Turn and face the strange

In rifling through my dresser drawers, I note plenty of rock band t-shirts that don’t get much wear these days. Some of the shirts have outlasted the bands (and, in a lot of cases, my interest in those bands). Mostly, they’ve outlived daily wear with my acceptance of a lifestyle that dictates that I have to wear something more “professional” most of the time. Like most loved-but-non-durable objects, some have been retired — these to a pile destined for a quilt my mother will make for me, so that I can once again be wrapped with nostalgic signifiers of my youthful loves and interests.

One of these was a yellow soccer-style Meat Beat Manifesto shirt sporting a recycle logo on the front, one of the coolest shirts I have ever owned, if I can be frank. At least, I sure felt cool in it, and as an added bonus, its black recycle logo repped my novice teenage interest in environmental issues. Like many teens, I was prone to public displays of affection, and I had a particular obsession with the music of Jack Dangers that I never thought twice about advertising.

That recycle logo in some ways encapsulates and speaks for Subliminal Sandwich, the record that blew my mind in 1996. The opening salvo promised “Sound Innovation” and my fresh ears acquiesced as sampling culture collided with musique concrete studio genius, dance music absent rave mindlessness, and hip-hop. It was all dropped into the pot, purefied and cast into new, singular and disturbing shapes with vaguely paranoid politics. It was the first place I ever saw the word “simulacra.” It was subliminal, and I, wishing to assert my weirdness and identity, took its messages to heart, stealing the album’s already de/recontextualized samples for my own and scrawling them on my notebooks: “THIS is cancer – a warning sign”; “what in the hell happened?”; “nobody asked him about his hair.” The record outlived my very intense relationship with dance music, one that sort of flamed out when the genre started seeing too many other people.

From “Phone Calls From the Dead”: “Everybody’s got a dark side / everybody’s got something to hide.” Somehow the sentiment sounds trite in print. But Dangers’ words, voiced in multi-tracked dissonance, were sonically immediate. They allowed me to submerge myself in that dark side – and to dance while I was doing it. I swooned as bass clarinets and choice breaks battled for room with atonal confluences of sonic events and flown-in samples from what could only be described as an enviable collection of records and reel-to-reels.

Swept up in the record’s wake, I continued to profess my love for the public to see, finding agreement and excitement on a nascent Internet’s bulletin boards and telnet connections. I waited impatiently for a tour date, had the record autographed, did what teenagers obsessed with bands do. Thrilled and in thrall, I danced till 2am in a club at the MBM show a few hours from home. Freedom. Joining me on the floor were new friends I’d later lose track of. I danced, in that silly shirt and a pair of corduroys so absurdly baggy that the recollection of them is a minor horror. Now I recall Subliminal Sandwich, amazed that a younger version of myself (one I generally recall as foolish) was that moved by something that today I find both strange and artistically substantial. The record still manages to harness in me an enthusiasm that abjures cynicism, allays disappointment in later MBM releases, and points me to a dark and even obsessive side that every music lover shares at one time or another – one hidden in headphones and memory.

Listen:
Meat Beat Manifesto: “She’s Unreal” (from Subliminal Sandwich)

Meat Beat Manifesto: “Cancer” (from Subliminal Sandwich)

Meat Beat Manifesto: “Electric People” (from Subliminal Sandwich)

A force to reckon with

There’s really no point in hiding it: Maja Ratkje is more or less the woman of my dreams. However, before this became clear to me, something else happened: her music scared the shit out of me. It is absolutely the only instance in my 28 years when I have been sent blood-run-cold frightened by music and music alone.

Voice (2002) is Ratkje’s first solo album, and it was the first thing I heard of hers. The first time I listened to it, I was taken in viscerally by what I now regard as her impossibly real confusion of human and machine. This confusion is produced by a reversal of the common blurring of boundaries between nature and artifice: rather than challenging the listener to spot the technology at work in a deceptively inhuman production, Ratkje’s unhinged and imaginatively unhindered vocal virtuosity defies the listener to discern when she is not being processed. Her voice is the source for all of the sounds on the record, often heavily transformed. But despite Ratkje’s jaw-dropping vocal prowess, Voice is not an exercise in empty, calculated awe-induction; and despite the record’s intellectual appeal, this is not an academic technological showcase. And unlike a lot of rudimentary noise music, Ratkje isn’t feeding her sound source to the machines for digestion and excretion as some distorted mass of techno-scream. Maja Ratkje is a kind of post-digital deity, donning the tools of her craft like a sorcerer’s shroud, smashing the machines into so many tiny shards to be carried on the winds she summons with her banshee howls.

