Cassandra Voices

Tag: Music

  • Musician of the Month: Damien Lennon

     

    Thought Experiments from Time’s End

     

     

    History …is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.

    (Walter Benjamin, XIV, Theses on the Philosophy of History).

     

    Grammar expresses a human desire to control time. Regimented in terms of right and wrong, grammar draws lines by which people can express themselves as concurring or not with their own era. Breaking with grammar rules has often been seen as a form of resistance against the dominant forces of a time: take le verlan in disaffected French suburbs for example. But in corona times this paradigm has been inverted: the notion that humanity is at the heart of time has been annihilated. And now, our era has rejected us. Suddenly our grammar is exposed as fantasy. But wasn’t there always an implicit arrogance in the phrase “next week I will be sitting in Tulum drinking tequila”? It seems hubristic that humans are grammatically equipped to script their own future when anything can happen. Such reflections have been on my mind since our latest release flukishly coincided with the pandemic.

    In 2016 Zeropunkt recorded some dystopian improvisations and then parked them. Fort Evil Fruit expressed interest in 2019 and we jumped. We decided to call the album Future Perfect Continuous, inspired by the presumptuousness implicit in the tense, and the promise of an eternally blissful and unshakable utopia suggested in the actual words. The album took slightly longer to release than planned, ultimately concurring with the pandemic, making the title uncanny in a world where time had stopped. Life as we knew it had ended. We’d left the rigid regime of “time” and entered what Henri Bergson called durée (duration).[i] Human temporality had been exposed as an absurdity. Suddenly duration, not time, reigned over human existence, and we were in profound existential shock.

    The collapse of routine temporality can have a revolutionary feel about it. Seismic events upending time systems have occurred before. A revolutionary calendar was adopted in Republican France from 1793 to 1805. And Walter Benjamin mentions the later 1830 revolutionaries shooting at public clocks in Paris in order to stop time.[ii] A collapse of normal temporality can feel like a messianic occasion for progressive change. And it can be. But this overlooks how forms of human order can tend to just exchange places. Old order time gets replaced by revolutionary time, which becomes new order time, which in turn becomes old order time replaced by ‘new’ time, etc.. Humanity gets encircled by its own temporal systems, enclosed in its own bubble. Meanwhile, non-human time scales, the geological and the cosmic, continue happily in their duration – simply being.

    The coronavirus suggests we’re not special after all. Our personal and collective narratives hang by a thread, overblown in their significance and existing within scripted histories. Geological and cosmic history are very indifferent to our stories. There is undeniable arrogance in assuming our (hi)stories are the ultimate ones. We’re not the official account of the world – not by a long shot. Our consciousness of cosmic immensity doesn’t help us live our miniscule lives any better. Specialists in morbidity despair at the vast nothingness of the universe, but most people ignore it altogether. However, denial increases our nausea and dread doesn’t help. Being a speck in the void isn’t reassuring, but if you think about it, speck and void need each other to be.

    Remember that famous Carl Sagan “pale blue dot” poster, depicting Earth as “a mote of dust in a sunbeam”? Our planet is shown as a tiny dot in the cosmic dark. It should make us despair, but we realise that without the dot the immense darkness is indecipherable nothingness, and without the black backdrop the tiny dot cannot be seen. They both need each other to be what they are. Our microscopic relevance to the cosmos might not seem encouraging, but that immense emptiness can’t be discerned without our tiny cogitations. And, of course, if nothingness is the cosmic majority, doesn’t that make our puny somethingness a very concentrated sort of special? In a way, we register the cosmic existence because we express it. The cosmos can’t recognize itself – its recognition happens in the expression we give to it. This doesn’t mean the cosmos only exists when we exist. It just means its being is not registered – because we aren’t there. Our expression is the thing that gives being recognition.

    The desert is the best place to go if you are obsessed with these things. It immediately tames any extravagant ideas you might have about human narratives. I visit the Mojave Desert semi-regularly. There, human time really does appear pathetic. When you immerse yourself in its rocks and dust, you are stunned by the vast theatre of geological time.

    Photograph by Damien Lennon

    The desert is geological time’s grand museum. There are rocks there of unfathomable age. The time-scape of the desert constantly reminds you it can swallow you in a cosmic equivalent of less than a microsecond. In fact, gazing into it, you realise that it already has, that you are behind it in temporal terms. The “you” standing there is a premonition of the ghost you haven’t yet become to yourself. The significance of your story has already been unwritten in dust. The desert is way ahead of you, and way behind you. As a temporal expanse, it precedes you so thoroughly, and succeeds you so thoroughly, that whatever little moment you think you are having there is just an insignificant vanity. To the desert it means nothing whatsoever. Thinking like this makes it hard to reckon the place of the human story.

    Even botanical time in the desert can be extraordinary by human standards. There are creosote bushes in the Mojave called “King Clone” which are about 11,700 years old. When you see them in the searing sun they look quite mundane. You would never imagine them to be extraordinary. And I suppose, on a cosmic or geological scale, they aren’t. But we don’t process time that way. Such scales make us feel even more irrelevant when considering how difficult it is to survive the desert. Most humans wouldn’t last than 10 days there without water. That’s quite a contrast with 11,000-year-old bushes.

    Walter Benjamin both loved and doubted the human story. He dreamt of blasting fragmented instances out of oppressive narrative history, disrupting its clean lines by elevating sudden intensities that blow the continuum apart and resonate across time. A salient shard from the past would slice into a stunned present – bleeding chronological time to death. I wonder what he would have made of the Mojave, a zero point that obliterates linear time utterly. There, all credibility in human continuity from past to present to future vanishes. The desert proves continuity is not the succession of moments, not a continuum, but continuance: one cosmically long state of being.

    Ultimately along cosmic and geological scales, we are irrelevant. And despite earning our own era, the catastrophic Anthropocene, the monumental expanse of cosmic time from nothing to nothing surely relegates us to the smallest universal footnote. Maybe we take ourselves too seriously, but do we have any other option? We are clearly in some sort of time, so how do we live it? Perhaps we should abandon the sense of ourselves as a story, a narrative; a beginning, middle and end.

    Instead we could think of ourselves as a state of being only – before which we were nothing, and after which we will be nothing. If there is immense nothingness before us and after us, should we despair? We’re not as enduring as helium and hydrogen, and we are a minute blip on the universal scale. But instead of despairing, maybe we could be minimalist and egoless about it. Couldn’t we see our lives as a thrilling fluke, a fleeting thing dense with multivarious experience, like some rich sub-atomic, micro-temporal explosion? Something the cosmos knows as a glitch, but we experience as the condensed totality of our passions. Maybe we could be irrelevant and exceptional.

    For anybody these questions are pretty traumatic. For an artist they get invasive. I prefer improvising music to writing it, because I want to engage the single moment and then let it go. When it works it’s really something. But sometimes it doesn’t. We’re not always pre-disposed to being-in-the-present – we get distracted. And I’m not suggesting it’s “better” to improvise than write. I really do admire people who write great songs or pieces of music, who leave some sense of legacy. Most of my heroes are these people. Yet I’m half suspicious that this is an atavistic romanticism I got contaminated by. I can’t help feeling I’ve accepted this idea of legacy (a sort of calcified time product) as a necessary fiction we assent to, despite knowing it’s bullshit. I mean, five minutes in the desert tells you it’s bullshit.

    Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore can help us out of this paradox. They promoted the notion that poetry can happen when we recognise our existential fictions as fictions and still “believe” in them.[iii] They advocated the idea of being “literalists of the imagination”, people tasked with creating “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”[iv] That breaks with a certain type of “grammar” of course. It rejects a logical order – that distinct category between imaginary and real. But it also creates while destroying. We use the rules to break the rules, spinning in our circles. Our era has rejected us, absolutely. It wants to void us. And yet we are here, modest as a speck. Time appears perhaps to be an imaginary garden after all, but we are the real things who must inhabit it.

