011: Visions of violence imagined by women in "Army Dreamers" and The Pearlkillers.
Fantasy synths, intellectual and emotional horror, and more.
More time than I had intended to elapse between newsletters has, in fact, elapsed. This is fine, but some primordial introductory drive compels me to begin by addressing the time that has passed between then and now. I do this purely for fun, or “fun.” Sometimes it doesn’t end up feeling particularly fun, but we all know what I really mean by “fun,” which is free. Some of March and all of April were taken up with a large freelance project; I’m not sure what went on in February. All that time, I’ve been reading and listening to music and thinking about sharing some of it but never quite having the energy to sit down and do it. I think I felt a little hampered by the format I’ve been writing these in, so I’m trying something different.
First, what I’ve been listening to.
To start, I’ve been on a serious Kate Bush kick. The biggest rediscovery has been her third album, Never for Ever (1980). I’ve always enjoyed it, but it struck a deeper chord the other night. Maybe because I was at my brother’s house, visiting the family while also trying to get some work done. With our parents absorbed in the masculine debutante ball that is the NFL draft, I put my headphones in. A bit to drown them out and a bit just because I wanted to listen more closely, and I was just really fucking struck by the songcraft. “Army Dreamers” is a song I had missed in previous listens, I’m not sure why. This time, I became obsessed – partially because I’m a sucker for a war story (the narrative here is that of a mother mourning the death of her soldier son) and partially because this is not only a war story, but one told in the form of a waltz, and lastly because in the music video Kate is wearing fatigues and stalking about the forest with her backup dancer soldiers, which is my ultimate aesthetic.
I’ve also been desperately obsessed with Emerald Web’s Dragon Wings and Wizard Tales (1979), the epic fantasy synth-rock of my dreams, all windswept towers and howling caverns and maidens singing of impossible quests. The debut LP of Miami-based husband and wife synth enthusiasts, this music wraps the emerging vibe of New Age movements in the prescient coziness of dungeon synth, about a decade before that term was coined.
Here are some other albums I’ve had on repeat.
Oksana Linde, Aquatic and Other Worlds (2022)
Oksana Linde is a Venezuelan synth pioneer, in the vein of Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire, with a fascinating life story. This album compiles and restores music she recorded between 1983 and 1989. Mesmerizing, playful, exploratory, with prog-like sensibilities and a very clear appreciation for the natural world. Check it out HERE!
Suzanne Ciani, Seven Waves (1982) and The Velocity of Love (1986)
I think I’m probably pretty late to the Suzanne Ciani game. She seems to have gained an even more significant amount of attention for her life’s work as a sound designer and electronic composer in recent years, which is great and well-deserved. For me, it just means a lot of really wonderful catching up. I decided to start with her first two commercial studio albums and I love them both in every New Age way. I never imagined I’d be so into this style of music, but so it goes. Check ‘em out HERE and HERE!
Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer, Recordings from the Åland Islands (2022)
A fantastically dreamy gem of a record, one of my most anticipated of the year and yet another killer in the International Anthem line-up. Birdsong and other field recordings (the Åland Islands are an archipelago of ~6,500 islands in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland), violin, piano, organs, modular synths, and more are transportive, gentle, hypnotic, elemental. Put this one on and let yourself be elsewhere. Check it out HERE!
If you need more synth-based music in your life, the lovely people who follow me on Twitter spilled their hearts out in this thread, which I will be unraveling for a long time to come.
Now, some things I’ve read.
I just finished an exceptional collection, The Pearlkillers by Rachel Ingalls (1987). The contents include three short stories and one that could be classified as a novella. Two themes that run through all four are violence and family secrets. All of them have the makings of really fantastic films; I even started imagining a script while reading the second story, “People to People,” which is about a group of five men reuniting as adults to discuss a tragic event that took place during their college years. To say more would be to give it away, although the details of the event are unraveled fairly early on in the story. But as much as I liked “People to People,” it’s actually the one I’d rank fourth in the whole set. I’m going to be really broad here because the richness of Ingalls’ storytelling is in the way her characters move about their sad lives. The first story, “Egypt,” is about grief, tourism, and the inability of men and women to understand each other. The third story, “Inheritance,” considers what really constructs family bonds and ultimately becomes a thrumming horror story. The final piece, the one that is essentially a novella, is called “Captain Hendrik’s Story” and it is a highly memorable, tragic escapade of failed dreams and family secrets. I ripped through the first three and then came back around for the final because I wanted to prolong the reading experience. I suspect I’ll be revisiting this one.
I’m also in the middle of The Answers by Catherine Lacey (2017), who you may know from her more recent novel, Pew. I read Pew with a group of friends earlier this year and still can’t stop thinking about some of its themes, which is great because The Answers echoes quite a few of them. In fact, what Lacey has to say about bodies (what it means to have one, how and why other people feel entitled to do things with or to them) and religion (the idea that God or holiness is a thing we can see in other people) in The Answers is stripped down to its most elemental form in Pew. The Answers also brings to mind Alissa Nutting’s Made for Love (2017), which you may know from its pretty good TV adaptation, the second season of which either just started or is about to start on HBO. They both share themes of technological attempts to manipulate emotions and what it means to cede control of parts of yourself to someone else, particularly in service of simply trying to improve your shitty life. The Answers is headier than Made for Love and not funny in the way that the latter is, but they’re a good pairing.
I had finished The Answers by the time this newsletter was scheduled to go out, so I’m updating this post to add that I loved it. Highly recommended if you like Eternal Sunshine-style high-concept light sci-fi (emphasis on light) speculation plus corporate surrealism plus a cerebral tackling of love, identity, and what it means to be human.
I wanted to write some more about other books I’ve recently loved but I think I’ll save that for another newsletter. I will mention Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth (Charlotte Barslund’s translation was published by Verso in 2019 and originally in 2016) because it is also about secrets tearing families apart and (dis)inheritances, but also the rot of unacknowledged trauma and repression and one woman’s absolutely raging fury toward it all. It is a really painful read but can be funny and even absurdist. Hjorth has this really gripping way of portraying memories that feels very true. Speaking of truth, this novel caused a bit of a scandalous stir in her home of Norway in a life-mirroring-art sort of way.
I also adored her novel Long Live the Post Horn! Verso published that one in translation in 2020, which is what put Hjorth on my radar. In Long Live, Hjorth takes a subject that sounds fairly boring at face value (our narrator is tasked with writing a brief that the Norwegian Postal Workers Union can use to sway voters in their favor) and manages to wring truly sublime pathos out of it. It has been described as “an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service!)” – a sentiment that I naturally love. I hope much more of her work is translated and I can’t wait to read the next one from Verso, Is Mother Dead?, set to come out in October.
Until next time!