016: Free jazz, poet folk, photographs & memories.

I’m going to try something new. The new thing is sending this newsletter out more often and featuring less albums in each missive, with longer editions here and there. This time we’re doing three albums, but maybe I’ll just do one next time. Maybe I’ll do a book or a film instead. I’m trying to be more productive but in a looser way. Whenever I set parameters for myself I end up feeling constrained, so to hell with parameters. Let’s get into it!

Erin Rogers & Alec Goldfarb, Earth’s Precisions (Infrequent Seams, 2023)
As a non-musician, experimental music often reveals itself to me in literary images. The shriek of a free jazz saxophone in a song called “from a cobwebbed heap” is the creaking of doors, furiously opening and shutting at the musician’s call, wet sounds intermingling with sharp ones. “dim in the gulfs (beyond earth’s precisions)” is the buzz of an endless horizon, strings vibrating at the pulse of the terminal beach, edges fraying into infinity and brushing up against a boundless fear that, in a different light, is perceived as a kind of dark possibility. Rereading my own sentence, the images conjured bring to mind the many concerns, nuclear and otherwise, of Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger. This connection gains further resonance when the bleakly titled “nothing but a voice that laughed, blankly” ends with a deranged country twang. This is the free jazz of our doomed world.

Kara Jackson, Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? (September Recordings, 2023)
The other day I started a discussion about indie-rock adjacent music with literary lyrics. Kara Jackson’s heart-shattering debut album is a very welcome addition to this canon. Jackson is a poet and this album hums with the power of words, evident from the jump with its evocative title. The answer to this question, or the painful lack of one, reverberates across all 13 songs, the themes of which are chiefly grief, loss, and relationships. When we finally get to hear her sing the question of the title, the effect is one of immediate goosebumps – at least for me. 

The desperate figure cut by “rat” is my favorite song, gentle guitarwork and melancholy strings scaffolding a Raymond Carver-like story about a man heading west after a relationship goes sour, chasing and failing to locate his dreams. I’m not a huge fan of the Hold Steady but I once was, and Rat in this song brings to mind some of their down-and-out characters: Holly, Gideon, Charlemagne.

As a whole, this album is stark, emotional, deeply sad, fairly harsh, quite beautiful, and most vitally, honest. The music is principally folk or alt-country, easily moving between country twangs and orchestral strings, sometimes only sparse guitar but other times joined by additional instrumentation that really expands the breadth of the music. It’s incredibly good! 

The Clientele, Strange Geometry (Pointy Records, 2005)
July is a funny time for such an autumnal album to have found me, but the melodies are actually quite sunny so there is something slightly fitting about it. At any rate, I look forward to the chilled October morning when I’ll slip back into the romantic melancholy of this album’s world. I don’t know if this is a silly thing to say, but no band has ever reminded me so much and so well of the best parts of the Beatles.

“Since K Got Over Me” is a perfect pop song and I’m quite fond of “(I Can’t Seem To) Make You Mine” and “Geometry of Lawns” but my personal favorite has to be “Losing Haringey,” on which Alasdair MacLean’s deadpan lilt reminds me of John Cale in “The Gift.” 

I’m enamored with the lyrics, which tell a quietly painful story of memories activated by wandering through the landscape, time and longing swarming: “I held my head in my hands, feeling like shit, but a sudden breeze escaped from the terraces and for a moment I lost my thoughts in its unexpected coolness. I looked up and I realized I was sitting in a photograph.” It seems that where he’s seated is not the exact place of the photo it brings to mind, but the landscape is close enough to send him back to the time when the photograph was taken.

This bit right here is just the best: “Strongest of all was the feeling of 1982-ness: dizzy, illogical, as if none of the intervening disasters and wrong turns had happened yet. I felt guilty, and inconsolably sad. I felt the instinctive tug back - to school, the memory of shopping malls, cooking, driving in my mother’s car. All gone, gone forever.” 

The idea of stumbling into a place where you were once photographed, causing the memories of life at the time of the photo to flood into your mind is the opposite of Annie Ernaux’s style of memoir writing, in which she deliberately uses photographs to plunge herself back into the time she wants to explore, but the effect is the same, bringing the listener and reader directly into their emotional worlds. It feels raw somehow, but not unpleasant. I guess that’s one way to describe nostalgia.

Currently Reading: The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag; You'll Enjoy It When You Get There: The Selected Stories of Elizabeth Taylor; Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom; Thus Were Their Faces by Silvina Ocampo

Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover