In our latest podcast Ben Pantrey interviews former musician of the month Bartholomew Ryan in Lisbon. They discuss his new album ‘Jabuti’ composed while on retreat in Brazil, just prior to the pandemic, as well as the creative process and the importance of loafing.
We previously published the lyrics to Ryan’s song ‘Iguatu‘.
Ben also recites an important passage from Milan Kundera‘s 1995 novel Slowness which served as the original inspiration for Ryan’s musical project.
Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature? There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence in a metaphor: ‘They are gazing at God’s windows’. A person gazing at God’s windows is not bored; he is happy. In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing: a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for the activity he lacks.
Enjoy!
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‘Descend the stairs, bend your legs, melting one by one. / Open your mouth to the snake in the sand, swallowing you one by one.’ So begins the first single from our latest album. It’s one of my treasured moments in the meandering Loafing Heroes journey: in how it came about, how it was constructed, the unfolding of its words and arrangement, and how it sounds on the record.
“Stairs” sums up much of what I dream about with this music, its vision and where I’m at – then and now. Because, really, however much I say this is the end of a project, or that it is the beginning of a new one; we are really, always, in a way, wrenched into the middle of things, into the middle of life.
Feeling heartbroken at the end of a relationship, trying to come to terms with the death of a loved one, suddenly hearing by accident a special song from a moment in your life, or catching a smell that brings you somewhere, smothering you with longing, nostalgia, a great sadness or joy – these all throw me into the middle of things, into the middle of life.
We are suddenly tuning in again – or rather – we may feel that we are spectacularly out of tune with the regular speed of day-to-day, calculative life, and in tune for a moment with another world that is alarmingly alive.
Months can go by when no new song emerges, as an energy once bubbling over deserts you, and you think, well, that’s the end of that. Or, perhaps you say that I must find a way to begin again, do something new. And then it comes.
Sometimes all it takes is to hear someone speak, watch a concert, see someone dance, or travel in the countryside away from the chatter of the city. In my case, the intervention came in the form of a visiting friend called Jonathan.
Along the great river
After a lifetime thinking about it, I had been travelling along the great river Amazon for almost 3000km, listening to the mesmerizing cacophony, seeing the green, green, green of all the jungle, and following the trail of an extraordinary human called Roger Casement. After making it back to Europe, I went straight on a tour with the band to Ireland for two weeks, and then finally returned to my apartment in Lisbon.
I just wanted to be alone for a few days after being in such close quarters with people on the road. But Jonathan was staying at my place and he was still there. He was full of beans and delighted to see me, and yet he could quickly see that I was a little moody and withdrawn.
But that wouldn’t stop him. He knew that I hadn’t written a song in at least six months. So that evening, we forced ourselves to play a game. He offered me three words – ‘hair’, ‘software’ and ‘snake’; a chord to begin; and thirty minutes to come up with something. That’s how the song ‘Stairs’ came about.
I was thrown into the middle of things – I found myself diving, drowning and then submerged in the interlude, and suddenly I was singing about my hair being on fire and my skin turning to water. It was exhilarating, liberating, revealing. For me, that is what making music is all about. And if you can connect that creation and performance with someone else – then it really is alive.
I began The Loafing Heroes back when I was living in Denmark doing a Phd on Kierkegaard, where I met a wandering soul called Jamie from Arizona. We started making music together and recording the first Loafing Heroes songs.
Four years later, I was living in Berlin pursuing a career as a philosophy lecturer wondering where to go next with the music. The spirit of The Loafing Heroes is that it morphs with the people that have come in and out over the years. This allows diverse flavours and colours to emerge and fade away along the trail.
We recorded three albums in Berlin: Unterwegs (2009), Chula (2010) and Planets (2011). With Jonathan – yes the same one (from Berlin), another Jaime (this one from Nebraska), and Noni (from Dublin).
My dear friend and gifted songwriter Michael Hall whom we all affectionately called Big Bear produced the first album (Unterwegs) and was present throughout the album. He died tragically in 2013, yet his ghost continues to haunt and inspire us.
