Novels and Nirvana

December 18, 2002 by

A review of The Road of Excess by Simon Ings for The New Scientist that was originally published in print on December 18, 2002.

SOMETIMES the world transcends our physical experiences and expectations. But we have lost the art of how to speak about that experience.

In The Road of Excess: A history of writers on drugs, English professor Marcus Boon suggests that drug-taking became a necessary literary experiment the moment writers found themselves living in a materialist world. When neither church and state nor tree-clad mountainside reflects the face of God, where but in the “negative, transcendental space” of drug experience can writers express the poetry of human smallness and purblindness in an immense universe? Boon uses literary, historical and cultural analysis to reveal “how a society came to believe certain things” about drugs, about writers and about itself. He justifies this approach by asserting that drugs have “dynamic historical properties” Historical meanings, he says, are part of the user’s experience.

And these have changed over time. In the 19th century, hidebound by institutionalised religion and a growing enthusiasm for mechanisation, a gulf seemed to separate everyday consciousness from the realm of the sublime. In the 21st century, that gulf is being healed. Where the radical early 20th-century critic Walter Benjamin, taking mescaline, experienced “a shower of gifts pouring out of gnostic darkness”, modern writers on drugs are more likely to write about the way human consciousness participates in the workings of an infinitely open and interconnected Universe.

Their rhetoric has its failings, chief among them the ease with which drug-taking can be medicalised. Why else would we be using normalising drugs like Prozac to steer us away from the bracing terrors of the sublime? On the other hand, a rhetoric that sites the sublime within the mechanisms of consciousness does allow writers to fulfil the original Romantic ambition: to contend with science in explaining how we think.

Best of all, Boon, an ambitious thinker, puts his money where his mouth is. To take just a handful of examples, he shows that anaesthetics reproduce the rhetoric of philosophical analysis; that writers who use cannabis produce parody and tend towards the Rabelaisian; that culture and chemistry together underpin the amphetamine-fuelled world of “shining machines and traumatised human bodies”; that the unchallenged ego will make a “self-serving and deceiving charade” out of psychedelic experience; and that under the influence of many drugs, the language function itself will reveal its “essential autonomy”.

Boon’s observations speak as much to our scientific understanding of the brain as to our literary appreciation of writers like Henri Michaux and Charles Baudelaire, William Burroughs and Will Self, and they deserve close criticism. This alone makes Boon’s ironic and perceptive book very welcome: it is that rare creature, a work of literary criticism that the scientific community can enjoy, contend with, and from which it can draw inspiration.

Simon Ings writes fiction and journalism about the senses.

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Writing on high

November 17, 2002 by

A review of The Road of Excess by Nick Kre for the Toronto Star that was originally published in print on November 17, 2002.

There is a common trait among such intoxicating writers as William Lee Burroughs, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Paul Bowles and a number of other influential, literary talents: intoxication.

Such classic works as The Naked Lunch, The Seraphim and The Sheltering Sky were written while their authors were under the influence of some inhaled, injected or ingested stimulant. Some of those organic and chemical stimulants were medicinal, some mind-altering. Among some of the stimulated, drug addiction served as a creative catalyst as much as a route of escapism.

It fueled work habits, helped fire the imagination and provided temporary relief to whatever misery the tortured artistic soul was suffering at the time. It also often sentenced those creators to a form of purgatory, imprisoned by their dependence to suffer stunted health, severe depression and premature death.

Despite the drawbacks, the association of drugs and literature has been one of romantic chic. The drug-induced abstract stream of conscience spewed by gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson isn’t pitied, it’s envied. The passionate pharmaceutical-stoked rants of rock critic Lester Bangs are viewed through the rose-coloured glasses of admiration, despite his eventual death by overdose. The futuristic psychoactive-inspired visions of sci-fi writer Philip (Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep) Dick are showered with praise and exploited as movies. Whether these tacit endorsements soothe or raise your moral heckles is moot, for the behavioural patterns matching certain writers with certain habits.

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Strange trips: Drugs, writers, and the chemistry of style

October 27, 2002 by

By James Parker. Originally published on October 27, 2012 in the Boston Globe.

THIS IS A WRITER. This is a writer on drugs. Can you tell the difference? Is there any difference? We’re still not sure. When the poet Geoffrey Hill – to take a local case – revealed in interviews a few years ago that he had been taking antidepressants, including lithium, to treat what he described as ”undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder… the terror of utterance,” there was a fluttering in the critical coop. ”Is style chemical?” clucked William Logan in the New Criterion, reviewing Hill’s collection ”Speech! Speech!” (2000). ”Can swallowing an amine neurotransmitter change the comprehensions of syntax a life has earned?”

Swiftly and skeptically the link was made between Hill’s newly-achieved chemical balance and his increased productivity; his output, after all, once a famously agonized trickle, was now (relatively speaking) a torrent. A new book every two years! Formerly ”constipated” (as Logan wrote), the chemically emancipated Hill was now ”jabbering like a maniac.” Coming clean about his medication, Hill groaned in an interview with the Guardian of London, had ”of course given ammunition to those who don’t like me…. They say, `Hill has just turned the tap on and now he can’t turn the tap off.”’ A block had been dissolved, but at what cost? Had Hill’s authority as a poet been compromised?

Well, not on the page. In his latest collection, ”The Orchards Of Syon,” Hill’s poetic voice remains commanding and unmistakable, and – if not stable – then at least reliably volatile. As usual, difficulty hangs over the verse like incense, conferring the odor of a deep and private tradition. And as usual, nature flashes out of it with effortless intensity: ”Wintry swamp-thickets, brush-heaps of burnt light. /The sky cast-iron, livid with unshed snow.” There’s been no diminution of power here.

But the lithium question remains, because behind the high-flown anxieties that have been expressed about Hill’s medications lies something more basic, even childish: disappointment. Poets, we feel, aren’t supposed to take anti-depressants. Of the poet above all is expected a certain fidelity to misery and muddle – he must keep the clouds in his house, not shoo them away. And it can be dispiriting to see a poet present himself to the doctor with ”symptoms” and then obediently join in the gray trudge toward wellness, the herd-movement toward mental health. Is this imagination’s defeat, at the popping of a pill?

Hill himself framed the question with astonishing precision in ”Speech! Speech!”: ”How is it tuned, how can it be un-/tuned, with lithium, this harp of nerves?” He adds: ”Fare well/my daimon, inconstant/measures, mood- and mind-stress, heart’s rhythm/suspensive; earth-stalled/the wings of suspension.” Gerard Manley Hopkins – a man to whom lithium was not available – is present in these lines, humming piously in mid-air. Is Hill saying goodbye and good luck to his daimon, with its extremes of ecstasy and terror? To its wacky ”inconstant measures” which he has now ”earth-stalled,” i.e., with lithium (an element)?

But writers have been taking drugs as long as there have been drugs to be had, and – as we learn from Marcus Boon’s fascinating and meticulous ”The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs” (forthcoming from Harvard University Press) – the line is blurred, in fact invisible, between those writers who take drugs to inflame or exalt their daimons and those who simply need, in Aldous Huxley’s phrase, ”a chemical vacation from intolerable selfhood.” (There is a third category, too – those who take drugs to stay awake so they can write more and make more money.) ”The Road Of Excess” does the field of drug studies a great service by providing a clear narrative of literature’s long romance with drugs, and by relating each substance to a specific creative enterprise. All the big names are here – the opiated or narcotized (Baudelaire, De Quincey, Coleridge, Poe), the stimulated (Philip K. Dick, the Beats), the psychedelicized (Michaux, Huxley), and the smokers (almost everyone). Boon also includes among his speedfreak theorists the great rock critic Lester Bangs, whose insights into the interplay between drugs and music were extraordinary and – more important – extraordinarily well-written.

Unlike his fellow academic Sadie Plant, author of ”Writing On Drugs” (1999), Boon is not about to declare that substances hold the key to history. Plant’s book seemed to be leading us gently (by the nose, but gently) toward a point where we might accept that it was amphetamines, not certain convulsions in international affairs, that started the Second World War – that speed itself was hungry for new machines and better bombs, bigger noises, faster deaths. Drugs for Boon are not Plant’s ”meta-messengers,” writing their own story through largely bewildered, out-of-it human agents. In his argument, and it is a literary argument, drugs correspond to particular areas or moods of the imagination: opium to the Romantic plunge into darkness and exoticism, Benzedrine to the Beats and their wide-eyed gluttony for kicks and high-velocity typing. There is a groundbreaking chapter, for example, on the consonance between anaesthesia (first used surgically in the 1840s, in Boston) and the developing philosophy of the American Transcendentalists – infinity glimpsed from the dentist’s chair.

Boon finds that at certain moments drugs and the imagination are indeed interchangeable: ”If De Quincey’s Miltonic evocations of the sublime,” he writes, ”or Coleridge’s use of color, are the symptoms of opium addiction, then the literary imagination itself must be considered pathological.” It was part of the Romantic mission, he continues, to ”cultivate” this pathology. Was the mission a success? Coleridge is the test case: a man – a genius – enfeebled and laid low by his dependence on laudanum (opium in liquid form), who nonetheless seems to have produced great poetry under its direct inspiration. Who held the pen, the man or the drug? Of course not everyone thinks it’s such great poetry; Boon quotes an unforgiving female professor from 1928 who declared that ”the whole body of his poetry is drug work, shows drug mentality, bears the stigmata of the drug imagination.” No one since then has been quite that sure on the Coleridge/opium question. ”About, about, in reel and rout/The death-fires danced at night; /The water, like a witch’s oils/Burnt green, and blue and white.” Is that drug work, drug coloring?

The British poet Ted Hughes didn’t think so. Hughes regarded Coleridge’s battle with laudanum as a sideshow, a sublimation of the more essential, lethal conflict between his heathen nature-worshipping heart and his Christian intellect. ”Kubla Khan,” with its singing gulfs and its choked-off chants, presented for Hughes not a dreamy fragment but a precise diagram of this psychological crisis: ”And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, /As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, /A mighty fountain momently was forced: /Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst/Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail….” Coleridge’s poetic career, so full of the half-states of dread and longing, stalled – in this view – not because he became addicted, but because he hadn’t the nerve to continue it.

The question of nerve is an interesting one. Just how courageous is it to get high? Daniel Pinchbeck, a Manhattanite in his mid-30s, has just published a book called ”Breaking Open The Head” (Broadway), which describes his travels through Mexico, Ecuador, Gabon, and certain cultural backwaters of the United States, on the trail of drug-induced revelation. Iboga, ayahuasca, DMT, name your mushroom – Pinchbeck got them all down and kept his cool, or at least his ability to write English. His journey is a classic one: ”I fell into a spiritual crisis. I fell, and I could not get up.” And off he goes like Henderson the Rain King – the crumbling monumental Western ego, the baroque heap of subjectivity, looking to get zapped, tottering into the tribelands in search of something, anything. Pinchbeck would doubtless say it was desperation, rather than audacity, that led him to the feet of the Gabonese shaman (a dubious figure who shouts ”When is he going to see the fabulous castles? The cities of the spirits?” and then goes off in a huff); still, you can’t help admiring the hardness of the man’s head.

Our need for drugs remains – the sense that they complete or at least assuage us, that they come right out of the fissure of the human condition. On this matter, as so often in drug literature, it is the bitter, hallucinated voice of the expelled Surrealist Antonin Artaud that rings out most clearly. Artaud had a rare commitment to opiates (hard to argue with a man who writes thus to an ex-lover from inside a lunatic asylum: ”You must find heroin at any cost and if necessary be killed in order to bring it to me here…”). He insisted simultaneously on their pointlessness and on his absolute right, as a matter of necessity, to access this pointlessness. ”It is not opium which makes me work but its absence,” he wrote. ”And in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present.” Punctual reminders of ”that state outside of life” sharpened Artaud’s taste for the here and now. And on behalf of self-medicators everywhere and for all time, from the wino on the street to the high-achieving user, he entered the following plea: ”We are not mad, we are wonderful doctors, we know the dosage of soul, of sensibility, of marrow, of thought. You must leave us alone, you must leave the sick alone….”

No glamour there, no beautiful illusion. The most surprising thing about drugs is how very boring they can be. For all their technical interest there is an air of superfluity, almost of futility, to many of the testimonies and descriptions collected in Boon’s book. Oliver Wendell Holmes, he reports, coming round from a revelatory experience on ether and searching for les mots justes, managed only the following: ”A strong sense of turpentine prevails throughout.” One longs for more details like this; after 200 pages in the company of deadly-earnest self-injectors and inner-space buccaneers one longs for bathos, deflation, the irruption of the normal. I was coarsely gratified to learn, for example, that the California ketamine researcher John Lilly, after becoming ”the void beyond any human specification,” had his studies curtailed by a ”serious accident while bicycling.”

The thought occurs, even allowing for their near-universal impact, that drugs might just be a monstrous irrelevance in the history of human consciousness, a colossal red herring – that the real business of living demands from us that we ”learn to make it without any chemical corn.” That was William Burroughs, in a post-narcotic mood, but let’s end where we began: with Geoffrey Hill. ”Redemption,” he writes in ”The Orchards Of Syon,” ”is self-redemption and entails crawling/to the next angle of vision.” Crawling is the word – humiliated, horizontal, no shortcuts or sudden leaps, no vaulting into bliss. And with an unassisted effort of self we see that the next angle is already there, appointed for us whether we make it that far or not.

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Global Ear: Marrakech

August 1, 2002 by

This was originally published in the August 2002 issue of The Wire. (To read more of my journalism, click here.)

William Burroughs called Morocco’s northern port city of Tangier Interzone back in the 1950s, and described it as “the market where all human potentials are spread out.” Musically speaking, this remains a pretty good description of the Djemaa el Fna (“the place of the dead”), the large square at the center of the southern Moroccan city of Marrakech. Despite its age, in the daytime the square looks unimpressive. A few snake charmers sit under umbrellas, waiting for tourists to come have their photo taken. A heat haze rises off the tarmac. But when the sun goes down, crowds converge on the square and clusters of musicians appear with darboukas, djembes and other drums and chant the songs of the Sufi brotherhoods or Berber folksongs. In another area, the same hand drums are accompanied by a toothless young man on an electrified oud, who thrashes out scratchy Beefheart style guitar lines over the drums. Near the orange juice stalls, an especially large group has gathered around a long haired moustached guy who sits by a drum and what looks like a photo of himself. He is flanked by drummers, guitarists and two banjo players. The young guy next to me says that he is not the same as the guy in the photo, who turns out to be the leader of revolutionary Moroccan-rock group Nass el Ghiwan, who died in a plane crash in the early 1980s. The group plays cover versions of Nass’s stridently political songs, while women covered from head to toe in the traditional manner shuffle sexily to the music. Meanwhile, over by the vendors of love magic and the fortune tellers, are the tape stands, selling the latest Jay-Z or Limp Bizkit next to tapes of Arabic classical music, contemporary Moroccan chaabi pop, while “Arabica” remixes of Oum Kalthoum and Missy Elliott cooked up in bedrooms in Casablanca rock the speakers. Periodically the amplified voice of the muezzin in the nearby Koutoubia mosque cuts through everything. The cacophony, with its constantly shifting performance spaces and amplified sounds marks the square out not as the primitive exotic place beloved of writers like George Orwell and Elias Canetti, who visited in the first half of the century, but as a modern space which sets its own terms – Berber, Islamic, Maghrebi – for the kind of experiment and re-evaluation of values that we normally associate with the modern.
Around midnight the crowds begin to drift off home. It is at this point that the sounds emanating from the periphery of the square catch your attention. You had already noticed the picturesque costumes of the Gnawa musicians, sitting in groups so far towards the edge of the square that they are almost run down by traffic. But the qrakech, the iron castanets that the Gnawa play make a quiet wash of steel sound that requires you to enter the circle for it to make it’s effect. Similarly, the three stringed bass guitar, the guimbri, which the leader plays, is inaudible until you’re close up. But by 1 am, the square is empty except for the Gnawa groups who attract a ragged selection of night owls to their circle. A four year old boy sits on a rag next to me, while a bald hunchbacked man nods to the bass and the chanting. A disturbed man joins the circle, jabbering to himself, smoking compulsively. The castanets set up rippling rhythms until they’re something like a sea of beats, inside of which the guimbri moves, and the chants grow. The Gnawa grow curious about the disturbed man, the music seems to tighten, to focus. They giggle to themselves. His hat falls to the ground, and he takes out his lighter and puts it to his forehead, not, apparently, to set himself on fire, but as though he was trying to illuminate his skull, see through it. The Gnawa are known for their ability to work with the mentally ill during all night lilas, similar to the vodoun ceremonies of Haiti. This is not a ritual in the square, but some small act of exorcism appears to take place. The castanets keep on going. All night long.
The Gnawa, who call themselves “the sons of Bambara” trace their ancestry back to sub-Saharan Africa, from where they were brought by Moorish slave traders in previous centuries (Marrakech had a slave market until 1912). Although they are at the very periphery both of the square and of Moroccan society, in recent years, Gnawa has become a part of the global music scene, and its key features – supple castanet rhythms, looped double bass-like guimbri sounds, trance and chant – have mutated into increasingly novel forms. Like reggae, the sound of Gnawa is easily appropriated. A music of gaps, spaces, extended durations, it lends itself to remixes, fusion experiments which “fill in” the “gaps” in the music with dodgy synth washes, Santana-style guitar solos and secular words. The Essaouira Festival of Gnawa, one of a series of annual summer music festivals that includes the Rabat Rhythm Festival and Fes’ Sacred Music Festival, has become the focus of much of this fusion activity. A free and freewheeling event that takes place in venues and on the street around the beautiful coastal town, the festival has hosted guests like Archie Shepp, Susann Deihim, the Orchestre de Barbès jamming with Gnawa groups from around the country. Over 200,000 people attended the most recent festival. Perhaps it is evidence of the Gnawa’s famed ability to manipulate time that cassettes of the 2002 festival were on sale in the square in Marrakech weeks before the festival itself took place.
Collaboration between Gnawas and American jazz musicians in Morocco has a long history. Pianist Randy Weston lived in Tangier on and off from 1969 to 1975, and ran a club there called African Rhythms, where, along with other jazz musicians, he played with a Gnawa master Abdellah El-Gourd, at that time an electrical engineer for the Voice of America radio station in the city. El-Gourd’s home is now both shrine and school for Gnawa in Tangier and photos of Roland Kirk and old Hammond organs intermingle with vintage guimbris and photos of Gnawa masters like Ba Hmid. Weston’s The Splendid Master Gnawa Musicians of Morocco (1996) brought together a group of Gnawa elders from around the country including the great master Ahmed Boussou. Meanwhile, Pharoah Sanders has collaborated with Essaouira’s gnawa master Mahmoud Ghania on The Trance of the Seven Colors (1994), a recording produced by Bill Laswell, who lent his hand to a variety of key recordings of Moroccan music, including Night Spirit Masters, a set of recordings of the Gnawas, made in Marrakech featuring the incomparable Mustapha Baqbou. Laswell also produced the more tripped out sounds of Aisha Kandisha’s Jarring Effects, released on the excellent Switzerland-based Barraka el Farnatshi – a label that continues to pursue strange hybrid musical forms like Argan’s fusion of heavy metal and Berber music on South Moroccan Motor Berber, or the doped out Chaabi-meets-trance sounds of the recent compilation Imperia Consequential.
A number of Moroccan musicians have been producing experimental gnawa. The originators, back in the 1970s, were Nass El Ghiwan, whose Chants Gnawa du Maroc, with its strange sludgy Can-style prog rhythms and intense vocals, still sounds totally fresh. Hassan Hakmoun, who cut his teeth performing as a young man in the Djemaa el Fna and at ceremonies is the best known of the Marrakechi Gnawa explorers. He performed and moved to New York in the 1987 and charted much of the fusion territory back in the early nineties, making the impressive Gift of the Gnawa (1991) with Don Cherry and Richard Horowitz. He was involved in the downtown New York scene, producing funky Gnawa-Hendrix discs like Trance (1994), with his group Zahar, before returning to a more traditional style. A more conventional but equally euphoric funk groove drives Gnawa Diffusion, a Paris based Moroccan-Algerian collaboration that mutates gnawa into 80s club soul. Casablanca’s Dar Gnawa (“House of Gnawa”) rap in Arabic over Gnawa rhythms because “we’re Moroccans, but we’re Africans too”. Most promisingly, Saha Koyo is a collaboration between Hamid Al Kasri and Issam-Issam, two Moroccan musicians playing Gnawa songs on 80s style synthesizers and drum machines that sounds like lo-fi electro jazz.
But again, the most important revisions of Gnawa tradition are not necessarily sonic. In recent years, a small Women in Gnawa scene has developed. One of the great successes of the Essaouira festival has been Hasna el Becharia. Born in the desert town of Bechar on the Algerian side of what is now the border with Morocco, Becharia plays the guimbri and sings. On her first CD Djazair Johara, released last year on Indigo, she plays electric guitar that sounds like a spikier version of Khalifa Ould Eide’s work with that other Saharan diva Dimi Mint Abba. Then there’s B’Net Marrakech (“the women of Marrakech”), five Berber women residing in Marrakech who mix Gnawa with Rai and Chaabi styles. Their newly released first CD, Chama’a features a repertoire of songs that runs the gamut from love to demonic possession to the heroic Moroccan World Cup soccer team. “Gnawa music is only for men, and it takes a lot of courage to break that taboo,” observed one of the group in a recent interview in Globalvillageidiot. “We’re women who love the night time. Something to smoke, something to drink, and we can play for hours.”
Thanks to Gwen Brown, Pat Jabbar at Barraka and Magali Bergès.
Hasna el Becharia’s Djazair Johara is out on Indigo, B’Net Marrakech’s Chama’a is out on L’empreinte Digitale and Dar Beida 04’s Impiria Consequential is out on Barraka el Farnatshi.

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Ether Talk

June 1, 2002 by

This was originally published in the January 2002 issue of The Wire. (To read more of my journalism, click here.)

“Visual. Concrete. Sound” announces the sleek, minimalist homepage of UbuWeb, giving little indication of the vast store of sonic, visual and textual treasures that lies within: thousands of MP3 and real audio soundfiles that archive a vast area in the international history of oral and sound poetry, sound art, and concrete poetry beginning with recordings of Russian futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky and Dadaist Hugo Ball (from 1916!), passing through Antonin Artaud’s 1948 radio broadcast, a miscellany of Beats, Lettrists and Fluxus, current Wire obsessions like Henri Chopin and Bob Cobbing, to more contemporary sound work from the likes of Vito Acconci, text-sound composer Charles Amirkhanian and Cecil Taylor. There are whole issues of pioneer sound art magazine Tellus, an impressively complete set of MP3s of New York poet John Giorno’s Poetry Works LPs, all unavailable on CD, including the historic Dial a Poem series from the early 1970s and the William Burroughs celebration, 1978s The Nova Convention. And to go along with it, there’s a large, exquisite selection of writings that document the evolution of the sound and concrete poetry worlds.

UbuWeb was begun in 1996 by New York based visual artist, writer and DJ Kenneth Goldsmith, as a side project to a web design business he was running at the time. As the possibility of distributing audiofiles over the internet developed in the late 1990s, Goldsmith’s voracious appetite for burning and ripping obscure out of print vinyl and CDs and posting them online soon overwhelmed even the generous ISP who was donating free server space to him. Charles Bernstein, guru of language poetry at U. Buffalo (famous, amongst other things, for the presence of minimalist Tony Conrad), offered unlimited server space at the university and Goldsmith has made full use of it, making UbuWeb the largest resource for the sound/concrete/poetry nexus on the web today.

Goldsmith, who grew up on a downtown New York sonic diet of punk, funk, jazz and head music, was converted to sound art around 1990 while working in his studio in downtown Manhattan. “It was around the time of the first De La Soul LP, and somebody was walking by with a beatbox blasting and as I listened, it sounded just like music concrete to me. And I thought: wow, someone is walking down Houston Street playing Pierre Henry??? And what I realized was that it was actually a break between two rap tunes. With hip hop, you could take any sound at all, even the most abstract ones, and the minute you put a beat behind it, it’s legitimized. Whereas if you take the beat out, it becomes completely illegitimate and has no place in the culture.”

Goldsmith has made this illegitimacy his modus operandi on his WFMU radio show Unpopular Music a.k.a. Anal Magic, which has become infamous for sonic headfucks like his broadcast of the whole of John Cage’s Indeterminacy last Thanksgiving to New York City. Goldsmith’s own work has walked a fascinating path between concrete poetry, John Cage, and hiphop. At one point, his concrete poems (see picture above) were set to be presented in collaboration with rapper Del tha Funky Homosapien. Del bailed, but the project later evolved into his collaboration with Cage’s favorite vocalist Joan La Barbara as a book/CD 73 Poems. While a lot of language poetry sounds pretty academic, Goldsmith’s interest in hiphop has given his work a vibrancy that’s firmly rooted in everyday NYC language and experience. Speaking of his book No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96, a vast catalog of found and processed words and phrases which he describes as “a big rhyming text”, he notes “I was listening to a lot of rap, but seeing the connection between James Joyce and rap in the compounding of words. “Funkdoobiest” could be something ripped out of Finnegan’s Wake.”

Goldsmith sees the web in the same terms. “For a long time, the URL for Modell’s wasn’t modells.com, it was “gottagotomos.com”: it’s out of hiphop culture and it’s out of Finnegan’s Wake. The web is the manifestation in concrete language terms of the meaning of hiphop and Joyce.”

For Goldsmith the future of sound poetry is digital and web-based, because of the access the internet provides to an enormous archive of sound. He walks over to his turntables and puts on Stock, Hausen and Walkman’s “Flogging” from Ventilating Deer complete with it’s sample of Henri Chopin’s sound poem classic “Rouge”. “Everybody’s grabbing stuff from the web, including UBUweb. People are going to be chopping this stuff up and reassembling it. It’s totally thrilling. I hope people are sampling the hell out of UbuWeb!”

Asked whether he’s had any Napster-style problems putting up such a vast collection of proprietary audio material he shakes his head. “If John Giorno called me and told me he was putting the Poetry Works stuff back in print, I’d take it down tomorrow because the job would be done. The distribution for these things was extremely marginal in the first place: mostly they just die, or become huge collectors items. None of the MP3s on UbuWeb are in print. The Henri Chopin all comes from out of print vinyl. I’d never take an in print Alga Marghen record and put it up. I realize there’s no economy there, and I’m not going to take money out of the hands of people that are doing good work. I’ll put up real audio files, but the sound quality there is degraded to the point that it just stimulates sales for the CDs.”

Goldsmith sees UbuWeb (on which he is an anonymous presence, and for which he receives no money) as an example of the way in which the web functions as a gift economy in which low production costs and free distribution make possible a utopian cornucopeia of hitherto unknown experimental richness. “The web is a new way of giving shit away – in a major way. And the web is made for poetry. The avant garde remains the counterculture – non-narrative, opaque, things without beats and stories, things that are weird. As the culture gets more and more oriented to pop, to beats, rhythm and capitalism (R n’ C?), this stuff is just forgotten. There was a moment where the avant garde and the main culture came together in the sixties, when the Beatles were talking about Stockhausen and Cage, all that crossover stuff. The eighties killed it. So this stuff remains as potent as ever. Nobody makes money doing this, so why not give it away? It’s beautiful.”

UbuWeb is at https://www.ubu.com. Goldsmith’s writing is at https://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/. His musical writings are at A Popular Guide to Unpopular Music at https://www.wfmu.org/~kennyg/.

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12k/LINE: Zen and the Art of the Drum Machine

April 1, 2002 by

This was originally published in the April 2002 issue of The Wire. (To read more of my journalism, click here.)

“Minimalism Keeps Getting Starker”, announce the sleeve-notes to Chronologi, a compilation of recordings from the first four years of Brooklyn based Taylor Deupree’s ultraminimal label 12k. So stark that Deupree recently started a separate side label, LINE, with Washington DC based sound artist Richard Chartier to explore mostly beatless realms of virtual silence. Chartier’s recently issued Of Surfaces must rank alongside fellow LINE artist Bernhard Gunter’s work as one of the quietest CDs ever made. For the first two and a half minutes, you think that there’s been a mistake. You check your audio equipment to make sure all the settings are right. Your ears strain to hear something as the LCD on the CD player indicates that track 1 is still in progress. The first muffled bass sounds make you wonder if your speakers are fucked up. The second louder bass sounds at 03:48 make you wonder if your attempts to hear something by cranking the volume up to 10 are now going to fuck the speakers up. An infinitely subtle, almost imperceptible drone starts up. Then it fades again. There’s a surprising level of tension, as you await the next sound event. And afterwards, the effects linger. You hear a drone, a rumbling bass sound, and wonder whether you have left the CD on. It’s “just” a car, or the rain, or the sound of the fridge in the next room. But suddenly you are listening to it. Your ears have received a brief training in sensitivity to the almost imperceptible.
Talking the day before his first LINE CD Series is to be exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, the most prestigious fine art show in America, Chartier recalls that, “as a child I was always mimicking appliances, like the refrigerator. I loved listening to its low frequency hum. I like the subtleties of low or really high frequencies. We live in a culture that’s dominated by information, and information is noise, whether it’s visual or audio. People don’t listen to small things because usually they’re drowned out. I got email from someone in New York saying, “I can’t listen to your music because my environment’s too loud, there’s too much going on.” Most people don’t grow up in a situation where they’re required to listen – so anything small, or subtle or barely there is lost because they’ve tuned it out.”
Chartier and Deupree’s collaboration on LINE, as well as their recent 12k CD After, whose main track was recorded live with Kim Cascone at Mutek, the Canadian sound art mecca, says a lot about the current state of digital sound culture. While Chartier comes from a strong visual arts background, Deupree first surfaced as a member of Prototype 909, a popular early nineties US techno act, famous for their live machine improv rave shows. Deupree’s gradual disenchantment with rave’s beats n drugs culture and his growing interest in stripped down sound is revealed on Chronologi which shows 12k’s development, from early 1997 ambient FSOL-like projects such as Human Mesh Dance’s Thesecretnumbertwelve with it’s 808 rhythms, to the drifting spaces of Kim Cascone’s “Bufferdrift” and the beautiful ambient shapes of Dan Abrams’ Shuttle358. Deupree now says he prefers to perform in gallery spaces: “People have this connotation when they go see you in a club that they’re gonna talk or dance, and I’ve had disastrous club shows where the wrong audience shows up, expecting something else. When you play at a gallery, people are going in with a different idea, they’re not expecting a dance show. But you say club and electronic music and people think techno.”
Both Chartier and Deupree are fascinated by the CD as an object that straddles the visual and audio cultural worlds. Deupree, who designs all the 12k releases, with their elegantly minimal slimline jewel cases, notes that “when I began listening to electronic music in the early eighties, I used to buy records based on their covers, before I was aware of “graphic design”, just because they looked cool. I became familiar with designers like Peter Saville and Neville Brody, labels like 4AD and Factory . When someone compared 12k to Factory, it was the biggest compliment of my entire life.”
Poised between the music and art worlds, 12k and LINE’s “sound art” blurs the boundaries between the two worlds – it’s sold as a CD in record stores, even though the CDs don’t necessarily contain “music”. “We create this work on a CD,” says Chartier, “which has the ability to be purchased and consumed by the public. It’s blurs the line between fine art, something unaffordable which you have to go to a gallery to see or hear, and something that you can take into your home or put on your MP3 player. But if you remove the sound work from the package and the medium of the compact disc, it becomes something totally different.” 12k’s website based mp3 label term. focuses on the ephemeral quality of digital sound, not to mention it’s tendency to proliferate into infinite versions and collaborations. Deupree says that term., which has so far released work by Sogar and Goem side-project Freiband “is the representation of pure data and imageless sound information. The antithesis of physical form … all downloads will be available for a finite period of time only.”
A good introduction to Deupree’s aesthetic can be found on the 1999 Caipirinha compilation Microscopic Sound, which Deupree assembled, featuring stripped down but funky tracks by the likes of Ryoji Ikeda, Thomas Brinkmann and rastermusic founder Frank Bretschneider. At their best, these tracks sound like blueprints for a manual on Zen and the Art of the Drum Machine: it feels like you are hearing an 808 for the first time. Much of Deupree’s work, including Balance his just issued collaboration with Bretschneider on Mille Plateaux, maintains a strongly rhythmic pulse, but one that can be focused on as sound rather than a groove to dance to: “I’m really interested in repetition, so to me an interesting sound is often one that can be heard over and over again. When you hear a sound repeating, a small loop, you often start to hear other things within the sound. The more you concentrate, the more you hear some little fluctuation in the sound that starts to become really apparent.”
Chartier, whose own work is almost rhythm (not to mention sound) free, believes that the computer offers the possibility for new types of minimalist sound: “if you think of the work of people like Reich or Glass, who’ve been designated minimalists, it’s minimalist in a musical sense, but not in a physical sense. To me their work is very busy, active. The advent of digital audio has greatly increased what composers can do in terms of using the aspect of silence as a compositional element. Where it really is silent, not an analog silence that has that hiss. With digital silence, there’s nothing. An absolute zero – no code. My work is really a process of removal. Sometimes a piece will be based on one [looped] sound with things layered over it, and then eventually I will take the original linking element out. So it’s this ghost element that’s not really there. That’s what I like about working with sound as opposed to paint and canvas: especially working on a computer, you can take away sound until there’s really nothing left.”
The 12k. compilation Chronologi is out on Instinct; Cascone, Chartier and Dupree’s After is out now on 12k; Chartier’s Of Surfaces is on LINE; Bretschneider and Deupree’s Balance is on Mille Plateaux. For more information, go to www.12k.com.

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Ocean of Sound (Ocean of Silence): Siri Karunamayee talks to Marcus Boon

March 1, 2002 by

This was originally published in the Summer 2002 issue of Ascent Magazine. (To read more of my journalism, click here.)

I first met Sri Karunamayee at a music workshop held in Rishikesh last winter, where she was teaching Indian classical music, alongside other students of the great Indian singer Pandit Pran Nath, and other members of the Kirana gharana, India’s foremost school of classical singing. Aside from her beautiful voice, Sri Karunamayee’s classes were impressive in the way they stressed the fundamentals of singing and sound. The roots of her ability to articulate a philosophy of sound and it’s Divine nature can be found in her life story.
Sri Karunamayee was born into a family in Delhi that was devoted to spiritual music. She pursued parallel careers as a singer and an educator, achieving the status of a class ‘A’ broadcasting artist for All India Radio, while at the same time obtaining a Masters in Philosophy from Delhi University, and acting as head of the music department at V.M. College of Ghaziabad of Agra University. Throughout her life, she has been committed to music as a spiritual practice, seeking out the highest teachers like Pandit Vinay Chandra Maudgalya, Vediji. She was one of the first students of Pandit Pran Nath, who in 1970 brought the Indian Classical vocal tradition to America, and numbered amongst his students, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Terry Riley and Jon Hassell. Sri Karunamayee pays regular visits to North America, at the invitation of the Bay Area’s Sur-Laya-Sangam, to teach Hindustani vocal music.
One day in 1966 while traveling by bus in Delhi, she felt the urge to go visit the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in the outskirts of the city. There, she Encountered the Ashram’s founder, an old family friend and holy man named Sri Surendra Nath Jauhar Fakir. Strangely, she heard an ‘inner call’, and offered to sing a song for him. After much persuasion, he gave in, and she sang, reducing the room to tears. Mindful of the time, she made her excuses to leave, but was refused. She remains at the Ashram to this day, teaching and engaged in her Sadhana.
I visited Sri Karunamayee at Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Delhi on a beautiful morning in May. The sound of cuckoos in the garden vied with the sound of auto-rickshaws, airplanes and the delightful urban chaos of Delhi. We spoke for several hours, with a large photo portrait of The Mother beaming down on us. The conversation was so exhilarating that even the Delhi public bus that I took back into the city center afterwards, a notorious source of discomfort, felt infinitely spacious and full of joy.

MB: In what way can we understand making music as a form of spiritual practice?
K: Music, and especially Pandit Pran Nath’s approach to music, is very close to silence, the Sunyatta, from which everything comes and to which everything returns. That music is so close to silence, that to attain it, one has to learn to go within, make the inward journey. It is not so easy. First one should have the aspiration to do so. One should know that there is something worthwhile in going to the depths, where there is not so much sensation, activity, turmoil and drama as on the surface. The very depths are so still and impenetrable. In our own selves there are such levels. If one wants to be fully dynamic and effective in the true sense we must contact and master this level of perfect silence and equilibrium. Playing with a top in full motion it appears static, fixed, and gray, but just a touch and lo, it assumes quite a turmoil, hectic movement and a riot of so many colors! This is what life is like. When you have achieved that balance, only then will you try to make this venture. You were asking about pop music earlier. If you want the surface, all the variety, thrills, change and change and change, then pop music is very good. But if you want to know what is the ultimate reason why all this has been created, and not just be tossed by the rising and falling of the waves, if you want to know where the power of the waves comes from, you have to go to the tides. And what controls the tides?

MB: How do you stop yourself from getting lost in those depths?
K: Indian music—the very blessing of the Divine as Shiva—has given us the gift of the tambura, the four stringed Veena or Drone, which gives you a feeling of groundedness, so you do not get lost as in Western music. The tambura will support you always. It is said that even Saraswati, goddess of wisdom and learning and music, when she enters the Nada Brahman, the ocean of sound, feels that it is so impenetrable, so profound, that she is concerned less she, the goddess of music, may be lost, inundated by it. So she places two gourds around her, in the form of Veena, and then she is guided by them into it.

MB: Such an ocean!
K: Yes. And that ocean of sound is the sound of silence. The depth of which is expressed in the sounds of the tambura.

MB: The sound is the reflection of the silence?
K: Yes. Silence: it is like the depth of depths. It is the eternal game of hide and seek. You may create any number of sophisticated games in the world, but the one game with universal appeal, which nobody is ever tired of, is the game of hide and seek. From the child to the oldest person. Everyone loves it. Sound: from where does it manifest? From where has it come? Where does it go? It merges into the ether, the Sunyatta, and then it re-emerges. Whether we are in the sound, or the sound is in us, it is always a mystery. Even when we are not striking up any sound, does the unstruck sound not emanate through us, in spite of us? The ocean of sound is composed of that struck and unstruck sound, all rolled into One. And we are a part of that. The drop is in the ocean. But the drop in the ocean can say, yes I am ocean.

MB: Are we sound?
K: We are sound. Aren’t we? When we are in control of sound, then we are sound. And that sound is just like when you hold a set of scales, on one side you keep the weight, on the other you keep the goods. So sound is balanced with silence. You cannot be fully aware of the beauty of this sound unless you have tasted silence.

MB: Are we silence then too?
K: Yes.

MB: How did you became involved in music?
K: Oh! My involvement in music? Surely it started before I was born. Because “sound-crazy” as I am, how could I not be born in a family which was already resounding with the music of masters like Pandit Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, Ustad Abdul Karim Khan, Ustad Fayyaz Khan and Pandit Bhatkande? Through my grandfather’s hummings, my father’s singing, my elder brother and sister’s practice, and through their teachers. But as a small child I liked to go to where nobody made any sound. Where two doors met in our house there was such a place, and I would just go and hide myself there. For hours I would stand there and feel the silence. Silence going into sound, and sound turning into silence. That was my favorite time. Sometimes my mother would look at the brood and say “uh oh, where is Karuna?” We were a big family. I had to find my own corner of silence, which was essential for my existence.

MB: Did you have a formal music instructor?
K: At the age of six, good teachers were coming and teaching my brother and sister. But I was very small and it was not considered necessary for me. But I had a gift. Whenever I heard some music it just became ingrained in me. My consciousness of silence kept my slate very clean. Most of the time I enjoyed the silence, even when everyone was talking, I felt a kind of echo of the silence, as if I was in a tunnel, untouched by any of it. Whatever I heard was imprinted, and I found myself singing in that way. Nobody cared. I would just put my head down and start going sa-re-ga-ma. Sometimes I would hear my sound very clearly. I would think: it may be that my sound is not heard, but I can think of music! And holding that thread, not of the sound that I’m making, but of the concept of sound, with that I would go up the scales for many octaves. And then I would say, alright, let me come down, keeping the thread, and I would find my voice becoming audible, very clear, and then deep, and then less clear, more unheard, but I could go deep also. This was my favorite exercise. I would go higher and higher like the birds at noontime in the sky. Then I would imagine that somebody is taking water out of a well. You can go as deep as you want. There is no limit on either side, up or down. So I experienced infinity in height and depth through sound and silence. It gives you control over your mind. A thread of sound.
But you asked about formal instruction. In answer to my deepest aspiration for music as the path for my self-realization, at the age of twelve I was blessed by the teaching of Pandit Vinay Chandra Maudgalya of Gwalior Gharana, a second generation disciple of the savant of Indian music, Pandit Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, who initiated me into the depths and lofty heights of Indian music with crystal clear understanding and with a due sense of devotion and commitment for which I am so grateful.

MB: When did you first meet Pandit Pran Nath?
K: I met him in 1953 at a music festival in Delhi. This was a difficult time in Guruji’s life. His master, Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan had just died and Guruji was like a person who was very disturbed, uprooted. When Guruji started singing, my teacher Dadaji said to me, “Listen carefully, this is the music for singing for which you have taken birth on earth.” Guruji sang “Miyan Ki Mulhar.” That is a raga of rain. At certain moments, when Guruji sang, it seemed that he collected the breath of all of us, and held it for some time, and then gave it release. About five thousand people were sitting in that hall. So he held the breath of us all, collected our breath through his own breath, held it at one pitch and then let go. When he let go, we also let go. And that opened our eyes. I could never imagine that someone could hold the breath of other people. It was a shock to me. All this can be done with music! And when he ended there was torrential rain! And suddenly Pran Nathji got up, he was very sad and frustrated and angry, and he said, “I’m not a musician, I’m only a teacher.” And he left the stage. We were very shocked.

MB: The first time I heard a recording of him, I thought it sounded wrong. I couldn’t understand what he was doing. I’d never heard someone consciously trying to do what he was doing. It educated my ears.
K: You need to develop a special faculty. Then you can hear. Supposing someone is born with no faculty to smell. You say, “Oh a rose smells so beautiful!” He says, “What are you talking about?” Sri Aurobindo said people live in a three dimensional world. But in fact we live in a four dimensional world. What is the fourth dimension? The Divine. To live with or without the Divine: it is like living with or without a dimension. So living with or without music is living with or without a dimension. Music is a dimension of our existence. I first realized this when I heard everyone’s breath held in one man’s hand— and unless he decided to let go, we couldn’t release our breath. Five thousand people sitting there. So this can be done. But what is happening in between the breaths? I became aware of that when I started learning from Pran Nathji.

MB: What was Pandit Pran Nath like as a teacher?
K: He was a great teacher. He would expect the best from you and could bring out the best. Every step: the way of looking at notes, at rhythm, everything was Divine approach. With him I felt there was no difference between Divine experience and musical experience. Life was music, life was Divine. It was one experience. He said: music is just like waves, it is continuity, sometimes one aspect is shown more, another time, another aspect. It should be a total experience. I always used to look at notes from different angles, but he taught me to look at a note in its totality all at the same time. All at the same time: you see how it is rising, and at the same time, how it is balancing to fall down.

MB: So it could go in any direction?
K: Yes. The real music is between the notes, that is Pandit Pran Nath’s special contribution. Notes are landmarks but in-between much happens. When a child is growing from childhood to adolescence, adolescence to adulthood, there are so many stages of maturity. One Marcus was born as a baby, and it is the same person growing, passing through different phases in life. That is continuity.

MB: The note is always passing through time?
K: Yes, music with its notes, its sound and silence, is something continuous. For our own limited understanding, we put limits on this continuity. A mother who is with a child all the time cannot see how her child is growing, but any person who only sees the child every few weeks will say, “Oh, the baby has grown.” The Western musical notation system cannot do justice to sound, it can just point. That’s all. Notation misses how one thing changes into another.

MB: The great Balinese Gamelan master Wayan Lotring once said “In my time, all music was nothing but nuances…”
K: Those subtle things in between go unnoticed because of the fast life, to notice them you have to slow down your own inner speed. Look at pop music, how fast and loud it is. It doesn’t give you the opportunity to think of the finest nuances, and observe how one thing changes into another. It is so imperceptible. But even it is made perceptible, if you can bring your consciousness to focus on that sacred phenomenon of one thing becoming another, to hold control over that is not a simple thing. Things get out of hand!

MB: I heard Pandit Pran Nath say that raga means living souls. What did he mean by that?
K: Pandit Pran Nathji was a Siddha-Nada-Yogi of the highest realization. With his natural gift, and his sadhana of the purity of sound, he was able to offer a living experience of Ragas as divine entities coming and manifesting in their celestial true forms. Every note and nuance had the power and potency to bless the singer and the listener alike with felicity and Ananda. When the singer invokes the spirit of a particular raga, his own spirit gets attuned to a pitch of the raga, and through those sounds, he says to the spirits please come down and manifest. He offers himself completely. When he is singing a raga he is not thinking of anything else, every drop of him is taken possession of, there is no individuality left. Unless that surrender is there, we have not invoked the spirit of the raga.

MB: Can such a spiritual practice of Indian music really take root in a place like North America?
K: Music is a great barrier breaker. Pandit Pran Nathji’s music was spontaneously appreciated and adopted by the spiritual seekers, practitioners following the Sufi path like Pir Vilayat Khan and his followers, and master musicians like La Monte Young, Terry Riley, John Hassell and others. They open-heartedly welcomed this absolutely different tradition of Indian music—and even that of the Kirana Gharana—taking a head long plunge into the Nada Brahma in Yogic spirit. This resulted in a sea-change in their approach, and the emergence of a new musical form which has been called minimalism.
Just as India is dedicated to divinity, America’s ruling spirit is liberty. They really respect freedom – but from that, misunderstandings also come, and you have to pay a price for this. India has paid a price for divinity. All kinds of sadhana are prevalent here, but in the name of sadhana, there is much negativity also. In the same way, in America, there is a ruling spirit of freedom, but it is not fully applied. It will be applied only when just as I say, “The divine in me acknowledges the divine in you and bows down before it,” in the same way, the should say, “The free soul in me respects the free soul in you.” Everyone! If we have perfected one quality, then all the other things will be taken care of. When we have really mastered the idea of liberty, there is no difference between liberty and divinity! And music is doing this work: music is that which will open all hearts, it is the fountain of grace which will pour down over all creation.

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Dark Angels

March 1, 2002 by

This was originally published in Hungry Ghost, a website I maintained from 2001-5 that was devoted to spirituality and contemporary theory/culture. (To read more of my published essays, click here.)

“Paris changes! but my melancholy

Has not changed at all! New palaces, scaffolds,

Bricks, old suburbs, it all becomes allegory to me.” – Charles Baudelaire, “The Swan”

In July 2001 I sat with a musician in a café in Soho in Lower Manhattan, who I was interviewing for a magazine.  Having gotten over pleasantries, my interviewee, a long time inhabitant of the city, expressed his total alienation from what Manhattan, and presumably the rest of America had become.  He talked of how he felt that everything in American culture had become twisted, distorted beyond recognition, and that this was a culture in a state of hopeless decline.  I agreed with him.  Both of us felt like ghosts, hungry ones no doubt, wandering through the paradise of designer clothing stores and retail delights that now fill a neighborhood that in the 1960s and 1970s was the incubator of some of the most beautiful art, music, poetry that the world has ever known.  We were ghosts, yes, but still had access to these haunts and our feelings of disaffection were in a sense untenable, since we both enjoyed the good fortune to be able to enjoy the city on that warm summer afternoon at our leisure.  Two months later, the dust from the twisted, distorted metal framework, and the bodies and machines that inhabited it about a half mile down the road from where we sat, might have floated through the open doors of the café and settled on top of our cappuccinos.

I am very much aware that hindsight is 20/20 vision, but the fact remains that many people living in New York were angry about what happened to the city in the 1980s and 1990s.  Figuring out the contradictions involved in that anger, an anger born of our love for the city, is what this article is about.  Presumably, ever since there was a bohemian subculture in Manhattan, there were people who angry about what was happening to the city; bohemia is about doomed utopias, disenchantment.  I’m talking about a much more specific feeling, probably born from being immersed in the world of people with AIDS for most of the 1990s, and experiencing the discontinuity between their experience of life (especially before the protease inhibitors came along) and the Friends/Seinfeld world blossoming all around me.  I’m a natural born pessimist, so I believed that this world could not last.  But it carried on.  I believed that something was going to happen, had to happen, but it carried on.  Like everyone else, I was shocked by September 11 when it happened.  I had fantasized about some slow grinding recession or depression which would make all the Starbucks and Rite Aid branches go bust, that would drive “the yuppies” away and allow me to rent a cheap apartment in the East Village.  Or maybe some kind of Y2K apocalypse.  But despite the bursting of the stock market bubble, it didn’t happen.  Stranger still, even after September 11, everything still continues, although in a queasy, jittery way.  Is this a sign of the plucky resilience of ordinary New Yorkers, or a sign of a terminal inability to face a situation that is out of control?  Or both?

At one point during the late 1990s, I started writing a new version of Lord of the Rings, in which Mordor was Manhattan, the East River the Great River, and Brooklyn the Shire.  I wanted to capture the impotence of those of us with little money, and little interest in making any, in controlling what happened to the city that we lived in.  Thinking of those lines from Benjamin about the storm of progress heaping up its wreckage, which The Mekons quoted on “Sorceror”, I conceived Guiliani as a new Lord of the Rings, able to make and remake Manhattan at will, shifting around vast sums of money, reshaping the skyline and the street level of all the streets that I love, mocking the poor of the city, harrassing artists, eradicating all signs of the genuine street life of the city in favor of a suburban shopping mall imposed on everyone with brute force.

Of course, it was not entirely money that has reshaped our skyline in Sept. 2001, although Osama bin Laden did make his fortune in construction.  After September 11, I walked around the streets of New York, and it was incredibly hard for me to understand how some of the plane hijackers must have passed through those same streets, seen the incredible of explosion of cultures and peoples there, and were indifferent enough to them that they could want to destroy them. I guess what they were really interested in was the towers. The people in them, the people living on the streets around them were dispensable. Hmmmm. Sounds familiar. How could they not see that it means nothing to destroy a tower – that the wreckage, the frame-work is quickly carried away, the power structure that built the towers continues, in fact is invigorated by the damage, and the suffering that remains is felt by families who have lost someone. That’s all.

Yes, it’s amazing that someone out there in the world apparently regarded Manhattan as Mordor and hated it enough to want to destroy it.  Equally amazing that after 0911, The Lord of the Rings film, which was already in production when the disaster happened, could still be brought out, and become the box office smash that it has.  Just as Star Wars was to Reagan’s 1980s, so Lord of the Rings is to Bush’s 2000s.  But while the evil Empire and Communism were easily equated, who exactly is our Mordor?  Milton’s Satan says that “I myself am Hell!”  So maybe this time we are Mordor?  If Brooklyn is the Shire, it’s only because Manhattan is the visible symbol of American power and across the East River, the rest of the world, a dull sprawl of gas stations and mini-malls begins.  Not that that made any difference to those who drove planes into the twin towers, killing many people from the Shire.  The metaphor breaks down, doesn’t it?  Am I a part of The Shire or Mordor?  Both, really.  Better still, am I a hobbit … or an orc?  Another idea for a book I had was to retell the Lord of the Rings from the point of view of an orc, Good Soldier Schweyk style.  This orc would be lazy, totally uncommitted to Sauron’s plans for world domination, indifferent to elves, dwarves, hobbits, other orcs or Black Riders. I am not saying I admire this orc. I am saying such orcs exist.

The problem with the marketing of Tolkien’s conceit is that it was rabidly anti-industrial revolution, anti-modern state.  The world of technology, the military industrial complex is the world of Mordor.  Sure, maybe Tolkien was talking about fascism.  But Saruman’s glass ball, Sauron’s evil eye are techno-scientific wonders of the kind that dominate American culture at the millennium, just as the Black Riders on their monstrous horses, represent the fearsome powers of American military technology, such as those drone planes that recently smoked a group of Al Qaeda people driving down the highway in the Yemen, totally unaware (I presume) that they were about to be struck by a missile from an unseen drone plane and reduced to instant ashes.  Is it clear what I’m saying?  The narrative of the Lord of the Rings is to some degree the same narrative that the modern world hating Al Qaeda view the world from.  In a different way from Al Qaeda, who I abhor, it is a narrative that many of us in the counterculture view the world from too – however much our lives, immersed in technology such as the laptop on which I am writing this, contradict this feeling.  It’s a narrative that many Americans presumably identify with – since it’s endlessly marketed to us by Hollywood in movies like Independence Day.  Even the makers of the movie The Two Towers seem confused about whether a tower is a good or a bad thing.  In Tolkien’s book, The Two Towers are Isengard, home of Saruman, a formerly noble place, now mysteriously turned evil,  and the noble tower of Gondor, Minas Tirith.  They represent a balance, a polarity of good and evil power – a polarity maintained throughout the trilogy. In the movie, somehow, the tower of Gondor has all but disappeared, and the two most visible “towers” are now the evil Isengard (which moreover appears to have always been evil) and Sauron’s towering Mount Doom.  As though it was impossible to imagine a “good” tower any more – or maybe a tower not associated with trauma.  Note that the winning design for the restored World Trade Center contains nothing that resembles a tower.  Are all towers now to be shunned?

The cover of the new Rhys Chatham compilation on Table of the Elements suggests an answer.  It’s a photo taken by Robert Longo of one of the ornate top stories of one of those turn of the century warehouse type buildings in Soho, with ornate mock classical decorations around the windows and the flat roof.  Or for all I know, it’s one of those buildings that fringe Central Park, which are beautiful too.  The photo is taken so that this single building appears to be reaching up to the sun.  It looks imperial, but fragile too.  It’s the kind of building that Frank O’Hara would have called beautiful in a poem in a way that everyone would understand, but whose beauty now, in retrospect, appears to be at least in part connected to its imperial status.  For decades, the rest of America despised New York, and so the gesture of saying that the Chrysler Building is beautiful, which I, and Frank O’Hara, and millions of others, have made, made some kind of sense.  New York’s beauty was something fierce, something that needed to be affirmed.  Somehow it was something that could be affirmed even by those who couldn’t afford to live there.  I can’t claim that I never thought about the imperial nature of the city – it was the architecture, its sublimity, that first struck me when I visited the city in 1982.  That and hiphop, graffiti.  Somehow the combination of the two even: this vast sublime architecture, the expression of imperial power, and the wildness of the street, the subway, so opposed to one another, yet somehow inhabiting the same space.  To what degree does the roar of sheer electric exuberance that comes from the great artifacts of downtown Manhattan’s cultural heyday (early Bob Dylan, John Coltrane and Albert Ayler, the Velvet Underground, abstract expressionism, Martin Scorsese’s films, beat poetry, punk rock and nowave, hiphop, even Chatham’s noise minimalism) come from the power of those towers?

And what went wrong, so that the culture that Chatham, Charlemagne Palestine and so many others were a part of disappeared, moved to Europe, or migrated to the internet?  Finally, to what degree did that wall of noise, the roar of art, even the sleaze of the old Times Square somehow protect all these towers of industry?  The full title of Chatham’s compilation is An Angel Moves Too Fast To See.  Is it possible that all those dark angels that fill Scorsese and Abel Ferrara’s New York films were driven away by Giuliani in the 1990s?  It’s an absurd thought, completely unprovable in every sense.  But it points to another side of the Magical Politics that several people in this issue discuss.  The world of magical politics, in Mick Taussig’s expression, is the murky realm of manipulation of the “power of the souls of the violently killed, the unquiet dead ranging over continental drift …  this magical universe of warring spirits, metamorphoses, illusions, confusions and secrecy.”  In terms of New York, that would be the streets, that murk and chaos out of which, as Rem Koolhaas described in his book Delirious New York, the pristine power of those towers arose.  Koolhaas thought that it was New York’s grid, and the austerity of the architecture that led to the chaos going on in the streets, and in the lofts where monstrous erotic, aesthetic carnivals played themselves out.  But what if it was the other way around?  That all that chaos, the violence and exuberance of the streets, the drugs, the discos, the art, poetry and music being cooked up around the city, everything that Giuliani despised about the city, was actually what sustained the towers? And that when Giuliani successfully “cleaned up the city” in the 1990s, drove out most of the remaining artists, got rid of the sleaze of the old Times Square and made everyone behave like they were in Switzerland, he actually destroyed a delicate balance that protected the city, a balance between the cool, sleak, hard, straight lines of the towers, and the turbulence murk and darkness that constitutes city life. The new sanitized city became out of balance, the angels that protected it fled, and it became vulnerable to attack.

Why did Rome fall?  Why did Paris cease to be the center of modern art around World War II?  These are obviously very complex questions.  I want to point to a way of thinking about these questions that I haven’t seen discussed, that’s all.  I don’t know that I believe in angels.  I do believe, like Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, who quit New York for Toronto in the 1960s, that cities thrive or die according to the richness of the people and cultures who inhabit them.  There is a profane magic to the anarchy of great cities that is not a matter of metaphor.  This magic does not belong to the Giulianis of this world, however much they like to flatter themselves that it does.  It’s turbulent, murky, out of control, offensive and scary.  It was also an important part of what I love about New York, and in a strange way I did feel protected by it.  A sanitized city is not necessarily a safe one.  I think Jacobs left the city way too early.  I hope it’s still not too late.

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Mexico’s Sweet Gold

March 1, 2002 by

This was originally written on spec for The Guardian, but not published. (To read more of my journalism, click here.)

I was sitting in the 20th of November market in Oaxaca, Mexico sipping my post-lunch chocolate con leche when a short, sturdy old man, with skin about the color of my beverage walked up to me. He looked at the foaming bowl in my hand and nodded, approvingly. “In Oaxaca,” he said in a bassy growl, “no coca cola! Only chocolate!” And giving me a hearty punch in the arm, he walked on.

I had came to Mexico in search of chocolate, not gold. When Cortes and the Conquistadors arrived in Mexico in the sixteenth century in search of El Dorado, they were surprised to find that the chief coin of the realm in Mocteczuma’s court was not the shiny, precious metal of their dreams, but the beans of the cacao tree. Diaz del Castillo, a soldier in Cortez’s army described how Mocteczuma’s men “brought in cups of fine gold, whith a certain drink made of the cacao itself which they said was effectual to provoke lustfull desires toward women.”
The gourmands of sixteenth century New Spain were less than impressed with the beverage however, and complained about the oily “skumme” which floated on its surface. Nevertheless, they brought the bean back to Europe and by the eighteenth century, chocolate drinking was highly fashionable among the aristocracy of Europe, who sipped the drink out of delicate cups in the mid morning from their beds in Versailles.

Alas, as we know, coffee, tea and the French revolution put an end to all of that, relegating chocolate drinking for the most part to a nocturnal activity for the caffeine-phobic. Meanwhile, the cocoa bean itself was put to other uses, becoming the worldwide number one confection, available in dizzying varieties, from the humblest Cadbury Bar to the dazzling bittersweet creations of the worlds master-chocolatiers in Paris, Milan and Zurich.
On a recent trip to Paris, I had come across a chocolatier in Paris’ chic Saint Germain neighborhood (La Maison du Chocolat), selling exquisite chocolates with Aztec and Mayan symbols carved onto the faces of the chocolate. How piquante it would be, I thought to myself, as I devoured a box with the companion of my choice, if chocolate was still used in Mexico!

A few months later, I was shopping in my local supermarket, when I noticed a that there was a Mexican brand of drinking chocolate lurking in the ethnic foods aisle, called Ibarra. Unlike the Dutch-processed cocoa familiar to most gringos, a brown floury powder from which all the oil or cocoa butter has been removed, this cocoa came in large round coin-like tablets, with the name of the maker emblazoned on them. The cooking method is simple. You scald milk as you would with cocoa powder, break up one of the tablets into small pieces and melt it in the hot milk, drop the mixture in a blender for a minute or two and then serve. Although excessively sweet, I loved the dark, smoky intensity of the drink. Reasoning that if such a product was available in my local supermarket then chocolate drinking must surely be alive and well in Mexico itself, I determined to go on a quest for “el oro dulce”, Mexico’s sweet gold.

On the plane to Mexico City, I was seated next to one of newly elected President Fox’s aides, who nodded approvingly at my half-read copy of Mayan code-breaking anthropologists Sophie and Michael Coe’s True History of Chocolate. Yes, he said, Mexicans are still passionate about chocolate – after all, they invented it. The Coes’ book backs him up. As the plane flew over the vast expanse of Mexico City, he suggested that the best cup of chocolate would be found at the City’s legendary Cafe de Tacuba, an elegant mural and painting covered hostelry near the Zocalo that dates back to 1912.

I enjoyed Tacuba’s elegant, metropolitan chocolate, and the gorgeous environment in which it was served, but I felt that the chocolate was … diplomatic, overly cautious and thus indistinguishable from any other “good” cup of chocolate in the world. So I wandered the city, drinking endless cups of Nescafe like everyone else and looking at the commercial drinking chocolate in the markets – the same chocolate that was for sale in Williamsburg. For succor, I gnawed on a slab of Valrhona cooking chocolate that a chef friend had given me as a parting gift, savoring its bitterness. Where was the real Mexican chocolate?

Driving home from the mariachis at the Plaza Garibaldi one night, a blasting brass band rendition of the Bee Gees “Staying Alive” still echoing through my head, local friends told us about El Moro, a 68 year old chocolateria that stayed open 24 hours a day. Curious, we swung the car around and arrived a little after midnight, to find the large tiled room packed with Mexican families feasting, while the TVs flickered on the walls.

El Moro’s menu is on the wall too. It has only two items: chocolate and churros. Churros, in case you’re wondering, are ten inch long strips of deep fried dough, dusted with sugar – a slender straight donut, perfect for dipping in the chocolate, which comes in four flavors at El Moro: Mexican, Spanish, French and Special. Taking our cue from the Mexican families around us, we ordered a copious spread of cocoa brews, along with a small mountain of churros. The Spanish was an intense, fiercely chocolatey brew, with dark depths in which cinnamon and vanilla flavors rose to the surface, requiring an extra hit of sugar to stand up to the bitterness of the brew. Like many of the other patrons, we requested a jug of hot milk to dilute the brew to the point where it could be drunk rather than eaten with a spoon. The Mexican was similar in style, but sweeter still. I asked the patron, Sr. Francisco Iriarte, why the cocoa was so sweet. He replied that the chocolateria has been in the Iriarte family since the 30s, when they emigrated from Spain, where the custom is to drink it thick and sweet. Personally, I liked the French the best, milkier, not too sweet but packed with cocoa flavor.
Although indisputably a chocolate drinker’s heaven, El Moro’s origins are in Spain – and in metropolitan Mexico City. But I wanted to go back to the time before the Spanish arrived, bringing cattle and therefore milk to mix into the chocolate (a good thing, according to chocolate guru Johnathan Ott, since the milk apparently cancels out the potential carcigenicity of the tannins in the cocoa). So I headed south to Oaxaca.

The chocolate center of Oaxaca is Oaxaca City’s 20 de Noviembre market, where a plethora of market stalls sell the beverage, alongside machetes, marimbas and piles of fried grasshoppers (chapulines). In Oaxaca chocolate is made with your choice of milk or water, and served in a cafe au lait type bowl. The milk drink is familiar to sippers of cocoa worldwide, although somewhat stronger. Great pride and attention however is taken with the foam (or espuma) that tops the chocolate bowl. Although commercial Mexican brands of cocoa like Ibarra advise the use of a blender to make this foam, the traditional way is to use a molinillo, a wooden whisk that looks like a magic wand, which is placed inside the chocolate bowl and spun between the hands to whip up the magic foam. When made with water, as it was in pre-Colombia times, the cocoa flavor comes through much more strongly, and other spices, including chili peppers, are often added to the brew, for balance.

The preferred time for Oaxacans to drink their chocolate is in the morning, at 6 a.m. In a country where the coffee is mostly depressing cups of Nescafe and tea from the tea bush is merely an affectation of the wealthy or of homesick Brits, people get their hit of caffeine from a sturdy cup of morning chocolate, often mixing the chocolate into the corn porridge or atole that is the prefered breakfast dish. While the humble cup of steaming cocoa enjoyed in England and America is relatively low in caffeine, the intensely cocoafied brews enjoyed in Oaxaca are so dense with cacao that you do get a little caffeine hit off them, although theobromine, said to be the source of chocolate’s aphrodisiac powers, is also a mild heart stimulant, giving you a little blood rush something like a sweet, cheap low-dose Viagra.
Ah yes, Viagra. Many people in Mexico told me about chocolate’s aphrodisiac powers in a tone that resembled national pride. Being nothing if not a thorough reporter, determined to bring my finely-honed mind to bear on the problems most afflicting mankind, I was of course curious to learn whether the tales of chocolate’s aphrodisiac qualities were true.

Anthropologists like the Coes are dismissive on this subject, claiming that the tale is nothing more than a colonial fantasy – but theobromine, the most important alkaloid in chocolate is known to act as a mild heart (or blood?) stimulant, and is thus a pretty good simulator of arousal, whether sexual or otherwise. It is of course true that you can buy copious quantities of chocolate anywhere, including your local newsagent, but what with our poor Spanish, the tedium of Mexican TV and the fact that nearly every store for blocks around sold nothing but chocolate, the research team of two in my hotel room found ample time to conduct a thorough study of the issue, and concluded that whatever the anthropologists and psychologists say, chocolate creates a reproducible sensation that for all intents and purposes, is the same as horniness.

Although you can drink chocolate in the Oaxaca markets, the ultimate way Zapotec peasants get their daily dose of theobromine is to buy the raw cocoa beans from the Oaxaca market, toast them, and then grind them in a heated metate or grinding stone. For those people who lack the time (several hours) required to do this but unwilling to embrace the prepackaged products of Nestle or Ibarra, a number of chocolate grinders around the market in Oaxaca will roast and grind cocoa beans for you, in the same way that a good coffee store in El Norte will. These stores exude a powerful smell of cacao that can be sniffed for blocks around.

King of the chocolate barrio is the 50 year old Chocolate Mayordomo, where young Zapotec men and women grind up kilo upon kilo of cocoa for dignified looking Donas and sharp looking young men, in a row of three foot high grinding machines. The cocoa is grinded with canilla (soft stick cinnamon) and almonds, followed by hair-raisingly vast quantities of sugar, producing a familiar looking, but pleasingly bitter (or semisweet) cocoa powder.

Chocolate is in fact a passion pretty much everywhere in Mexico, and traces of its pre-Colombian roots can still be found. A few pounds heavier from all that cocoa butter, but indisputably happy, I still wanted to know the secret of great chocolate. So I asked Mayordomo’s owner,Sr. Flores and his daughter Zoila. They laughed and said “no exist!!!” But on further consideration they concured with Sr. Iriarte of El Moro’s opinion: “pure cacao, careful preparation, and love!”

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Badawi: Tomorrow’s Warrior

January 1, 2002 by

This was originally published in the January 2002 issue of The Wire. (To read more of my journalism, click here.)

The titles of New York based Raz Mesinai a.k.a. Badawi’s three ROIR CDs Bedouin Sound Clash, Jerusalem Under Fire and the newly issued The Soldier of Midian all take a warrior stance that sounds pretty provocative in the wake of September 11 and it’s aftermath.  The music itself is aggressive too: the first two records filled with righteous nyabhingi drums stalking through digi-dub loops and heavily processed vocals, while Soldier explodes with Middle Eastern percussion, Persian horn samples and dulcimer licks cut up with a major dose of studio tricknology.

Born in Jerusalem in 1973, to American and Israeli parents, Mesinai moved to New York City aged 3, making periodic trips back to Israel.  When he was seven, his godmother took him on a trip to a Palestinian refugee camp on the Lebanese border, where he attended zikr Sufi ceremony led by Sheik Murshid Hassan.  There he first heard the frame drums which triggered a lifelong obsession with rhythm that has so far encompassed Persian, Indian, Yemenite, Moroccan and Afro-Cuban styles.  Time spent with the nomad Bedouin (from which the name “Badawi” comes) in the Sinai desert as a child seems to have infected the young Mesinai with a musical nomad style capable of moving through different terrains without ever losing itself.

Post-punk music from hiphop to hardcore often relies on a rhetoric of violence whose superficiality is quickly revealed in the light of the real thing.  But talking after a weekend that saw a succession of suicide bombings in Jerusalem and renewed threats by Israeli prime minister Sharon against the Palestinians, Mesinai has a more nuanced take on the subject: “War’s something we all have within us as human beings.  The aspect of a warrior changing, a spiritual warrior who for a while killed people and then realizes they can focus in a different direction – that really interests me.  Violence is the easiest way to make a statement, and there’s a lot of lazy people in the world.  But sound can also be violent.  I went to a psychic who told me that in my past life I was a priest who forced everyone to convert to my religion, and if they didn’t I would destroy their cities with guns made of bass!  I was like yeah …. I would do that!  I’m not a completely peaceful person.  I’ve got a lot of hostility to certain ideas and I get mad and I shout.  Music can be that way, and it’s great when violence is expressed in that form.  I was really into hardcore, the more violent the better!”

Mesinai notes that the culture of violence that left the biggest mark on him was that of New York City, where, growing up in the early 1980s, he was also exposed to early hiphop culture: “I was a horrible breakdancer,” he recalls, “but so into it, it was like angels to me: amazingly spiritual, like a trance ceremony.”  Mesinai also wrote grafitti, using amongst others the tag of Scriabin, the great Russian composer.  Turned on to dub through his love of the instrumental side of electro, he formed SubDub with John Ward and became part of the downtown NY scene around DJ Spooky, Olive and Byzar that was given the tag of illbient for a period in the mid nineties – a label he says that was as inevitable as it was meaningless.

Mesinai says he remains interested in dance music, especially now that New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has made dancing illegal in most of the city, but he has also pursued a parallel career in modern composition, culminating in the recently released Before the Law in the Radical Jewish Culture series on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, a set of soundscapes inspired by Czech Jewish modernist writer Franz Kafka.  The tracks combine strings, percussion and piano into moody, short, Zorn-like blocks of sound that capture the mood and pace of Kafka’s writing.  Mesinai, who is also a writer, dates his obsession to telling musical stories without words to time spent studying as a child with New York orthodox Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, a master storyteller who dramatized his tales with a guitar.  He’s put out several other pieces of modern composition including The Heretic of Ether, a CD which landed him a gig contributing to the soundtrack of horror film Hellraiser 6, along with his own tripped out imaginary darkcore soundtrack The Unspeakable.

Although Mesinai’s work has strong connections to Jewish tradition, he’s emphatic about the universal nature of what he’s doing: “Badawi means “desert dweller”.  I wrote it as “Badawi” because I wanted to keep it universal, open, like William Blake, as opposed to any particular tradition – a friend from Korea says the word means “over water”.”  Perhaps because of the rich complexity of his background, Mesinai has managed to avoid making a “world music” that just pastes together different musical styles in an exotic way.  Noting that Kafka wrote his novel Amerika without ever actually visiting the continent, he views his own work as being based on the universality of sound, and of human experience.  “Badawi is about whatever influences I’ve had in my life.  I want to perceive not even in a musical way that all people are vibrating, making these sounds in this desperate way, all over the world.  I’ve heard a lot of music and grown up around a lot of types of music and started seeing resemblances.  When I DJ, I’ll take a ska track and some Hungarian gypsy music, and discover that they’re both making similar sounds, with rhythms going umchuka umchuka.  And that raises the question: what’s going on there? Rather than forcing Hungarian music to sound like ska, it just does sound like ska and vice versa.”

Technology, used Badawi style, provides a set of experimental tools for opening lines of communication between different sound cultures from around the world, without smoothing them down into one bland “global” style.  Walking across town to his DJing gig, we discuss our mutual enthusiasm for American composer Charles Ives, who Mesinai notes was “sampling” American military marching band tunes and folk song and mixing them up in modernist compositions at the beginning of the twentieth century.  When Mesinai spins, the resulting noise is often similar to Ives’ exuberant, aggressive clashes of styles, but with the emphasis shifted from melody to rhythm: tabla throwdowns melt into Garvey’s Ghost and King Tubby, Moroccan gnawa, Nuyorican percussion workouts and tracks from Soldier of Median, polyrhythms crashing into one another like waves.  It’s an intensely joyful sound, even if it predictably sends East Village cocktail sippers scurrying off to the bar.

Mesinai, who is marrying fellow turntablist/composer Marina Rosenfeld (see Wire 213) on December 30, continues to work with decks.  In the works for 2002 is a CD for Tzadik’s Composers series of string quartet pieces, which includes his String Quartet for 4 Turntables, premiered at Lincoln Center last year with DJ Olive and Toshio Kajiwara.  Mesinai doesn’t subscribe to any traditional dichotomy between technologically and traditionally produced sounds.  “I always start with acoustics.  I believe that energy has to be put into the music, you have to be moving, you have to put energy in through the instruments.  The problem with electronics is that often you’re not putting enough energy through – you sit there more, you type.  Turntables are actually the closest thing to a live instrument, and energy can be thrown through very nicely.”

Even if, as philosopher Paul Virilio says, war is the essence of technology, Mesinai remains optimistic.  “You need to know your enemy, and befriend him,” he says.  “If my enemy is electronics, then I need to befriend it.  That’s what the Badawi project is about.  Machines processing traditions.  When I was a child, my mother used to take me to the Sinai desert and I used to have these Japanese Transformer dolls that can transform into insects, they’re these machine robots.  So I’d sit out there in the desert, and there’d be Bedouins, and I had to entertain myself so I’d take out these Transformers and start up these total battlefields and I think of that when I do a Badawi track, these Transformers duking it out in the desert.”

Raz Mesinai’s Before the Law is available on Tzadik; Badawi’s Soldier of Midian is out on ROIR.

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