Out Today!
Here’s one for your summer-sun-addled minds. Looming in the wake of this year’s folklore masterpiece “Songs From Home”, Simon Piler and his merry Atom Band are back with an eponymous album recorded in the Florida springtime. Somewhere between folk and experimental, bolstered by samples and strange instrumentation, this collection of songs is a fascinating jungle of ideas, where the thin line between dreams and reality gets rubbed out in the firey poetry of sound snapshots.
You can download it: here
I was still so wonderfully perplexed by this record after the fifteenth listen, that I figured the only way to get to the bottom of it was to virtually corner Simon and get him to explain it all as best he could. What follows is arguably the most inspiring descriptions of the inner workings behind a record that I’ve ever read. You’d be well advised to savour every word.
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So before we begin, let’s talk titles. You previously said you weren’t sure whether this new record was going to be called ‘Heimdall’, or simply self-titled. Which is it going to be, and what is ‘Heimdall’ anyhow?
Well, it’s officially self-titled, but the front cover’s imagery is a self-portrait in the guise of the Norse god Heimdall. Heimdall is the herald of the gods in those legends. From his celestial perch he’s capable of hearing a single leaf fall to the earth or seeing a single blade of grass move. He uses his horn, Gjallar, to mark the arrival of the gods, and to warn of danger. However, the most notable (and ultimately final) sounding of the horn announces the ‘final destiny of the gods’, Ragnarok. If you listen, Gjallar sounds several times throughout the album – most notably during This Too Shall Pass, Bars, and again at the reprise of This Too Shall Pass. When it speaks, it speaks calmly, and it says, “THIS IS THE TIME.”
This Too, Shall Pass
The apocalyptic jazz opener – I really like it. It’s got this sinister soundscape behind it, rumbling electronic sounds and gathering thunder effects and this all-out vocal take. Like a lot of your recordings, it’s very lo-fi and simple – I noticed for example that it seems to be entirely in mono. Is that a conscious decision? How do you go about mixing and mastering songs?
They are indeed mono, but really that’s just the result of my recording setup – I’ve only got one audio input into my computer, and that’s where I did a good chunk of my mixing and mastering for this album. I like to use the freeware program Audacity. It doesn’t ‘color’ the recording as much as Garageband does, and also makes it easy to fabricate patchworks of tones.
Lyrically, it’s the complete opposite – philosophically monstrous. “This is the time for the gentle-hearted person / Do not be fooled / If you think you’re right / Please think again” – made me think about how especially in the West we are living through a time of relative physical safety, and to embrace this and make the most of it, for there will be more sinister times to come. It’s a poetic call to disarmament. What’s it really about then?
This Too Shall Pass is a song about living one short life, like you and I are both doing right now. And you know, apocalyptic jazz just might be the appropriate epithet for this song. The organ track is sampled from a gospel organ tape I found at a rural thrift store. It was a very rich sounding recording, but unfortunately it was destroyed only shortly after I snatched that part. I came up with the melody while singing in the field, pondering the ability of human beings (like us) to survive on very little.
I really do feel that there is a new hour rising, a time of conflict due to excessive waste. As a young ecologist, I am becoming aware of the struggle between an organism and it’s resources. We are a society of indulgence, but frankly, I see an enormous number of young people (that is to say, organisms) in my generation who really do want to live simply and to tune their lives and families to their own environment. So it is a song of readying and preparation. A song that calls for people to stand their ground against grotesque marketing and to ready themselves for the difficult uphill struggle against their own over-consumptions.
The ‘gentle people’ of the song are the sensitive people of this time. Sensitivity, in a sense, is part compassion and part to do with observational acuity. I know that anger and pridefulness won’t be the vehicles of change because they cannot supply the thoughtfulness that is needed to overcome serious challenges. I am worn out with anger. I don’t need to speak priggishly or in a manner that makes me appear superior. I just want to enjoy sounds or smell my food before I eat it. I don’t want to have a TV barking commands in my home. I want to remember my dreams.
Well, I Just Wanted To Tell You That I Like to Dance
Rolling folk instrumental with peculiar rhythms, bleeps and a cool little “Yeah!” halfway through. It’s funny, but this is the kind of track that you could easily let happen and dig, but when you actually stop to listen to it you notice so many things stacking up, and making it what it is. It sounds like a workshop of sounds – so what weirdness exactly did you put into that mix? And how does an instrumental like that form?
This song is one of my favorites on the album, probably because it came together very effortlessly, and because it is, in fact, a dance. I’m very fond of my dances and preludes.
It’s got a good number of layers, but maybe not as many as you’d expect. It starts with a reversed tape sample, then washing machine / bottle cap percussion, synth, guitar, $0.50 recorder, and voice. Intermittently there are sound-sculptural elements and of course, the splendid sample of the kids shouting, “Yeah!” I got that fromfreesound.org. (Actually, I get some of my better samples from that site.)
I think this one started the way a lot of my songs do; that is, as a systematic rhythm in my veins. I usually have a rhythmic idea first, then just record different synth voices or guitar improvisations on that pulse until I get something that I like. At that point, it’s only a matter of figuring out subsequent overdubs, and I’ll admit, there’s a lot of effort put into figuring out parts that aren’t too redundant. I’m really pleased with the sound sculptures, because they let me get sounds out of my head that aren’t possible on a physical instrument.
Blue Pants, Green Shirts
More disharmonious, experimental folk with surreal visions of “sewer saints” in green shirts and blue pants. It’s not one of my favourite songs, but in the context of the whole record it’s another dimension and that’s one of the things I love most about your albums, that they go all over the place in terms of style and substance and yet the transition and feeling of the record as a whole is one of continuity. Plus this is a great example of how you have a unnerving poetic ability to just open up and go for it vocally, like sung spoken poetry. Is that a honed skill or an innate inner voice that has always been?
I’ve always been a poet, but I think that’s because I’ve always been a dreamer. That’s not to say that I haven’t honed my skills at crafting words or tuning their metrics to music. I was lucky to have Adam Pergament to study and practice with when I did; I do credit him as a major influence to my own poetic style.
This song deserves an explanation as well.
It’s one of the first and the clearest of the dream-songs that arose. In order for the dream to make sense, though, I need to make a short detour:
When I was younger I came up with the story of ‘The Homeless Sewer Skaters’ - a group of drifting ascetics (a bit like whirling dervishes) that had magical ice skates they wore all the time that allowed them to skate pretty much anywhere. They understood the magic of streetlights and when they danced, they made understandings of space into physical visions for those in attendance. The short musical sketch for my failed play, Metropolis, details the arrival of a young man to the ultimately bureaucratic city, Metropolis, and his involvement with the Homeless Skaters.
This year (three years after the original story was formed), I had a dream that involved The Homeless Skaters again. The images are as clear in my memory as if I had experienced them in my waking-life. They had become a omnipresent group of roving people – and I knew almost every one of them. Their eyes were deeply sunken, and they were all very pale, because they lived in the sewers. People would treat them so cruelly that I had a hard time believing it. But their new leader was so harsh and disciplined that he brought an incredible willpower to his followers. His name was David Geppinger. He rallied the group and drilled them until they were practically a militaristic street gang. They called themselves ‘The Sewer Saints’ and wore blue pants and green shirts.
I watched things become more and more maniacal, but when my good friends joined the order, and I couldn’t believe it. While sitting in an airport/exposition center, I witnessed the group march in and start harassing people into doing what they wanted. Finally, David Geppinger and his group came up to me. I stood up, and they started to push me around. I fell back into my chair, but instead of physically hitting it, I went right through it into this all-encompassing purplish-red glow. I didn’t have a body or anything anymore, I just floated in this colored field. It was at that point that I felt my hand grasp around something, and I suddenly existed again. I held my hand high, and in it was The Bolt of God! (My phosphorescent recorder.) I said to him with a forceful and direct energy, “David Geppinger, this is the flute that will call your death. There is no denying this.” There was a general murmur in the crowd and an sharpening of malicious faces among The Saints. I remained unwrinkled. Their faces changed when I said, “I give it to you as a gift.”
Abyss, Capable of Charm
This one’s pretty insane and for that I really like it. “As you and your friend wrestle deathly underwater in an argument over the way you’ve been living your life recently” – there’s something about that line leaps off the record. Is this a surrealist song, or is there hidden meaning in it?