After four years, we all found ourselves going in different directions. I headed down to Lisbon to begin a research project on the enchanting poet of multiplicity – Fernando Pessoa; Jonathan formed another band called Fenster that have gone on to record some really special experimental pop music; Noni set off to work on solar energy in Rwanda; while Jaime remained for the time being in Berlin, but would remain committed and connected to The Loafing Heroes. She plays the bass clarinet – one of the trademark sounds of the band over the last ten years – and has recorded on all of our six albums.
The three other albums were recorded while based in Lisbon (Crossing the Threshold [2014], The Baron in the Trees [2016] and Meandertales [2019]). I met Portuguese novelist João Tordo on my first night in the city, and he became a new loafing hero, and played double bass on the two albums before Meandertales.
I glimpsed Judith with a violin on her back one night at The Lisbon Players Theatre, and soon she was playing with us too. From Germany, Judith actually makes her own violins and violas, and has played on all three of the last albums.
Other musicians and friends have weaved in and out, but before Judith left Lisbon to return to Germany she introduced me to Giulia with a plan for her to join. From Italy, Giulia is now at the centre of the band, playing autoharp, piano, percussion, concertina, and singing and writing songs on the last two albums.
To complete this crooked cosmopolitan tale, four of our albums have been produced and mixed by our very talented, generous comrade and friend from Greece – Tadklimp.
Many of the songs have evolved from various strange places; on the one hand, from travelling through vast expansive landscapes; and, on the other, hiding away in dark melancholy, verging on paralysis, in the interiors of a room that can sometimes seem like a shrinking capsule.
Loafing is always essential in an age of increasing speed, technological overload, psychological detachment and environmental collapse – as we humans exhaust everything under the sun.
Let’s slow down. Let’s wander. Let’s see and think anew, and laugh. Let’s channel and imbibe energy not into potency, possibility and power; but rather as actual, as here and now, in everything that exists. Energy as a passive ‘is’.
These twelve new songs (constructed by Giulia, Judith, Jaime and I), from our new album under the title Meandertales, encompass the distorted fairytale and dream-folk that throw us into the middle of life. In the totality and disintegration of chaosmos, in this loafing musical endeavor, I work and play to transform my energetic pessimism into a subversive joy.
What does it mean to be a loafer? Loafing as an activity has always existed. It has been carried out, witnessed, imagined and sung since the dawn of human time; from the ancient Aborigines on their walkabout, to the modern idling of the nineteenth and twentieth century dandies. Today, loafing as a mode of existence, may well be one of the last subversive acts and means of combating and living affirmatively amidst the information and technological age.
The loafer is more than just a flâneur, epitomised by a Baudelaire or Wilde; he or she can be bucolic or urbane, a scientist or poetic seeker – anyone from Einstein to Yeats. And far from lazy in the vulgar sense, on the contrary, the loafer is never really at rest, but attuned to the present, and observing from various perspectives at the same time.
A loafer is not bored; boredom comes from a forgetfulness of the power of the imagination; boredom is the great trick of marketers who vomit out messages demanding we purchase our entertainment, and sell us things we don’t need. Most of us live in a world where the power of advertising effectively distracts us from the impact of what we are consuming, and implicitly accepting.
A loafer can enjoy waiting and musing; a loafer does not become irritated that he or she has to wait an extra minute for change at the supermarket, or partake in beeping and cursing obscenities to others while stuck in traffic, when they are part of the traffic; a loafer does not do a mountain or a country, but rather ascends a mountain and wanders a country. To paraphrase the Irish philosopher John Moriarty, the geography of the loafer’s mind becomes the geography of the landscape he or she travels in.
As an example, James Joyce’s novel Ulysses emphasises loafing in at least two major ways. Firstly, in its conception, Joyce – as external and internal itinerant – creates a work that is an alternative journey or odyssey on the periphery of war-torn Europe.
This is a difficult work that unfolds before the reader’s eyes with Joyce making his way as he writes, a book that becomes ever more sprawling as the episodes proceed. It defies schematic dogmatism, but simultaneously the work – merging chaos and cosmos expressed in Joyce’s words ‘chaosmos’ and ‘thisorder’– is contained within strict boundaries. Out of difficulty, arrives a wealth of possibility.
