Queens' Wharf, Wellington. The air smells like salt and is full of the calls of sea-gulls. Waves lick at the grey wood of the jetty. Late afternoon sun turns everything gold. Small groups of people have begun to gather; looking down at their watches, their cellphones. Where we're waiting isn't far from a sculpture of some giant kina - very realistically rendered and set down so that the sea can brush up against them. I'd always been curious about that sculpture but hadn't been sure where it was.
7:25pm and we're ushered aboard the small ferry docked there. It's one of those that bus back and forth over the bay several times a day, relaying commuters between Wellington Central and Eastbourne, shaving a good deal of time off their journey; better than the motorway at least. The sea is calm, the day glorious and still warm as the sun fades; even down here where it's typically coldest in the city. We're a fair distance out over the water before they begin the performance. Actors, previously disguised amongst the audience, enter into character and set about relaying increasingly urgent and hysterical messages. A terrible electrical storm has spiralled down out of the clear sky and besieged the city. Lightning is tearing the coastline apart. Thousands are dead or injured. The lights in the cabin blink out. It's an emergency, we're going to have to find a safe place to dock the ship...there's no way we can get back to the harbour now.
Outside everything is warm and golden and serene, the waves crinkle gently against the sides of the vessel.
We draw alongside Matiu-Somes. As if on cue we pass into the shadow of the island, the sun disappearing behind it's bulk. Suddenly everything is grey and colder; the clash between the world the actors are describing and what we can see outside of the windows isn't so great any more. The actors continue their performance, crying out that some strange power has taken hold of the ferry and is pulling it, inexorably but oh-so-gently, towards the island. We dock and emerge from the vessel and onto the jetty. A strange figure perches above us on one side; a woman, blue-skinned and partially unclad, her features accentuated and rendered slightly inhuman. She extends a hand to us as we pass. She is holding something; a small bag of knitted cloth. She makes little noises as we pass. Nobody lingers. This is Ariel.
An aside: Matiu-Somes is a small island in Wellington harbour. In the past it has served as a quarantine colony (originally for people: settlers, later for animals). There are many strange stories about the place - it has seen a lot of death and suffering (people who succumbed to fevers and illness little more than a stone's throw from the land they'd been promised). As with all such things, it is rumoured to be haunted. Now it serves as a protected sanctuary for some of New Zealand's remarkable Native flora and fauna. It is a very beautiful place and day trips are popular among tourists and locals alike, although there are very strict controls and anyone coming to the island must be checked thoroughly (bags are inspected to ensure that they don't contain mice - it has happened before - and shoes are inspected for soil and seeds, even some species of ant are a threat to this perfectly self-contained system, so vigilance is essential). They do their best to incorporate this into the performance and while we shuffle about inside the closed hut, examining our footwear, one of the doors snaps open and Ariel pounces; stealing off with Stephano. A second later she snatches Trinculo as well. We are left now with only the Boatswain and Ferdinand. They reason that we should form a search party and make our way inland in the hopes of finding some kind of shelter from this terrible (still alleged) storm.
We make our way up the steep hill track while New Zealand Native bush curls thickly overhead, eating what little is left of the day's light. Ariel watches silently as we pass and strange music issues from somewhere.
The play begins inside one of the island's compounds. It is all narrow walkways, weird industrial-looking ovens and cell-like chambers. Animals were kept here. We are seated in a row before a series of low-fenced pens. The gates swing out just before our feet. Prospero emerges: gloriously preening and prone to pontification. He rages at being driven from his deanship at Victoria University and sent into exile (there were allegations of black magic, you see, and not entirely unfounded). Here he bides his time - with only his daughter Miranda and two phantoms of the island for company - plotting a chance to revenge himself against the brother that assisted in his exile. Now, with the arrival of these strangers to the island, he has his chance.
This is Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' you see, but it has been reworked, edited, spliced, chopped and transformed into something wholly fresh and contemporary. Much of the Bard's glorious language is retained but now it is shot through with an abundance of modern vernacular and interjections. I certainly don't remember quite so many F-bombs in the original text. Most of the sub-plots and excess characters have been excised and the narrative is now made entirely of the those that, to be honest, are the only ones anyone really cares about...I mean, surely. It is also profoundly funny.
This has pissed off a number of ever-so-serious critics who have deemed 'A Tempest off Matiu-Somes Island' (note the very specific avoidance of the definite article) improper use of Shakespeare's genius.
Now, I'll level with you. I'm not a colossal fan of Shakespeare's work and I'm no purist. I'm not going to say anything pointlessly incendiary like asserting that he is overrated - 'cos he bloody isn't; the dude's work forever re-shaped the English language and his plays still speak to deep human truths even today, centuries after their conception. But Shakespeare didn't just write for royalty and intellectuals (though he definitely wrote for the former, or more specifically, for their commissions), he wrote for the people. His works are shot through with bawdy humour, cheap gags, gleeful bloodshed and sexual innuendo. I think he'd welcome all the liberal interpretations of his works. His plays are not dry, dusty exhibits in museums; unchanging and unchanged. To assert that they must be treated with unwavering reverence is absurd. Shakespeare was a practical man and his plays were living, breathing things as much shaped by the performances and the environments in which they were performed as anything else. So, let me just say that I love what this collective have done with 'The Tempest'. I think it kicks ass. This is a no-holds-Bard (with apologies to Troma head-honcho Lloyd Kaufman for nicking his pun).
Anyway, end rant.
The performance takes place in two locations: the first inside the enclosed industrial compound, the other in one of the areas of said compound that open out to the night sky. Lamps are hung from creaking poles of woven wood and the crowd presses closer to the action. The latter area is far colder than the former and I was feeling some pity for the actors portraying Caliban and Ariel, both of whom are wearing little more than skilfully-applied body paint. Both sets are beautifully arranged and cleverly utilised.