     

    Damien Lennon is a member of experimental improv group Zeropunkt. His new collection of minimalist poetry was recently published in a dual edition with Rosmarie Waldrop by hardPressed poetry (available here).

    Photograph by Paddy Kiernan

    [i] Henri Bergson. Matter and Memory. Trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Cosimo Inc. 2007.

    [ii] Walter Benjamin. “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. In Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1973.

    [iii] Wallace Stevens. “Imagination as Value”. In The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011.

    [iv] Marianne Moore. “Poetry”. In New Collected Poems. Heather Cass White ed. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2017.

  • Quarantine (and then there will be the music)

    It was the silence. The sound of total silence. A deep peaceful vibration carrying the bells from a church I never knew I could hear from this window. The acoustic of silence was able to carry it as if it was across the street, like an apartment in Paris or Vienna, but here in NYC around the corner from Leonard Bernstein Way, birds were singing louder than any singer at nearby Juilliard or Lincoln Center. This was April 4th 2020 and the city for the first time, the world for the first time, was totally shut down. No noise on West 66th Street except for the sound of birds and the feel of a clear breeze. A personal miracle just happened to me because of the pandemic, I don’t have to move out of my apartment of twenty-four years in a building I’ve lived in for thirty-five.

    Twenty-nine years ago, 1989 my first Saturn return, I had been given my first big break by one of the greatest channelers of music, of language, of life, Leonard Bernstein. LB chose me to go on for an ailing famous singer, it was the only time he conducted Candide the operetta/musical he wrote for Broadway after his signal identifying masterpiece, West Side Story.

    Leonard Bernstein

    I had been anointed by the master. Though I was in love with Prince as much as Mozart, LB was a conduit, a crystal microcosm to what my life would be about for the next twenty-nine years. My second Saturn in 2019 resulted in an amazing bookend, I was onstage singing several roles – one of them Queen Elizabeth I – in the world premiere of Olga Neuwirth’s Orlando, at the Vienna State Opera. I had sung in just about every major opera house except for this jewel of a theater which has been bedazzled by the presence of all the great opera composers. But Saturn brought me to this mystical coda and with it, I brought ten years of having had a Uranian shock, a change in musical direction from a very successful classical career into the realms of pop, funk, rock, jazz not only singing and on keys, but as a songwriter, music director, producer, arranger and record label founder.

    So on December 9th 2019 – almost twenty nine years to the day when I stepped on stage with LB and the London Symphony orchestra – the call coming on a pay phone outside of the Belgian National Opera in Brussels; all happening so quickly and inexplicably, that no one could be there to witness it, having to patiently wait years before the video that was made could be viewed on something not even invented yet: YouTube. However, in 2019, this Saturn return, this opening night there was the time to make sure everyone could be there that was important in my musical life. George Clinton, the Godfather of Funk with whom my beloved funk-rock band, Miss Velvet and The Blue Wolf had toured the globe for the past three years; friends, family, fellow musicians, all were there in the hallowed hall of Mozart, Mahler, Beethoven and Berg, documenting this spectacular evening on iPhones, Instagram, Facebook, and live streaming.

    New York

    The planets were all converging behind the scenes to set the stage for the coming Age of Aquarius; the convergence of Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn; heralding the end of an era and the last big party before Covid-19. I returned to New York from Vienna in mid-January after spending my birthday there alone, enjoying the solitude and loneliness after a busy and exciting year. Always superstitious of how one spends one’s birthday and New Year’s, as a way to set a tone for the coming year, in hindsight, it was not only precognitive, but I guess good to know I felt pretty damned good in my solitude.