Voice opens with a giddy incantation: Ratkje recites a Dr. Seussian meditation on selfhood, squashing diction and syntax in a delightful mockery of technology’s confusion of meaning. She is taunting the machines, pulling them into her orbit, preparing for the eruption. Lying in the dark, headphones strapped to ears, listening for the first time, I was smiling, fully unprepared for the vocal force about to be unleashed. When it finally and suddenly came, a wail to tear the very fabric of the universe, a shock shot straight down my spine and I was filled with a real terror that, as I said, no other recording has come close to matching in me.

Ratkje’s is a voice that can flatten forests and level office parks alike. Tornadoes twist away in fear, earthquakes pause to express their admiration. And for listeners willing to be swept up in the maelstrom, the debris will settle into beautiful configurations.

Sample with caution (both from Voice):

Maja Ratkje: Trio
Maja Ratkje: Vacuum

-JDS

Prescient/Untimely Americana

Their champions were few, their name unimpressive, and their catalog was perhaps a bit uneven. But for my money, Lincoln, Nebraska’s Lullaby for the Working Class foreshadowed and outshined some lesser acts that followed their emotionally spent, homespun sonic blueprint. Relegated to the “alt-country” ghetto in their time, LFTWC remain hard to define. With chamber-Americana arrangements featuring accordion, fiddle, glockenspiel, mandolin, they certainly weren’t indie-rock (few of their tracks “rocked”), and they certainly weren’t even as country as 90s peers that bore the label, like Jay Farrar.

In part due to this evasiveness, LFTWC always had a certain appeal for the foolish, younger me that treasured a band I could always keep for my own. Their three albums follow a progressively dire and anguished trajectory, but there’s a restraint and an unashamed nakedness about them that might have found greater audiences, in an age of greater room for such musical predilections.

Yet the band has become somewhat of a success story, not for its own works as much as for its offshoots. Frontman Ted Stevens tread similar paths with Mayday, then went on to ride sidecar with fellow Nebraskans Cursive, a screamier, more shambolic and better publicized enterprise. LFTWC fans listened to Mike Mogis’ steady growth as producer and instrumental utility-man, and his sound graces records by Bright Eyes (a band Mogis has since joined full-time), The Faint, Cursive, and many other heralded bands from Omaha and the well-received Saddle Creek label.

The first track included here is from the group’s debut, Blanket Warm. As the album’s title suggests, the songs feel instantly familiar and one can hear the tape it was recorded on. In “Honey, Drop the Knife” Stevens darkly asks his listener, “drop your clothes for forgiveness” — over a loose, driving brush-beat and cheery picking. It makes for the kind of well-played contrast that reveals itself in much of the band’s work.

One might infer from the band’s forgettable name that Stevens can get weighed down in his words at times. Such is the case with “In Honor of My Stumbling,” from the band’s follow-up I Never Even Asked for Light. A stanza that starts “color me Caligula” is a head-scratcher, but the song endears once it hits a waltz stride, and Stevens belts out: “faith is a candle in direct sunlight, and I find a great consolation in singing!” Set to music, it rings like (light) Whitman for sad-eyed children of the American midwest. I once counted myself among them, and still I find in the work of these Nebraskans an honesty that may have gone unrewarded in the public sphere, yet always rewards upon new listens.

Downloads:
Lullaby for the Working Class: Honey, Drop the Knife (from Blanket Warm)
Lullaby for the Working Class: In Honor of My Stumbling (from I Never Even Asked for Light)

Credo

Here’s the idea. Our aim is to translate the head-rush of musical memory to text. Our goal is to share that which we love and find ignored, under-represented, or awaiting new perpective. We can only write about what we know and have heard, but we will welcome contributions from beyond our circle.

Have you recently unearthed a forgotten song, album, voice or recording — one relegated to a cherished place in your heart/brain, but waiting for a moment such as this to express itself? Write it down. Give us some context. Share the emotions that accompany it, but also show us what it’s like. Oh, and provide a link to share it for a short time.

This is our mission. Please accept it, graciously.

J.B.