Friends, fiends, and fornicators,
Greetings from Oakland, CA. This move has been challenging and invigorating much like my early morning bike rides to work and late night treks back. Biking is so easy in the Bay Area and has been a nourishing source of self-reliance, fitness, and exploration. The solitude has provided me time to write, cook, volunteer, and recalibrate.
Oakland is charming, strange, and well-worn. The friends I’ve met so far are very sweet and cool and my initial hesitation and pessimism of crash landing here are dissolving into novelty, excitement, and gratitude. The wine and food scene in the Bay Area is completely bananas and as far as continuing a career in wine, this is certainly a great place to be. I’m working at an old school natural wine bar in San Francisco called Terroir and also in Oakland at a cider bar called Redfield and a coffee shop called Kilo Volt.
When I’m not working I’ve been spending a lot of time writing and cooking, which has been a great way to process, cope, and feed my curiosities. I usually write at the kitchen table so I honestly spend all day in the kitchen. Cooking is such a flow state activity for me. From the contexts of where food came from, to the preparation, and the transformation into something (hopefully) delicious, I find cooking to be totally intoxicating.
This issue of Mortar returns to the format of writings on music and film. I’ve sprinkled in a couple recent photos as well as a few meaningful poems as of late. I appreciate you all for keeping in touch, reading this, and keeping me updated on your life! I started this newsletter as a way to get off social media and now I’m kind of back on Instagram, slowly morphing a wine review account into a more personal one. You can follow me there but I might just totally delete it again. That shit sucks!
This issue is a bizarre concoction featuring writings on music by Nala Sinephro, Valentin Silvestrov, Dax Pierson, and Klein, and the films Maska and Fear X. It features poems and words by bell hooks, Maurice Manning, Wendell Berry, and Laydi Long-Soldier. This newsletter is now two years old which is pretty cool! Thanks for reading all this time!
“To know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and to others. Creating a false self to mask fears and insecurities has become so common that many of us forget who we are and what we feel underneath the pretense” - bell hooks in all about love
Nala Sinephro celebrates a galactic expanse of musical lineage on her 2021 debut album Space 1.8. The London-based Carribean-Belgian composer, harpist, and keyboardist offers a dazzling, intimate, and bright burning song cycle synthesizing threads of ecstatic jazz, fourth-world ambient, and sultry RnB into a lush technicolor quilt. As bandleader, Sinephro’s writing places her hidden in the songs’ groove and harmony foundations; her spacious vamps and pads make ample room for the power of improvisation gifted in the contributions of a fiery crew of London’s finest young jazz musicians including saxophonists Nubya Garcia, Ahnansé, and James Mollison, with keyboardist Dwayne Kilvington (aka Wonky Logic), and guitarist Shirley Tetteh, just to name a few. Sinephro wrote this music and recorded it in 2019 when she was only 22 years old after recovering from a long illness. The catharsis and healing is clear in the music’s warm soothing waters and caterwauling releases. Her record was released on the powerhouse experimental electronic label, Warp.
Had to include the way Layli Long Soldier formatted this poem. I think about this piece a lot. It’s titled “Three” in her book of poems, Whereas
Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov was once quoted “composing music in our time is the galvanization of a corpse.” In this vein of pessimistic abandon, I can’t help but draw lines between Silvestrov’s postmodern composition in String Quartet No. 1, the films of Russian-born director Andrei Tarkovsky, and the chilling surrealist hellscapes of Polish painter Zdzisław Beksiński. These three artists draw heavily upon the cultural and societal influence of Christianity and wed it, often grotesquely and shockingly, with the surreal and bizarre post-Soviet Nihilism present in Eastern European artwork in the 1970s-80s. Using the traditional training and palette of their crafts, the three artists use and bastardize the sanctity of religious symbolism (i.e Religious texts, Cathedrals, Hymns, Revelation) as a mirror and window into the horror of reality, a disillusion of faith, and a surreal pessimism.
(note: This version^^ is fine, but my favorite is performed by the Rosamunde Quartett, recorded in 2002 on Silvestrov: Leggiero, Pesante which features a whole program of his early to mid career music. Find it on Spotify)
Silvestrov’s quartet begins as a beautiful fuzzy-hued hymn, utilizing consonant harmony known to 19th century Church and Romantic era classical music. This prayer quickly devolves into dissonance, singing in disparate intervals, and punctuated by twitching pizzicati, and an anguished whip-like motif of two notes that reappears throughout the piece. While the music rarely becomes violent there is a simmering chorale of agitated arguments between the two violins, punctuated by stressed suggestions made from the viola over the wise but brooding bellows of the cello. The dissonance is florid, beautiful, and unrelenting. Brief sections of reprieve come in returns to hymn-like harmony–an inkling of hope and beauty burned brightly and disappearing weightlessly into the air like smoke from a thurible.
Silvestrov’s mastery in this piece (and honestly in much of his work) is the prowess of traditional Western harmony in balance with challenging, aching dissonance to create bittersweet, painfully beautiful moods in his music, raw with honesty and soaked in melancholy. String Quartet No. 1 arrives at its end exhausted, abandoning its arguments. Cushioned in soft shimmering consonance, the last remaining chords sound a shrill and tired whistle disappearing into overwhelming light.
Riding in on a wave of surrealist macabre sludge, I present a potent double feature of two films that will leave you transfixed, hollowed out, and vulnerable to a hum of bizarre chills and stoic contemplation. 1st- Maska (2010, dir. The Quay Brothers), 2nd- Fear X (2003, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn [Drive, Only God Forgives])
Death was her design but love is Duenna’s fate in the 2010 stop-animated short Maska produced by Polish Animation Studio Se-Ma-For, directed by the Quay Brothers, all with haunting soundtrack from composer Krzysztof Penderecki. Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem’s 1974 techno-horror short story is animated with ghastly puppetry within a dark rotting realm, shot with glossy, hypnogogic special effects, and foreboding coloring.
The woozy pacing and flat-affect narration work in tandem with the foreboding swells, violent bursts, and eerie tonality in Penderecki’s de natura sonoris (also featured in Kubrick’s The Shining.) The resulting mood is disturbing, entrancing, and beautiful- capturing the moral dilemma of Duenna coming to terms with her design and desire. You can watch Maska in its entirety here on vimeo, on Mubi with a subscription, or here on YouTube.
In Fear X, Harry Caine is searching for answers in an otherworldly realm of grim midwestern mundanity. His obsessive investigating into the murder of his wife conjures bizarre hallucinations and drags him into a sinister underbelly of Middle America. Lead John Turturro delivers awkward oblique dialogue resonating strongly in a cold hopeless winter soundtracked by a glowing score by Brian Eno and J. Peter Schwalm. Surreal visions, confusing secrecy, unanswered questions, and disturbing encounters give Fear X a strong Lynchian or Coen Brothers flavor. If you’re enticed by this kind of shifty, shrouded, slow pacing you will be totally intoxicated in this films’ strange hell.
Fear X places itself firmly in a canon of media mythologizing, disgrace and romanticize, and contemplate the vast strangeness, crushing space, and mundanity of the Midwest like Napolean Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, Fargo, or the 2021 album The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid by ---__--___. You can watch Fear X for free on YouTube
Song by Wendell Berry I stood and heard the steps of the city and dreamed a lighter stepping than I heard, the tread of my people dancing in a ring. I knew that circle broken, the steps awry, stone and iron humming in the air. But I thought even there, among the straying steps, of the dance that circles life around, its shadows moving on the ground, in rhyme of flesh with flesh, time with time, our bliss, the earthly song that heavenly is.
“I just like the idea of making folklore out of reality TV” -Klein from 2017 interview with Fader.