And now, the performances:
As Ariel Erin Howell is remarkable - simultaneously naive, sensuous and predatory; she communicates the character superbly through her physicality, imbuing a strong sense of the other in this spirit of the isle. Matt Clayton is equally superb as Caliban, hunched and grotesque; a brute definitely, but also a victim, hobbled with resentment and still bearing the raw wounds of Prospero's betrayal and trickery. Clayton lends Caliban a tragic, and ultimately redemptive, quality. As Prospero, Scott Ransom, possesses endless charisma, dominating every scene he features in. He is just really, damn cool. The final scene between both he and Caliban is startlingly intense. Wiremu Tuhiwai as Trinculo and Giles McNeill as Stephano are an utterly hilarious (and oft-intoxicated) double act. Their scenes contain the most anachronistic dialogue and are all the better for it as they gleefully undercut the Bard's poetry to endlessly entertaining effect. Jordan Rivers (Ferdinand) is indefatigable and delightfully stumbling, a charming but slightly hopeless young lover, his hipster attire also works brilliantly. Claire O'Loughlin (Miranda) renders her slightly ditzy and prone-to-hysterical-exuberance character extremely well and it's a superb performance, although it does mean she's the only character that gets a little tiresome. Mike Ness (the Boatswain and our guide throughout the entire evening) is delightful and convivial company.
And that's literally the entire cast, right there.
I did mention that this was a very sharply edited rendering of the play, which to be honest, is exactly how I like my Shakespeare served.
We make our way down the hill in darkness after the performance; some of us carrying lanterns, others torches; to ensure that we didn't step on anything Native and potentially endangered. The lights of Wellington harbour make a halo around the isle and the sea is black when we cross back over. The mythical storm has cleared now and we are safe to return.
It was a wonderful show and a fantastic experience. The team behind it all hope to run it as a yearly event from now on and the fact that this season had to be extended twice due to unprecedented ticket sales suggests they might be able to do so.
If you can, I recommend you risk the storm itself to see it.
www.facebook.com/ATempestOffSomesIsland?ref=stream
Wednesday 27 February 2013
Saturday 23 February 2013
The Road That Wasn't There
In the early days of this country - New Zealand - they drafted maps for proposed roads. These roads were no more than dotted lines drawn across the landscape - entire townships and settlements, all existing in theory alone. They were afforded legal status. Many were never built, the paths never sealed over. These roads exist, to this day, only as dotted lines drawn on long-forgotten maps; a landscape stitched across with places that might have been but never were.
It is too good of a concept not to use in some creative context and playwright Ralph McCubbin Howell certainly thought so.
Bats Theatre is one of the longest running and well-respected of the non-mainstream theatre venues in Wellington. The original building that housed the company, now owned by Sir Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, is undergoing earthquake strengthening. It's temporary venue is a converted bar on the second floor of a building near Wellington's slightly bohemian quarter. Before this it was a dingy student bar, before that another, equally grim, establishment. It has been heavily remodelled and re-purposed and is now quite open and expansive. Split off into two sections; one for the bar & ticket booth, and the other leads to a narrow brick-walled hallway, heavy with ducts, and then to the theatre itself which appears closely modelled after the original Bats' stage area. Most of the walls in the bar area are painted in rich colours. The ceiling above the waiting area is painted with clouds - it is old paintwork, probably there before the redesign and the clouds, though quite white and fluffy, have a trace of stormy grey in their bellies. The floor is still quite sticky underfoot...there is only so much that can be done, really. It is a damn good venue for fringe plays.
The set is built from a number of cardboard boxes. Skeins of old maps hang at the bag of the stage, everything looks weathered and sepia, a world of temporary things. One of the 'boxes' cleverly conceals a screen that, lit from behind, is used as a separate, smaller stage for scenes of shadow puppetry. There are only three actors but many fascinating characters. Oliver de Rohan takes the stage first of all, he introduces the main theme of the play with a clever introduction and then announces the first of a number of chapters.
Gabriel, the protagonist, works what appears to be a rather dull job in Australia (there is much humourous stamping of documents) when he receives a series of narrowly-missed phone-calls bidding him to return to the tiny township he left behind in New Zealand and attend to his mother, Maggie, who while always eccentric, has become increasingly troublesome in her later years. She has been stealing maps from all across the South Island, she has removed the handle from her front door, and she is becoming somewhat liberal in the use of a rifle that she has in her possession.
Maggie's world is a series of fantastical tales that she has regaled Gabriel with throughout his life, but now it's looking as if she might be succumbing to dementia. Gabriel duly returns home and learns that there is one story that his mother has never told him, the story of his father (who left before Gabriel was born), and this story is to be no less fantastical than any of her other imaginings, however this one might just be true.
Turns out, when she was young (and her family very poor) Maggie headed out for a job sewing curtains at a remote estate, only she took a road that she'd never travelled before - a road that existed only as a dotted line on the map. It was there that she met Walter (her first love) and Walter's eccentric showman father - both with skin and clothing as white as paper and seemingly forever stuck in a time long ago and unaware of anything beyond the imagined township that they live in. But, of course, things do not run smoothly and this imagined road can only be accessed by a very specific map. In a fit of despair and rage, Maggie draws her own second map and creates a bad copy of the road that wasn't there. Thus she unleashes Retlaw (a flawed and inverted version of Walter) upon both her real and imagined worlds.
The scenes between present day Gabriel and Maggie are enacted by de Rohan and Elle Wootton respectively with McCubbin Howell gamely tackling every other role. Their performances are all superb, offering clever, well-developed and compelling characters.
The scenes from Maggie's youth and her adventures after taking the road that wasn't there are enacted by wonderful papier mache puppets (the work of unreasonably-talented director Hannah Smith). These puppets have rough, slightly primitive faces that are hugely expressive. Other scenes - the myths within the myths - utilise the afore-mentioned shadow puppets, cleverly echoing the different levels of truth and legend within the narrative.
The Road That Wasn't There is a play of myths, of imaginings, and of things that exist only in possibility. This is never more telling than in the character of the Blanket Man, a figure that exists only in Maggie's tale. It is this character that first tells Maggie of the paper road and who comes to her aid when she needs it most.
His real name was Ben Hana, though he liked to be simply called 'brother'. You'd see him around Wellington, his skin baked dark brown from the sun (or equally from accumulated grime). He wore only a loincloth and a filthy checked blanket that he often draped about his shoulders like a cloak. He was as skinny as the handle of a whip. Most days he'd sprawl on street-corners or stride around looking like something plucked from another time, another place. He was frequently drunk or stoned (or both), almost always incoherent. There were rumours about his past: he had an ex-wife somewhere, a family...kids, he'd slipped through one of societies' multitudinous cracks after accidentally killing a friend while driving drunk, once he disappeared for several months and rumours abounded that he'd died only for him to reappear in his usual haunt, unchanged.
Hana died a few years ago now: it was a combination of malnutrition and alcohol-related damage. His favourite spot on the street was briefly turned into a shrine, his blanket hung on the wall and messages scrawled across the brickwork. The phrase 'Blanket Man Lives' appeared on a wall near what is regarded as Wellington's oldest graffiti - the words 'Ian Curtis Lives' (though said phrase has had to be re-graffitied several times on several different walls). Ben Hana was a damaged, lost man; homeless, alcoholic. But, Blanket Man was a myth; a modern, urban legend - a mysterious figure about which you could speculate pretty much anything...
...and that is who he is in The Road that Wasn't There: a truth become a tale. It must also be said, the puppet really captures the essence of him.
And then there are the songs. Yup, The Road That Wasn't There has a strong musical component and all are beautifully sung. As Walter, de Rohan favours a soft, lilting tenor for an achingly sweet song (whose main melody reminds me a little of a Beatles number, for some reason), as Retlaw he drops his voice into a booming baritone to sing a number which sounds as though it could have come from the pen of Danny Elfman. Both other actors also sing and they too possess striking voices, sometimes joining together to make truly haunting harmonies.
Throw in a number of very humourous little scenes, some silliness with cats, a few moments of genuine dread, and an exquisite shadow-puppet telling of a legend from Queenstown's Te Rapuwai tribe and you have a hell of a lot of content for what is a fairly brief play.
Both times I saw the play the very last words (which are, incidentally, the title), paired with the gentle strumming of McCubbin Howell's acoustic guitar and the overall tone left me with a lump in my throat and a hint of mist in my eyes. Still don't entirely know why. But, it draws you in and hits you hard. It is a lovely work; occasionally menacing, often hilarious, and ultimately poignant. It should be seen by everyone who has a chance to do so and as the company Trick of the Light are currently touring, you might actually get the chance.
The Road That Wasn't There was originally performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2012.
http://trickofthelighttheatre.tumblr.com/theroadthatwasntthere
It is too good of a concept not to use in some creative context and playwright Ralph McCubbin Howell certainly thought so.
Bats Theatre is one of the longest running and well-respected of the non-mainstream theatre venues in Wellington. The original building that housed the company, now owned by Sir Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, is undergoing earthquake strengthening. It's temporary venue is a converted bar on the second floor of a building near Wellington's slightly bohemian quarter. Before this it was a dingy student bar, before that another, equally grim, establishment. It has been heavily remodelled and re-purposed and is now quite open and expansive. Split off into two sections; one for the bar & ticket booth, and the other leads to a narrow brick-walled hallway, heavy with ducts, and then to the theatre itself which appears closely modelled after the original Bats' stage area. Most of the walls in the bar area are painted in rich colours. The ceiling above the waiting area is painted with clouds - it is old paintwork, probably there before the redesign and the clouds, though quite white and fluffy, have a trace of stormy grey in their bellies. The floor is still quite sticky underfoot...there is only so much that can be done, really. It is a damn good venue for fringe plays.
The set is built from a number of cardboard boxes. Skeins of old maps hang at the bag of the stage, everything looks weathered and sepia, a world of temporary things. One of the 'boxes' cleverly conceals a screen that, lit from behind, is used as a separate, smaller stage for scenes of shadow puppetry. There are only three actors but many fascinating characters. Oliver de Rohan takes the stage first of all, he introduces the main theme of the play with a clever introduction and then announces the first of a number of chapters.
Gabriel, the protagonist, works what appears to be a rather dull job in Australia (there is much humourous stamping of documents) when he receives a series of narrowly-missed phone-calls bidding him to return to the tiny township he left behind in New Zealand and attend to his mother, Maggie, who while always eccentric, has become increasingly troublesome in her later years. She has been stealing maps from all across the South Island, she has removed the handle from her front door, and she is becoming somewhat liberal in the use of a rifle that she has in her possession.
Maggie's world is a series of fantastical tales that she has regaled Gabriel with throughout his life, but now it's looking as if she might be succumbing to dementia. Gabriel duly returns home and learns that there is one story that his mother has never told him, the story of his father (who left before Gabriel was born), and this story is to be no less fantastical than any of her other imaginings, however this one might just be true.
Turns out, when she was young (and her family very poor) Maggie headed out for a job sewing curtains at a remote estate, only she took a road that she'd never travelled before - a road that existed only as a dotted line on the map. It was there that she met Walter (her first love) and Walter's eccentric showman father - both with skin and clothing as white as paper and seemingly forever stuck in a time long ago and unaware of anything beyond the imagined township that they live in. But, of course, things do not run smoothly and this imagined road can only be accessed by a very specific map. In a fit of despair and rage, Maggie draws her own second map and creates a bad copy of the road that wasn't there. Thus she unleashes Retlaw (a flawed and inverted version of Walter) upon both her real and imagined worlds.
The scenes between present day Gabriel and Maggie are enacted by de Rohan and Elle Wootton respectively with McCubbin Howell gamely tackling every other role. Their performances are all superb, offering clever, well-developed and compelling characters.
The scenes from Maggie's youth and her adventures after taking the road that wasn't there are enacted by wonderful papier mache puppets (the work of unreasonably-talented director Hannah Smith). These puppets have rough, slightly primitive faces that are hugely expressive. Other scenes - the myths within the myths - utilise the afore-mentioned shadow puppets, cleverly echoing the different levels of truth and legend within the narrative.
The Road That Wasn't There is a play of myths, of imaginings, and of things that exist only in possibility. This is never more telling than in the character of the Blanket Man, a figure that exists only in Maggie's tale. It is this character that first tells Maggie of the paper road and who comes to her aid when she needs it most.
His real name was Ben Hana, though he liked to be simply called 'brother'. You'd see him around Wellington, his skin baked dark brown from the sun (or equally from accumulated grime). He wore only a loincloth and a filthy checked blanket that he often draped about his shoulders like a cloak. He was as skinny as the handle of a whip. Most days he'd sprawl on street-corners or stride around looking like something plucked from another time, another place. He was frequently drunk or stoned (or both), almost always incoherent. There were rumours about his past: he had an ex-wife somewhere, a family...kids, he'd slipped through one of societies' multitudinous cracks after accidentally killing a friend while driving drunk, once he disappeared for several months and rumours abounded that he'd died only for him to reappear in his usual haunt, unchanged.
Hana died a few years ago now: it was a combination of malnutrition and alcohol-related damage. His favourite spot on the street was briefly turned into a shrine, his blanket hung on the wall and messages scrawled across the brickwork. The phrase 'Blanket Man Lives' appeared on a wall near what is regarded as Wellington's oldest graffiti - the words 'Ian Curtis Lives' (though said phrase has had to be re-graffitied several times on several different walls). Ben Hana was a damaged, lost man; homeless, alcoholic. But, Blanket Man was a myth; a modern, urban legend - a mysterious figure about which you could speculate pretty much anything...
...and that is who he is in The Road that Wasn't There: a truth become a tale. It must also be said, the puppet really captures the essence of him.
And then there are the songs. Yup, The Road That Wasn't There has a strong musical component and all are beautifully sung. As Walter, de Rohan favours a soft, lilting tenor for an achingly sweet song (whose main melody reminds me a little of a Beatles number, for some reason), as Retlaw he drops his voice into a booming baritone to sing a number which sounds as though it could have come from the pen of Danny Elfman. Both other actors also sing and they too possess striking voices, sometimes joining together to make truly haunting harmonies.
Throw in a number of very humourous little scenes, some silliness with cats, a few moments of genuine dread, and an exquisite shadow-puppet telling of a legend from Queenstown's Te Rapuwai tribe and you have a hell of a lot of content for what is a fairly brief play.
Both times I saw the play the very last words (which are, incidentally, the title), paired with the gentle strumming of McCubbin Howell's acoustic guitar and the overall tone left me with a lump in my throat and a hint of mist in my eyes. Still don't entirely know why. But, it draws you in and hits you hard. It is a lovely work; occasionally menacing, often hilarious, and ultimately poignant. It should be seen by everyone who has a chance to do so and as the company Trick of the Light are currently touring, you might actually get the chance.
The Road That Wasn't There was originally performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2012.
http://trickofthelighttheatre.tumblr.com/theroadthatwasntthere
Thursday 7 February 2013
Word Frenzy
A friend of mine recently described my writing style as 'word frenzy', for this I am eternally in her debt. I don't think any two greater words have ever been applied to my work and, man, do I ever deserve them. I would love to be able to call this whole blog 'Word Frenzy' but I've already locked in the 'Dances for Architecture' thing so, oh well. You see, I definitely belong to the 'more adjectives, by thunder!' school of writing. My literary technique is less of a lean, analytical thing and more like a wild torrent of words with occasional explosions of imagery. If you've read any of my other posts, you might have noticed this already.
I am not a subtle man.
But that's not the whole story. I've just been going over a manuscript (novel-length, fictional, inspired by an old and rather obscure English folktale) that I first wrote about seven or eight years ago and my writing style of the time was even less..umm, reticent than it is now. It is not so much a novel as a blitzkrieg of words; a propulsive burst of unrestrained (and oft unhinged) imagery and every rhetorical literary device known to humankind. It is a glorious, gory, Gothic nightmare trip of a thing and frankly, I'm actually pretty happy with it. But, man...was I a messed up kid back then, albeit one with a flair for dramatic imagery and some rather surprising wordplay.
And yes, I am going to see that the demented tale gets printed.
The deal is, I've always written - as long as I can remember. I used to tell folks that I wanted to be a writer and hell, I may have actually had something written at the time. No, I did not just use it to impress girls. Although I may have tried to. Okay, yes for a while there (in a very uncomfortable burst of teenaged sartorial misjudgement) I tried to cultivate the hyper-dramatic and terribly Romantic (allegedly) air of a suffering poet type. I wore Byron-esque shirts and grew my hair long. At least I did it with a bit of irony, all of which only serves to make me sound like a hipster. No, not just any hipster - I was a hipster before it was a thing, dammit: the Original Hipster. Anyway, my obsession with writing has always stemmed first and foremost from my obsession with words. This seems like a pointless statement, but I can't stress it enough: I absolutely love words.
I mean, how could anyone not feel the same way? Words are such remarkable and slippery things. They are changeable and unpredictable; they can be used to express loathing or for declarations of love, they can brutalise and they can soothe, they can tear a world apart and rebuild it. With words you can totally screw everything up but you might also be able to save it all if only you can find the right words. In fiction you can do all these things, you can also tell deep and personal truths while cloaking them all in a veneer of 'well, it's all just a story, isn't it'. Okay, a confession, when I say 'words' here, I sadly mean English words. I don't speak any other language and on a rough morning before a nice, hot shower, I can barely even speak this one. English is a fascinating language, though; because it is such a shambolic, stitched-together Frankenstein's monster of a thing. It rampages around other languages and mutilates their verbs, steals off with their adjectives and violates their nouns.
If anyone ever wonders why the English language has so many seemingly arbitrary and self-contradictory rules it's because, well, we probably nicked over half of our words from the French, the Spanish, the Italians, the Germans and the Greeks, a little from the Celts, one or two from the Norse and the rest is mostly just butchered Latin. But some words are just so frickin' clever. Especially the words for other words or sounds. Seriously, what genius came up with the word 'stutter', a word that even sounds like its staggering out in bitten-off syllables?
Sinuous, slither, whisper, stagger, punch, grasp, hiss and so many more are all utterly lovely because they sound exactly like what they describe. Literary and linguistic terms go even further: fricative, sibilant, onomatopoeia, glottal stop, plosive - these words are their own definitions. Seriously, I think the most mellifluous word in the English language is the word 'mellifluous', it just ripples off the tongue.
So, yeah: lot of fun to be had there.
I've been commended for my imagery - it happened a lot going through school and a little bit after. I've always really dug imagery. Not so much the images themselves, though, as the words used to convey said images. If I was really into raw, pure images I would be more serious about photography or film-making. But there's more to it than that - often I just throw the words around because I like the way they sound, even deliberately taking them out of their usual contexts simply because I think they work in another one. I do tend to be over-reliant on adjectives, though. Must really tone that down.
Obviously, I read a lot. You can't really love words and not read. I'm not going to pretend that my bookcase is all Dostoevsky and James Joyce though. It really frigging isn't. I loathe James Joyce, honestly I think literature would be better served were his works entirely excised from existence.
Yes, I read 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' three times for University, why do you ask? Frankly the third time was neither essential nor even helpful, at that point it was just academic self-flagellation.
And I can't even be in the same room as 'Finnegans Wake'.
Actually, in order to set up an awkward segue; I've always been a fan of Stephen King. He's a great writer and to read his work you know...just absolutely know...that he damn well digs words too.
Which brings me to the macabre...
There are a few things that I feel have always defined me: a passionate love of words is very definitely one of them. An equally passionate and, some would and have said, love of many things dark and ominous is another. But that is something for a later post.
But enough writing about writing for now. I'll inevitably come back to it at a later date, but now it just seems all a bit weird.
I am not a subtle man.
But that's not the whole story. I've just been going over a manuscript (novel-length, fictional, inspired by an old and rather obscure English folktale) that I first wrote about seven or eight years ago and my writing style of the time was even less..umm, reticent than it is now. It is not so much a novel as a blitzkrieg of words; a propulsive burst of unrestrained (and oft unhinged) imagery and every rhetorical literary device known to humankind. It is a glorious, gory, Gothic nightmare trip of a thing and frankly, I'm actually pretty happy with it. But, man...was I a messed up kid back then, albeit one with a flair for dramatic imagery and some rather surprising wordplay.
And yes, I am going to see that the demented tale gets printed.
The deal is, I've always written - as long as I can remember. I used to tell folks that I wanted to be a writer and hell, I may have actually had something written at the time. No, I did not just use it to impress girls. Although I may have tried to. Okay, yes for a while there (in a very uncomfortable burst of teenaged sartorial misjudgement) I tried to cultivate the hyper-dramatic and terribly Romantic (allegedly) air of a suffering poet type. I wore Byron-esque shirts and grew my hair long. At least I did it with a bit of irony, all of which only serves to make me sound like a hipster. No, not just any hipster - I was a hipster before it was a thing, dammit: the Original Hipster. Anyway, my obsession with writing has always stemmed first and foremost from my obsession with words. This seems like a pointless statement, but I can't stress it enough: I absolutely love words.
I mean, how could anyone not feel the same way? Words are such remarkable and slippery things. They are changeable and unpredictable; they can be used to express loathing or for declarations of love, they can brutalise and they can soothe, they can tear a world apart and rebuild it. With words you can totally screw everything up but you might also be able to save it all if only you can find the right words. In fiction you can do all these things, you can also tell deep and personal truths while cloaking them all in a veneer of 'well, it's all just a story, isn't it'. Okay, a confession, when I say 'words' here, I sadly mean English words. I don't speak any other language and on a rough morning before a nice, hot shower, I can barely even speak this one. English is a fascinating language, though; because it is such a shambolic, stitched-together Frankenstein's monster of a thing. It rampages around other languages and mutilates their verbs, steals off with their adjectives and violates their nouns.
If anyone ever wonders why the English language has so many seemingly arbitrary and self-contradictory rules it's because, well, we probably nicked over half of our words from the French, the Spanish, the Italians, the Germans and the Greeks, a little from the Celts, one or two from the Norse and the rest is mostly just butchered Latin. But some words are just so frickin' clever. Especially the words for other words or sounds. Seriously, what genius came up with the word 'stutter', a word that even sounds like its staggering out in bitten-off syllables?
Sinuous, slither, whisper, stagger, punch, grasp, hiss and so many more are all utterly lovely because they sound exactly like what they describe. Literary and linguistic terms go even further: fricative, sibilant, onomatopoeia, glottal stop, plosive - these words are their own definitions. Seriously, I think the most mellifluous word in the English language is the word 'mellifluous', it just ripples off the tongue.
So, yeah: lot of fun to be had there.
I've been commended for my imagery - it happened a lot going through school and a little bit after. I've always really dug imagery. Not so much the images themselves, though, as the words used to convey said images. If I was really into raw, pure images I would be more serious about photography or film-making. But there's more to it than that - often I just throw the words around because I like the way they sound, even deliberately taking them out of their usual contexts simply because I think they work in another one. I do tend to be over-reliant on adjectives, though. Must really tone that down.
Obviously, I read a lot. You can't really love words and not read. I'm not going to pretend that my bookcase is all Dostoevsky and James Joyce though. It really frigging isn't. I loathe James Joyce, honestly I think literature would be better served were his works entirely excised from existence.
Yes, I read 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' three times for University, why do you ask? Frankly the third time was neither essential nor even helpful, at that point it was just academic self-flagellation.
And I can't even be in the same room as 'Finnegans Wake'.
Actually, in order to set up an awkward segue; I've always been a fan of Stephen King. He's a great writer and to read his work you know...just absolutely know...that he damn well digs words too.
Which brings me to the macabre...
There are a few things that I feel have always defined me: a passionate love of words is very definitely one of them. An equally passionate and, some would and have said, love of many things dark and ominous is another. But that is something for a later post.
But enough writing about writing for now. I'll inevitably come back to it at a later date, but now it just seems all a bit weird.
Friday 1 February 2013
One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula
Those thirty second sound bytes that they let you download for free on Amazon: those tender little tastings of the songs, sometimes they can be a bit of a joke. Thirty seconds to decide whether or not to send an item hurtling across the screen and into your shopping cart - for a lot of albums, that's really not enough. It is particularly hard on slow-burn, post-everything types. For others: you don't need anything like thirty seconds, for those rare few the instant you hear the thing it's as if you connect with the music on a chemical level.
It was like that when I first heard the Californian/Cambodian band Dengue Fever.
Whether it was the rolling surf guitars, the surging brass, the driving rock-pulse rhythms or the deliriously beautiful microtonal singing of the vocalist, I was sold the second it hit my ears. If you could map the pleasure-centres of my brain as different blocks of colour, this music would have lit them up like a fireworks display. I hit the 'buy now' button so fast it was a wonder the keyboard didn't catch fire. Then there was the exquisitely torturous wait for the CD to ship all the way to me out here in isolated little New Zealand.
The genre is Cambodian rock, not something I'd heard of before. The sound is extraordinary: it is not completely new or unfamiliar, instead it does something far more magical. It takes the bones of American garage rock from the fifties and sixties and transforms it. It is as if the music has been reflected in some strange and fractured mirror. The guitars are rougher, lean and slightly unhinged. The brass has a point it damn well wants to make clear. The drums, the bass, the blissed-out farfisa, everything has been cleverly twisted into directions and shapes that no Western artist has thought to manipulate it into. And the vocals...dear lord, the vocals...
The vocalist of Dengue Fever is Chhom Nimol and she is, as far as I know, the only Cambodian member of the band. Her voice is an amazing, spiralling thing: birdlike, soaring to notes that seem impossibly high, swooping down into percussive volleys of Khmer. There is something so extraordinarily alien and, yup, exotic about her voice cresting atop those instrumental arrangements. It is traditional Cambodian folk music meeting psyched-out garage rock in a thick humid haze, as dense and overwhelming as incense smoke.
It is reductive to say that it sounds like it should be on a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack, but...still, it totally does.
And for a long time that's all it was to me: a cool new band playing some way-out parallel-retro style of music, and another win for the bloody impressive Web of Mimicry label (a label founded by Trey Spruance, best known as one of the founding members of Mr Bungle). You see, although not that far from Cambodia on a geographical level, it might as well have been another planet to me. I'd heard of the Khmer Rouge. I'd heard of Pol Pot. I knew the truth was terrible but I was vague on the details. So I did a little research ( and by research I mean surfing the internet, isn't that what everyone means when they say that?). And what I learned was appalling, a sickening genocide carried out against the people of a country by their own self-appointed leaders.
Cambodian rock music is, or has been for far too many years, a lost music.
The Vietnam War. American troops occupied Cambodia - there are folks that argue that this was the first time the musicians of Cambodia were exposed to American pop music, via the Armed Forces Radio, but this ignores the fact that Cambodia was a prosperous and highly-educated country prior to the Vietnam war and that it's musicians were a fairly well-travelled bunch. Substantial portions of Cambodia were extensively bombed in order to destroy trade paths and those areas deemed of strategic advantage to the enemy. The 'enemy' in question being determined by which side was doing the bombing at the time. Tensions were already high in Cambodia prior to this, but the partial devastation of the country left it in a very fragile state. It spiralled into a civil war. Emerging triumphant from this war was Pol Pot and his army, the Khmer Rouge: followers of the Communist Party of Campuchea. Pol Pot sought to cleanse Cambodia of the taint of Western influence, he also annihilated the middle class altogether in his bid to drive Cambodia into a sort of socially-engineered agricultural farming community. Any hint of intellectualism was punishable by execution or being sent to one of the many prison camps (which was execution of a slower sort) - and in case you're wondering, just wearing spectacles was enough to earn you this kind of punishment. It was genocide. You've heard of the killing fields, you've heard of people naked and dying beneath a burning sun, the war crimes, the tortures, the purges, countless dead and rotting in piles, you've seen the images of heaped skulls...
The Cambodian rock musicians, the original ones: Ros Sereysothea, Pan Ron, Sinn Sisamouth and many more besides, all the names that appeared in neat little type on the inside jacket of the Dengue Fever album booklet, all of these names tell of tragedies. Ros Sereysothea disappeared and is believed to have been buried in a shallow grave by the side of a lonely road. Sinn Sisamouth was executed by firing squad after being refused the chance to sing a final song. Houy Meas was gang-raped and mutilated. Another young woman: I read somewhere it was Pan Ron but perhaps it was another musician, was stripped naked and forced to run in circles while singing until the scalding sun boiled her brains.
Their crimes: the music they played demonstrated a strong Western influence.
All these reports are apocryphal. This is a history half-lost.
The songs survived the singers, passed around on bootlegged cassette tapes, the music choked beneath a haze of white noise and wear, but still extraordinary. In the last couple of decades these songs have begun to be properly resurrected. The Cambodian Rocks website cleaned up the found recordings as best they could and made them available in compilation form once again, Dengue Fever themselves did something similar with 'Electric Cambodia'. But now two wonderful bands have brought the sound back to life, re-recording the resurrected songs while adding originals of their own to the mix. Those two bands are of course: Dengue Fever, and more recently a thrilling and primarily-Australian band called The Cambodian Space Project.
Dengue Fever are the smoother ride of the two. Brass and psychedelic organs play a strong role, thick rolling guitar riffs crest and break like waves. Nimol's voice, on their earlier work especially, is slightly tweaked in the mix, giving it a hazy, far-away quality - like a heat shimmer on a sun-baked road. Their core vibe is very melodic and often playfully humorous, but there is a melancholy informing much of their work - particular on later discs. This lingering sadness is fitting. One of their finest tracks is 'One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula', it appears on their second disc: 'Escape From Dragon House'. It is an utterly hypnotic piece, riding out on a pulsing krautrock-inflected riff. The vocals have been electronically altered, giving them a surreal warbled quality as if they are dissolving into water. A baritone sax drone surfaces from the mix like a shark's fin breaking the surface of the ocean. It is dedicated to the memory of Ros Sereysothea.
