935-2008. Don’t mourn, organize.
Archive for May, 2008
#220 – The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere
Thursday, May 29th, 2008#219 – Echolocation #12: Slings and Arrows
Sunday, May 25th, 2008the talk-singing of sue tompkins in the afterlife of life before buildings.
How to describe the talk-singing of Life Before Buildings lead singer Sue Tompkins?
Her voice, which drove the brief but brilliant band from 1999 to 2002, hurled accusations like poisonous darts, but the question was always whether those darts were in fact boomerangs.
As she repeated phrases over and over again — “my lips are sealed” on “Juno”; “high heels” and other phrases on “The Leanover”; “I forgot” on the breathtaking “New Town” — one started to wonder: was she seething at someone else (a boy, an authority figure, the world?) or was she angry at herself? Or both?
Life Before Buildings
This double messaging, outward and inward at once, with a fierceness that cut through both directions, cleared space for new kinds of emotional logics. It still sounds astounding long after the band has vanished. Though Tompkins went back to the painting that she trained for in Glasgow art school, her voice still pierces and expands, ricochets and sinks in.
#218 – White Bread
Sunday, May 25th, 2008a photographer’s wonder (bread).
Gregory Crewdson’s surreal landscapes are at once epic and mundane, grand-historical and absurd.
In “Untitled,” from his 1998 Twilight Series (in a bad reproduction here, but the only one available on the web), Crewdson presents towers of Wonder Bread in the woods on the edge of a suburban backyard, SUV and garage just off to the upper-left. Chickens and other birds circle the skyline of white bread among the ferns.
It is a startling mix of mass-produced and natural, of urban-looking stacks of Wonder Bread and a suburban backdrop, yet with a pastoral forest (or is it a more ominous jungle?) that could be an Eden of affluence (or a moldy hell of bird droppings, and soggy crusts).
If this is what it means to be white bread (and white bred), there’s much more going on than a lack of flavor: there’s a Babel-like flood of meaning; there’s food and rot, nature and artifice, affluence and decrepitude.
Gregory Crewdson, “Untitled,” from the Twilight Series (1998)
#217 – Echolocation #11: Lift Every Voice and Sing
Sunday, May 18th, 2008of field recordings, microphone placement, the individual, and the collective.
Sometimes, in a field recording, the microphone is serendipitously placed so as to create a whole new aesthetic of listening. Such is the case with Art and Margo Rosenbaum’s recording of “Let Me Fly,” by the gospel quartet of Sister Fleeta Mitchell, Rev. Nathaniel Mitchell, and Lucy Barnes.
The song, which appears on the wondrous Art of Field Recording, Vol. 1, features a marvelous trio singing the old gospel song. The performance is stellar, but what defines the recording is the way in which the microphone picks up the backup singers — Rev. Nathaniel Mitchell and Lucy Barnes — singing along with lead singer Sister Fleeta Mitchell.
We hear them listening to her. They pick up on this phrase and that, moving from replication to embellishment and back again. They are singing together and on their own; all at the same time and with different timings.
The microphone not only catches this, but accentuates this marvelous sense of simultaneous togetherness and separation. It’s a certain dynamic of singing together, which is that it also consists of singing apart.
And in the tension between the two, which the microphone absorbs and relays, captures and suspends, the musical sounds suggest a powerful way of living, a style of being both individuals and a collective.
The track is a testament both to the musicians and the recorders.
Image: Dust-to-Digital Recordings