Hardly any aspect of Western culture is left out in that account of a single day in Dublin on June 16th 1904, the day in which Joyce went on his first official date with Nora Barnacle who would become his muse, lover, wife, mother of his children, and companion throughout his entire adult itinerant life. Thus, the day marks a day of love and affirmation as well as being a universal modern bible of homelessness and homecoming.
Secondly, there is the main character of Leopold Bloom – the majestic loafer – at once sad-eyed and sharp as a hawk in his observations. If the scientist seeks to understand reality and the mystic seeks to experience it directly, then Bloom, as loafer, does both.
Statue of James Joyce in Trieste, where he lived on and off between 1904 and 1920.
Real time is that of the observer. Many Westerners have lost the secrets derived from mystical sources, but these are only other aspects of a wider reality in less alienated societies. Thus deprived, many seek for this connection in exotic realms which are removed from their society and detached from their own suffering. It is often easier to access the magic in strange, unfamiliar landscapes than in one’s own seemingly all too familiar, cynical and faithless culture.
Throughout the course of our lives, like Leopold Bloom, many of us will be confronted by tragedy at some point or enter dark places from which we find it difficult to escape. And each one of us is going to experience an apocalypse – our own particular death. As established religions have declined, a spiritual void has emerged in many people’s lives. But perhaps our own poetic traditions can offer the solace that many people seek, offering answers to which we are culturally attuned.
The secrets and the answers are right here in front of us in slowness, in loafing, in singing. Yes, because music too can lift the spirit, as both Joyce and Leopold Bloom attest. As the Irish writer Sean O’Faolain (although himself a chief critic of Finnegans Wake) put it: ‘In the presence of great music we have no alternative but to live nobly’.
As Joyce famously said himself of Finnegans Wake, if you cannot understand the text – then simply read it aloud and hear the music of it. The same goes for Ulysses. Walter Pater’s line is the key to Joyce’s experimental writing of the challenging music episode of Ulysses when Bloom wanders into the side room of Dublin’s national concert hall in the afternoon: ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’.
Loafers have sung eloquently throughout history, from the first Provençal troubadours who invented our modern idea of Romantic love, down to some of our finest popular late twentieth century musicians from the Brazilian Bossanova and Tropicalia movements, to the Celtic Soul fusion of Van Morrison.
Our contemporary society prizes speed, efficiency and growth and looks askance at activities deemed unproductive. In particular the loafer is anathema to a culture which has absorbed a work ethic equating time with money.
Yet perhaps the greatest achievements occur when the mind is at rest and seemingly unproductive. Peripheral vision allows us to look beyond conventional ideas and draw inspiration. One has only to think of Einstein discovering the theory of relativity while daydreaming in a patent’s office, or of Newton grasping a theory of gravity while dawdling under a tree. It is often as the poet, the philosopher or the scientist roam the busy city streets, or rolling hills, that the real work is done.
By embracing loafing now and then, we remove ourselves from the maelstrom of a contemporary culture where slowness and alternative ideas are devalued. The world is motored by rampant consumerism despite our knowledge that it creates great anxiety and is rapidly destroying and usurping much of the landscape for other animal and plant species to continue to exist.
Only by taking time out for undistracted reflection can we think about what is really happening and what we really need for our wellbeing. Crucially, the loafer Leopold Bloom’s first conversation is not with a human being but with a cat, and he treats the animal equally and with humor and tenderness, and it is from there that Bloom begins his odyssey through Dublin – observing, walking, feeling, ogling, helping, dreaming and loving for the world, rather than merely being in the world.
Loafing might thus be seen as a revolutionary act, which, if taken seriously, has the capacity to bring meaningful benefit and transformation to individuals and society at large. Our world which, to quote Joyce, is ‘ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void”. This expression, buried deep in the penultimate episode of this colossal book of loafing, may well be the definition of art, beauty, Ulysses and existence itself.