    I walked around Vienna on January 13th and reflected on what had happened in just a year’s time from one birthday to the next: the release of my second solo album, High Tides with a radio tour on the label I founded, Isotopia Records; accompanying George Clinton and his wife on the red carpet at the 2019 Grammy’s; a tour to Hawaii, Australia and Japan with Miss Velvet and the Blue Wolf; playing with the band upon our return at the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Awards to honor George Clinton, then forty-five more shows with George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic on the One Nation Under the Groove Tour; the release of the band’s second album which I produced this time with George Clinton as featured guest; the release of a new artist, Lemoyne Alexander and then suddenly it was October and the contract I had held in my hands for three years for the Vienna State Opera, was about to become more than a promise and a piece of paper, it was about to become real. And this time, my two mini dachshunds would come with me as I would be in Vienna for three months.

    Upon my return to 66th street, dragging twelve suitcases and the nostalgia of leaving Europe behind, I found that the front door to my apartment had been taken down and replaced with a new door by the building’s management company. Of course, no one noticed that on the door they disposed of was a painting I had done years before and the new door was a plain white generic one made to fit in with the ‘new renovations’ to ensure everything looked uniform, corporate, anodyne. The dis-ease of greed and herd decorating. I left my suitcases unpacked tripping on them every day, with the excuse ‘well you have to move and now with this vulgar white door, who cares, you can do it’.

    Creative Sanctuary

    You see this apartment was my spot, my creative sanctuary I came back to ten years earlier after my life had fallen apart. Discovering that having doormen who knew me since I walked through those doors as a hopeful twenty-three year old singer – being there through my parents’ divorce, two failed marriages, bringing stepchildren back and forth, the deaths of close friends and pets, my successes and disappointments, discrete and not so discrete love affairs and always the suitcases – were more comfortable and reassuring than family at times.

    The Wheel of Fortune allowed me to keep my apartment in New York City and staying in this spot had become mystical – not only because 65th street would be named Leonard Bernstein Way – but also because I had inherited Andrew Watt’s piano, the great pianist who also received his big break from LB.

    Andre was approached at the last minute to go on for an ailing Glenn Gould for the nationally televised broadcast of the Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic Live from Lincoln Center series. Andre would be the first African-American pianist and classical artist to break that glass ceiling. His story is what brought me to this building and New York in the first place: the longtime partner of my piano teacher’s daughter in my hometown of Toledo, Ohio, Andre and my parents’ generosity opened the door to my dream of being able to move to NYC, as he had an apartment across the street from Lincoln Center with a piano he wasn’t using. So, in 1984 after a summer as the youngest apprentice with Santa Fe Opera, I was told the best way to build a career as an opera singer was to move to New York or Europe; little did I know that history would magically repeat itself presenting me with the same opportunity as Andre, to jump start my career.

    I didn’t unpack after Vienna and for weeks tripped on my suitcases, what was the point of unpacking since I had to move – the new door being a daily reminder. I was finding the emotional strength to say goodbye to my adult roots: my paintings all over the walls and my recording studio, the foundation of Isotopia Records.

    In February, I saw more Broadway shows than I had in years; I went to New York City Ballet as often as possible, off and off-off Broadway shows, foreign films, it was as if I knew something was coming. I was voraciously having every New York experience as if for the last time. I even produced a music video on the coldest day in February – all over the city – with everyone involved feeling the love and magic of this one of a kind world haven for creativity and inspiration. 

    We could be next…

    By the time the week of March 11th came around and the rumour of this virus running through Italy had ravaged and shut down that country, I was feeling like we could be next as New York is a city of international visitors. Friday March 13th, our lives changed on a dime. By April 4th it was clear I wasn’t going to have to move. They were going to let me stay another year. With the shutdown in place I couldn’t move my suitcases to storage, so as I write this on day seventy-five, they sit as a reminder of the years of being a global citizen, artist, the adventure of travel and discovery.

    I painted the new door and it looked better than the one before it. I went to the piano and pressed the record button.