The glitchy, collaged, and multidimensional music of Nigerian-British artist Klein is the ghost of pop cultures past fused with the dazzling electronic patchwork of tomorrow. From her early self-released works to her latest album Harmattan, Klein has evaded understanding, proven her unique might as a producer, and created increasingly personal and adventurous work collaging pop samples, personal recordings, and Ableton etchings. Harmattan stands out as one of her most unique releases for a number of reasons, one being its release on the classical music label, Pentatone, whose other recent catalogue items include new recordings of Liszt, Mozart, and Puccini. Contextualizing Klein’s music within this catalogue is fascinating and showcases her ability to flip classical music notions on their head with tongue in cheek on tracks like “Trapping in C Major” or “for piano/solo.” The album begins with busier tracks including the playful and absurd “roc,” the title derived from the Roc Nation Brunch, a ritzy gala for Black cultural icons and artists hosted by Jay-Z. Klein trades the contextual glamour of “roc” for goofy, buzzing trumpet drones over creaking pads, harmonica and jazz guitar samples, and obtuse sound effects and broad swaths of synth. It’s a beautiful and complex piece with a cheeky accompanying music video of Klein wondering the late night lights of London dooting on a trumpet.
Harmattan loosens into longer ambient tracks for the majority remainder of the album. There is a haunting and an expanse of growth in these later tracks, evocative of sci-fi film scoring, or the tape loop works of Fumitake Tamura. In “haunting of grace,” there is an ominous chorus of what sounds like low accordion or melodica which is swallowed in a cascading reprieve of lush warbly synth strings. The dense emotive fog that Klein creates in these moods/songs harkens back to the title of this album, referring to a season of high winds which blow across northwest Africa creating drought-like conditions, sandstorms, and glowing hot smog. Even as Klein pushes into this new expansive territory her personal mark of playfulness and pop culture mythologizing shines through in frequent home recordings of piano, her gospel-infused vocals, tiny features of close friends, and even a heavily manipulated feature from Charlotte Church, an early aughts British pop-star who could be a cross between Céline Dion and Julee Cruise- a perfect example of Klein’s curious pop cannibalism. I feel the urge to keep writing and writing about this album and honestly about all of Klein’s work but just go listen to it and be sure to check out her myriad of accompanying video collages and music videos.
Nerve Bumps (A Queer Divine Dissatisfaction) is a kaleidoscopic tapestry of electronic music produced by Oakland music veteran Dax Pierson. This is Pierson’s second release since returning to producing music after a tragic car accident in 2005 left him paralyzed from the chest down. In renavigating his approach to making music Pierson designed electronic music systems in Ableton he could use without the need of much motor skills; controlling instruments with his wheelchair and through touch sensitive controls on ipads. AsNerve Bumps reflects this as a synthesis of influences fusing together elements of Techno, Queer Rave, and Music Concrete, with the spiritual expansiveness of Pauline Anna Strom, the electronic athleticism of Arca, and the rhythmic wizardry of Mark Fell. This album is a celebration of Pierson’s lifelong passion for music and also a celebration of his survival and return to making it. He waited 15 years to create this and literally had to wait for some of these technologies to be invented in order for this production. The album title, derived from both a misnomer to injury related goosebumps Pierson experiences and a portion of a Martha Graham quote that served as his mantra throughout the project, “…There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
"On Silence" by Maurice Manning from Railsplitter Poetry is the art of silence, the art of knowing when to stop a word or phrase and let it hang like a sheet billowing on the line. And the sudden or unexpected silence goes hand in hand with what is said in words or the flowery, natural phrase. Beginning with the idiom and moving to the metaphor, while following the stark rhythms of thought as they proceed and follow, is elegance, a wave of the hand for dancers to come forth and dance and give the scene a fluid movement. I see it all in a grand entrance, meaning I see it as entrancing, rapt and enthralling all there is. But what, in fact or dainty figure, is the scene? People in dark and bright attire coming closely together for a dance, for a spinning exultant reel? I made myself present for such events, yet also removed myself, to step away to pause and reflect. And stepping away I learned my candor, I learned how to pass my time in a phrase, in a measured phrase of poetry, and that is where I’ve tried to live.
Finally, a bonus piece of poetry and honestly some of my favorite music ever. This is from Robert Ashley’s 1991 Opera, Improvement (Don Leaves Linda). The Opera in its entirety is available on Vimeo here! Been chewing on this piece a lot lately.
Would love to hear from you soon. Have relaxing holidays and see you all in the New Year!
peace and love,
Cody