Other influences creep into their music from time to time - all suitably retro. There is the odd hint of Ethiopian Jazz from time to time. One of the two originals on their debut: the magnificent '22 Nights' owes more to Ennio Morricone than any other composer - a swaggering guitar riff that evokes a vast desert of sun-shattered stone. 'Saran Wrap' is all creeping menace and serial-killer perversion, sounding more contemporary indie than many of their other tracks. 'Sni Bong' boasts scatter-gun, almost rapped, bursts of Khmer. The chorus is transcendent. 'Sleepwalking in the Mekong' is blissful and strangely heart-rending. One of the tracks on third disc: 'Venus on Earth' sounds for all the world as if it's going to turn into 'Hotel California' before veering off into a far more interesting direction. 'Seeing Hands' is underpinned by one of the damn coolest basslines ever laid down There is even a slight echo of the Carpenters to some of the other tracks on that album. Later albums feature more English-language tracks, about which I have mixed feelings. To my ears, Nimol's voice sounds far richer and more enchanting when singing in Khmer - the shape of the words better suits the microtones, the gliding notes, the glissando. A fourth disc - equally brilliant - 'Cannibal Courtship' rounds out their catalogue. All are essential titles, though sadly the first two have become quite hard to come by.
Beyond the superficial similarities The Cambodian Space Project are truly strong enough to stand on their own. Their only full-length to date is '2011: A Space Odyssey' and, like Dengue Fever's self-titled debut, it focuses mainly on the once-lost songs of Cambodia ('Wait Ten Months More' and 'I'm Sixteen' appear on both albums) with a couple of originals thrown in for extra spice. Their sound is scrappier, more boisterous than Dengue Fever's. The guitars are rough and jagged: snapping and snaggling with real bite. There is little or no brass, but instead a profusion of raucous harmonica and some other even more unexpected sounds. The drumming is excellent, loose-limbed and heavy. A bevy of fascinating Eastern instruments have been worked into the arrangements, giving the music a richly exotic sound. 'Tek Tum' is a stand-out track: a traditional piece reworked. It boasts unusual chord patterns: circular and oddly descending over a bed of strangely-tuned Eastern instruments and a vocal line that seems to fold into itself, drawing the listener deeper and deeper into the arrangement. It is the most mellow piece on the disc - hypnotic rather than inflammatory, but no less incandescent. Srey Thy is the vocalist here and her voice is sharper, more clipped and punk-inflected than Nimol's, but equally divine. Her past is a truly fascinating thing, often-times disturbing (she was almost sold into sexual slavery after answering an application to become a beautician). Their sound is an explosion of ragged, wild-eyed joy. '2011: A Space Odyssey' is unquestionably a party album. Thirty thrilling minutes of exuberant garage rock and roll gone far east.
Perhaps that is the most remarkable thing about this music. It sounds so utterly and completely alive: like a burst of laughter, a sudden fall of hot rain. It is a genre that has passed through the truest of hells yet it remains: still bright and propulsive, full of colour and power.
http://www.denguefevermusic.com/splash.cfm
https://www.facebook.com/DengueFever
http://www.myspace.com/thecambodianspaceproject
https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Cambodian-Space-Project/102538263132453
And this fantastic article from the Quietus about The Cambodian Space Project, that puts everything better than I ever could:
http://thequietus.com/articles/06943-cambodian-space-project-interview
It was like that when I first heard the Californian/Cambodian band Dengue Fever.
Whether it was the rolling surf guitars, the surging brass, the driving rock-pulse rhythms or the deliriously beautiful microtonal singing of the vocalist, I was sold the second it hit my ears. If you could map the pleasure-centres of my brain as different blocks of colour, this music would have lit them up like a fireworks display. I hit the 'buy now' button so fast it was a wonder the keyboard didn't catch fire. Then there was the exquisitely torturous wait for the CD to ship all the way to me out here in isolated little New Zealand.
The genre is Cambodian rock, not something I'd heard of before. The sound is extraordinary: it is not completely new or unfamiliar, instead it does something far more magical. It takes the bones of American garage rock from the fifties and sixties and transforms it. It is as if the music has been reflected in some strange and fractured mirror. The guitars are rougher, lean and slightly unhinged. The brass has a point it damn well wants to make clear. The drums, the bass, the blissed-out farfisa, everything has been cleverly twisted into directions and shapes that no Western artist has thought to manipulate it into. And the vocals...dear lord, the vocals...
The vocalist of Dengue Fever is Chhom Nimol and she is, as far as I know, the only Cambodian member of the band. Her voice is an amazing, spiralling thing: birdlike, soaring to notes that seem impossibly high, swooping down into percussive volleys of Khmer. There is something so extraordinarily alien and, yup, exotic about her voice cresting atop those instrumental arrangements. It is traditional Cambodian folk music meeting psyched-out garage rock in a thick humid haze, as dense and overwhelming as incense smoke.
It is reductive to say that it sounds like it should be on a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack, but...still, it totally does.
And for a long time that's all it was to me: a cool new band playing some way-out parallel-retro style of music, and another win for the bloody impressive Web of Mimicry label (a label founded by Trey Spruance, best known as one of the founding members of Mr Bungle). You see, although not that far from Cambodia on a geographical level, it might as well have been another planet to me. I'd heard of the Khmer Rouge. I'd heard of Pol Pot. I knew the truth was terrible but I was vague on the details. So I did a little research ( and by research I mean surfing the internet, isn't that what everyone means when they say that?). And what I learned was appalling, a sickening genocide carried out against the people of a country by their own self-appointed leaders.
Cambodian rock music is, or has been for far too many years, a lost music.
The Vietnam War. American troops occupied Cambodia - there are folks that argue that this was the first time the musicians of Cambodia were exposed to American pop music, via the Armed Forces Radio, but this ignores the fact that Cambodia was a prosperous and highly-educated country prior to the Vietnam war and that it's musicians were a fairly well-travelled bunch. Substantial portions of Cambodia were extensively bombed in order to destroy trade paths and those areas deemed of strategic advantage to the enemy. The 'enemy' in question being determined by which side was doing the bombing at the time. Tensions were already high in Cambodia prior to this, but the partial devastation of the country left it in a very fragile state. It spiralled into a civil war. Emerging triumphant from this war was Pol Pot and his army, the Khmer Rouge: followers of the Communist Party of Campuchea. Pol Pot sought to cleanse Cambodia of the taint of Western influence, he also annihilated the middle class altogether in his bid to drive Cambodia into a sort of socially-engineered agricultural farming community. Any hint of intellectualism was punishable by execution or being sent to one of the many prison camps (which was execution of a slower sort) - and in case you're wondering, just wearing spectacles was enough to earn you this kind of punishment. It was genocide. You've heard of the killing fields, you've heard of people naked and dying beneath a burning sun, the war crimes, the tortures, the purges, countless dead and rotting in piles, you've seen the images of heaped skulls...