    Every day at 7:00 pm when those of us who don’t have second homes to run to or the finances to escape, we cheer out the windows to remind each other we are here, we are not alone in our circumstantial solitude; the cheers, whistles, pot banging and trumpet blowing applauding the health care workers who for me had personal meaning as they saved a cherished friend’s life during this disaster; a five minute expression of our love and memory of the dream for what this city was and will be again, but it will be in a new way of discovery and communal survival. And then there will be the music…

    Constance Hauman’s new album The Quarantine Trilogy is out now on Isotopia Records: https://isotopiarecords.com/. For more details of her work see: https://constancehauman.com/

     

     

  • Musician of the Month: Maija Sofia

    “It was like somebody realized you could take the surface of a song, paint a door on it, open it and walk through.”

    Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

      

    I’m going to start with a secret: I haven’t written a single good song since last August. It was the night after the sudden death of one of my favourite songwriters in the world, and I had spent the whole day writing an obituary. The summer had passed me by in a long, slow unshakeable depression, I was reeling from one too many painful happenings, and my desire to stare at the ceiling alone and cry and do nothing had far-overpowered any constructive desire to write.

    Then, one hot night in August I was dog-sitting alone in an echoey, affluent house in Rathmines. The lights kept flickering off and the dogs kept barking at vague invisible things and I was on edge and jittery. To distract myself, I sat down at a plastic toy-keyboard in the kitchen and my first song in months fell fully-formed out of my hands. I played it over and over again and made a rough recording on my phone. The next day I walked around in the sun listening to the song over and over to remind myself that there is something in me, despite everything, that comes out when I least expect it, and gives me a song.

    Ever since my album came out last November, I’ve been asked to talk about songs almost constantly – how I write them, why I write them, songs that I like, songs that have been important to me – and the more I have found myself trying to talk about songs, the more I become convinced that to talk too much about songs, to unpick them too delicately, is to do them a great disservice. The whole point of making a song is to evoke the strangeness that occurs when the right words are put to the right chords and something that cannot be addressed in everyday speech is expressed. I’m talking about good songs, there are plenty of dreadful songs out there that evoke nothing but the need to immediately switch it off.

    I’m suspicious about people who talk about songwriting like it’s a day job, like it’s a tap that can be turned on at will and new words and melodies will flow out in abundance. I secretly think the people who work in this way rarely produce anything good. Maybe I’m jealous; if I sit down with the intention to write a new song, it won’t work, whatever I write will feel forced and boring and I’ll begin to convince myself I’ve lost the ability to do it. The truth I have had to accept is that if I knew how to write songs, if I knew how a song worked, I’d do it far more often. That said, there are some things that I do know.

    Firstly, I know that it is very important to not let your ‘self’ get in the way of the work. In my experience, a good song can only be written after you’ve successfully gotten yourself out of the way. You have to try and accept that you are a conduit for the work and that the work is not you, it just travels through you. This is infuriating because we live in a world that measures our human worth against our capacity to produce. I think in order to write well you have to discard any sense of your art being a reflection of you – that way you can forgive yourself for the bad work, and also not let the good work go to your head too much.

    A good song will be unshadowed by your intention or personality and will just be a mystery that reveals bit by bit itself over time, until months later will you realise – oh yes, that’s what that was about. I think I succeed to do this every ten songs or so, but it’s also important to write nine bad songs in order to really recognise a good one when it arrives.

    Secondly, I know that in order to write good songs you have to truly love songs. This is obvious, but I think I started writing songs because as long as I can remember I have loved songs more than anything.

    I recently read Mary Gaitskill’s strange and excellent novel Veronica, near the start, the pretty – dislikeable – protagonist Alison describes the want to live inside of music. To live her life as though inside of a song. She doesn’t explain quite what she means by this, but reading it, I thought, oh yes, I know. I think I’ve spent my whole life looking for ways to live inside of songs, I have an obsessive streak, an inability to ever do things gently, and when I find a new song I love I want to be folded up and made small enough to be held inside it.