The Cambodian rock musicians, the original ones: Ros Sereysothea, Pan Ron, Sinn Sisamouth and many more besides, all the names that appeared in neat little type on the inside jacket of the Dengue Fever album booklet, all of these names tell of tragedies. Ros Sereysothea disappeared and is believed to have been buried in a shallow grave by the side of a lonely road. Sinn Sisamouth was executed by firing squad after being refused the chance to sing a final song. Houy Meas was gang-raped and mutilated. Another young woman: I read somewhere it was Pan Ron but perhaps it was another musician, was stripped naked and forced to run in circles while singing until the scalding sun boiled her brains.
Their crimes: the music they played demonstrated a strong Western influence.
All these reports are apocryphal. This is a history half-lost.
The songs survived the singers, passed around on bootlegged cassette tapes, the music choked beneath a haze of white noise and wear, but still extraordinary. In the last couple of decades these songs have begun to be properly resurrected. The Cambodian Rocks website cleaned up the found recordings as best they could and made them available in compilation form once again, Dengue Fever themselves did something similar with 'Electric Cambodia'. But now two wonderful bands have brought the sound back to life, re-recording the resurrected songs while adding originals of their own to the mix. Those two bands are of course: Dengue Fever, and more recently a thrilling and primarily-Australian band called The Cambodian Space Project.
Dengue Fever are the smoother ride of the two. Brass and psychedelic organs play a strong role, thick rolling guitar riffs crest and break like waves. Nimol's voice, on their earlier work especially, is slightly tweaked in the mix, giving it a hazy, far-away quality - like a heat shimmer on a sun-baked road. Their core vibe is very melodic and often playfully humorous, but there is a melancholy informing much of their work - particular on later discs. This lingering sadness is fitting. One of their finest tracks is 'One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula', it appears on their second disc: 'Escape From Dragon House'. It is an utterly hypnotic piece, riding out on a pulsing krautrock-inflected riff. The vocals have been electronically altered, giving them a surreal warbled quality as if they are dissolving into water. A baritone sax drone surfaces from the mix like a shark's fin breaking the surface of the ocean. It is dedicated to the memory of Ros Sereysothea.
Other influences creep into their music from time to time - all suitably retro. There is the odd hint of Ethiopian Jazz from time to time. One of the two originals on their debut: the magnificent '22 Nights' owes more to Ennio Morricone than any other composer - a swaggering guitar riff that evokes a vast desert of sun-shattered stone. 'Saran Wrap' is all creeping menace and serial-killer perversion, sounding more contemporary indie than many of their other tracks. 'Sni Bong' boasts scatter-gun, almost rapped, bursts of Khmer. The chorus is transcendent. 'Sleepwalking in the Mekong' is blissful and strangely heart-rending. One of the tracks on third disc: 'Venus on Earth' sounds for all the world as if it's going to turn into 'Hotel California' before veering off into a far more interesting direction. 'Seeing Hands' is underpinned by one of the damn coolest basslines ever laid down There is even a slight echo of the Carpenters to some of the other tracks on that album. Later albums feature more English-language tracks, about which I have mixed feelings. To my ears, Nimol's voice sounds far richer and more enchanting when singing in Khmer - the shape of the words better suits the microtones, the gliding notes, the glissando. A fourth disc - equally brilliant - 'Cannibal Courtship' rounds out their catalogue. All are essential titles, though sadly the first two have become quite hard to come by.
Beyond the superficial similarities The Cambodian Space Project are truly strong enough to stand on their own. Their only full-length to date is '2011: A Space Odyssey' and, like Dengue Fever's self-titled debut, it focuses mainly on the once-lost songs of Cambodia ('Wait Ten Months More' and 'I'm Sixteen' appear on both albums) with a couple of originals thrown in for extra spice. Their sound is scrappier, more boisterous than Dengue Fever's. The guitars are rough and jagged: snapping and snaggling with real bite. There is little or no brass, but instead a profusion of raucous harmonica and some other even more unexpected sounds. The drumming is excellent, loose-limbed and heavy. A bevy of fascinating Eastern instruments have been worked into the arrangements, giving the music a richly exotic sound. 'Tek Tum' is a stand-out track: a traditional piece reworked. It boasts unusual chord patterns: circular and oddly descending over a bed of strangely-tuned Eastern instruments and a vocal line that seems to fold into itself, drawing the listener deeper and deeper into the arrangement. It is the most mellow piece on the disc - hypnotic rather than inflammatory, but no less incandescent. Srey Thy is the vocalist here and her voice is sharper, more clipped and punk-inflected than Nimol's, but equally divine. Her past is a truly fascinating thing, often-times disturbing (she was almost sold into sexual slavery after answering an application to become a beautician). Their sound is an explosion of ragged, wild-eyed joy. '2011: A Space Odyssey' is unquestionably a party album. Thirty thrilling minutes of exuberant garage rock and roll gone far east.
Perhaps that is the most remarkable thing about this music. It sounds so utterly and completely alive: like a burst of laughter, a sudden fall of hot rain. It is a genre that has passed through the truest of hells yet it remains: still bright and propulsive, full of colour and power.
http://www.denguefevermusic.com/splash.cfm
https://www.facebook.com/DengueFever
http://www.myspace.com/thecambodianspaceproject
https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Cambodian-Space-Project/102538263132453
And this fantastic article from the Quietus about The Cambodian Space Project, that puts everything better than I ever could:
http://thequietus.com/articles/06943-cambodian-space-project-interview
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