    I think this kind of obsession is a bad and nauseating trait to possess in most aspects of life, but very necessary for the writing of songs. I know the difference between a good song and bad one because when I write a bad one it feels flat and rolled out and beige, but when I write a good one it feels like a full and elaborate structure, colourful and strong enough to hold me inside for days while I work the words out.

    Thirdly, when I am really stuck and feeling dreadful, I think going for a long walk, doing some physical work in the garden or having a blisteringly hot shower sometimes helps.

    Finally, I have two things I remind myself of when I’m in long phases like this one in which I haven’t written a good song in several months and it’s started to wear down my confidence in my ability. They are, firstly – that thinking your work uniquely terrible is its own form of narcissism and a self-indulgence best to be avoided, and secondly, that you always think you’ll never write again, but you always, eventually, inevitably do write again.

     

    For more on Maija Sofia’s work see:

    Bandcamp: https://maijasofia.bandcamp.com/album/bath-time

    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maijasofiamusic/

    Instagram: @maijasofiamakela

    Twitter: @maija_sofia

  • Iguatu

    Editor’s Note: To mark Earth Day 2020 we bring you a new song by Bartholomew Ryan of the Loafing Heroes with a new recording at the end.

    IGUATU

    I read a line from a Mineiro poet who wrote:
    A ausência é um estar em mim.
    Reading a poem is a slow act of contemplation
    in a moment of the day that the devil cannot find.

    I was born when the Sun and Pluto
    fought for my location
    the burning, brightest, boiling giver of life,
    and the coldest, darkest, remote star deep inside the soul.

    I’m caught between
    absolute defeat and absolute desire
    under the canopy of stars
    we are wanderers.

    ah Iguatu

    We have been a civilisation of sky worshippers
    children of a celestial father
    the forests were monstrous
    but they have always been divine,
    in the shadow, they have always been my home.
    It is time, with the animals, the plants, the stones and the streams,
    to return again and stay loyal to the earth.

    ah Iguatu

    When I opened my eyes
    it brought me back to when my brother died
    twenty years ago today
    his spirit still crackles in my mind’s eye
    his charming sneer wakes me up to vitality again.

    I’m travelling now through
    the luminous green continent of Brazil
    full of magic, full of pain,
    full of sun, full of rain,
    to find another one of my kin.

    On my way
    I saw thousands of Sub-Saharan Africans in chains
    forced over in slave ships
    Tupi and Guarani driven from the coast
    and desperate folk from Ireland
    in coffin ships arriving dead or sickly on the shore.

    This is tropical truth
    This is celtic truth
    This is Hy Brasil
    In the Kerribrasilian sea

    ah Iguatu

    I sauntered up to the sertão
    in the northeast to a town called Iguatu
    to find the river
    where my cousin drowned in 1973
    the name of the river was the Jaguaribe
    they called it the dry river
    but as his sister Joan said –
    ‘there was nothing dry about it that day.’

    Patrick was born in Castlecove Kerry
    he just had that glow
    he became a Redemptorist priest
    and headed off to Pindorama
    he learnt the languages, he played the tunes
    he rallied the kids, he said his prayers
    he laughed everywhere he went.

    He sang a song about the devil
    who supposedly was buried down in Killarney
    and then rose again and joined the British army
    he used to make up the verses here and there,
    and the displaced locals shone with him.

    ah Iguatu

    We are the only creatures
    that are allowed to feel that we don’t belong here
    while we seem to be there
    our identity and presence can be absent entirely.

    Tupi, Guarani, Irish and African
    the love songs are sad
    the war songs are happy
    we sing when we are grieving
    longing is the loss of life
    and loss is the life of longing.

    This is tropical truth
    This is celtic truth
    This is Hy Brasil
    In the Kerribrasilian sea

    This is Real Absence
    a presence I carry in me
    sing for the ancestor
    smile with the stranger
    wandering like the orphan
    my mother, your father
    my sisters, your brothers
    the rivers, my lovers
    the mountains, the trees
    the leaves, the seas
    these dark geographies
    oh tears of drowned liberation
    oh heretic-holy laughter

    ah Iguatu

    The Loafing Heroes: https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com/

  • Musician of the Month: Hilary Woods

     

    The Year Past and Ahead

    In October last, I was at a Russian Circles gig in Galway. It gave me a much needed stark reminder of the power of live sound: washing over me, enveloping, reverberating my insides, shaking me out of an internal slumber. Requiring a medium to travel, the body is a conductor for sound. Filtering vibrations moving through it. Sound percolating in time through tissue and sinew, connecting, evading, resonating, confronting, decoding, making pliable.

    I emerged from the show a renewed being: sensorially realigned, perceiving things afresh, and happy I made the effort to go. As Rumi says, ‘whatever purifies you is the right path’. It reminded me also of my love for sonically-heavier music.

    Through the course of writing my new record last year I studied analogue photographic processes in London. This was an enlightening experience – awakening, purifying, and sustaining. Conversations with Lasse (Marhaug) who produced the album, opened up with us bouncing ideas on developing bath times, film grain, and Japanese post-war photographic processes resulting in layered, high-contrast, noisy, black-and-white imagery.

    I was keen to achieve sonic textures on the record similar to those I was exploring in the darkroom. In this way, my journeys in both music and visuals over the past year intertwined and mirrored elements of each another.

    During a year largely spent playing catch-up and quietly rejuvenating, another formative experience was my artist residency at CAMP in the Pyrenees, France in the summer. The opportunity to work and nurture friendships with a host of positive and inspirational people – performance artists, sound artists, composers, musical thinkers, electronic producers, creators, actors, poets, playwrights and visual artists – was a pure gift.

    At high altitude we shared studio space and meals every evening, helped with each other’s projects as we listened or gave feedback, enjoyed walks and endured the heat, watched films, and shared equipment. It was a welcome respite, having worked on writing my new album in solitude up to that point for about eight months. Much of life as a solo artist is solitary, from writing to touring to persevering with it all, so it is a joy when golden social connections are cultivated beyond that space.

    I look forward to the year ahead although it will have a ferocious pace in comparison to its predecessor, with my record due for release in spring. It will feel good to share it. There is always an element of embracing the fear when releasing anything and of learning new ways to live with the vulnerability of doing so. I feel proud of the work I achieved with others in piecing it together, and the giant steps this record required me to take in its writing.

     

    For further information about Hilary’s work visit her website: http://www.hilarywoods.com

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_hilary_woods/

    Photo credit: Joshua Wright

    https://www.instagram.com/joshuajameswright/

     

     

     

  • Musician of the Month – Bartholomew Ryan of The Loafing Heroes

    ‘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.

    Jaime McGill of The Loafing Heroes Image © Sebastian Urzendowsky.

    Beginnings, endings, interludes

    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.

    Judith Retzlik of the Loafing Heroes, Image © Emiliano Perillo.

    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.

    Giulia Gallina of the Loafing Heroes. Image © Lucia Borro

    Chaosmos

    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.

    Forthcoming Shows
    Friday, 12th of April: Clonskeagh Castle, Dublin, Ireland.
    Saturday, 13th of April, Bello Bar, Dublin, Ireland. (IRISH ALBUM LAUNCH)
    Sunday, 14th of April, Pot Duggans, Ennistymon, Co. Clare, Ireland.
    Tuesday, 16th of April, Tech Amergin, Waterville, Co. Kerry, Ireland.
    Friday, 19th of April,MUSICBOX, Lisbon, Portugal. (PORTUGUESE ALBUM LAUNCH)    ,

    Bartholomew Ryan is a philosophy research coordinator at the New University of Lisbon (http://www.ifilnova.pt/pages/bartholomew-ryan) and leader of the international band The Loafing Heroes (http://www.theloafingheroes.com)

    Feature Image: Otwin Biernat

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