This song is the second of the major dreams described in the album.
I was back at my alma mater in Madison and my good friend (and member of The Atom Band,) Brendon Hertz, was on the dock with his Father and Grandmother. I remember it being near sunset, the sky densely pink and orange. There was a pressing and heavy saturation of colored light on every surface I saw.
Brendon didn’t care for my current state, and he berated my inability to feel, observe and think at the same level that I had used to. I rebuked his criticisms. I was very sour to him. At some point I remembered seeing (in my peripheral vision) a large seal-like creature sitting on a rock not even three meters from the dock. It was wearing a blue athletic jersey and it just watched us with a goofy, toothy face. I felt leery of it the entire time. Brendon and I fell into fighting. Almost instantaneously, we tumbled into the water – wrestling and socking each other while trying to get to the surface for air.
Something bit my leg. It didn’t hurt, but I could tell that damn seal had sunk it’s teeth really far into my quadriceps. I came up for a breath, and I can very clearly remember what I said to Brendon at that point. I said, “Look. Your Dad’s arm is orange.” That was my argument; my logic to prove to him that I was, in fact, still trying to pay attention to the details of this life. I think that it was probably a thin, bitter argument, but it did stick in my mind as being as real as anything I could feel in my waking-life.
From this dream I gleaned a fine thought, and probably my best while in Florida: You are alive while you are asleep.
Where do you stand in relation to the divide between those who are content to let people “take what they want” from your art, and those who attempt to communicate precisely their experiences and ideas? Is there even a divide at all? And if you turn right can you re-enter reality as easily as you leave it?
I’ve come to accept that people who hear my music won’t be able to figure out everything exactly how I had imagined it. But, then again, isn’t that the joy of imagination? I really just hope that my music can stimulate people in some way or another to think, to dream, or to feel for themselves. I write from experience almost always, but I don’t really think understanding the experience is important – just the potential that the experience could channel a vitality to people who listen.
Chicago Soul Food (The Hungry Ghost)
Meandering (possibly) improvised keyboard exploratory instrumental. Is something like this planned, or does it just happen? I mean, do you sit down and think “Okay, I need a keyboard instrumental, let’s see what I can cook up”, or are you just noodling away and think “Hey, I should record this”? It sounds to me like intermission music – like you’re sitting watching a film and three scenes in all the lights come up and this starts to play. I’ve been thinking a lot about track structure of records recently (actually it’s been a recurring theme of the last two years thanks to The Daydream Generation). How do you approach structuring a record like this, and do you have any particular philosophy about it? One of the reasons I ask is that this record gathers momentum as it goes, and it’s a very strange, maybe deliberately strange start?
Oh, you’ve nailed it. Intermission music. This song signals a transition in the album, notably, a dissolution from dream sequence into waking-life. It’s supposed to be soothing after the chaos and romp of the first few tracks, especially for people who are listening as they are going to sleep.
I don’t really decide how an album is ordered until the very end – usually after I’ve recorded more than enough tracks for it. In other words, the tracks are all recorded before I’m making decisions about their inter-album relationships.
Figuring out the order of the album is very much like composing a song. There is always a natural sequence, and sometimes it takes a bit of rearrangement to maximize the contrast during transitions. It’s probably my favorite part about making an album – taking my favorite recordings and puzzling them into a larger picture. I was just reading that music has a much more diffuse meaning than speech and takes a longer time to convey that meaning. I do know that an album is the amount of time I personally need to present a full sequence of ideas.
Big Bay
Folky rolling acoustic summer soundtrack with a great little vocal melody and faraway pulsing beats. I really love this one – it’s a side of your music that you fully expect to put in an appearance at some point and as always you don’t let those of us who love this side of what you do down. On saying that however, I get the feeling that you probably could produce a whole record of “songs” like this, but that wouldn’t be any fun for you? It has that very “American” folk feel to it, something I think that people can only authentically produce if they live and breathe the land. Are you aware of your traditional musical roots, or is that an unconscious thing? Curiously, as much as I like the politicized folk music of America, I’m not a great fan of our own Scottish folk music which generally involves singing about glens and lochs and girls with ginger hair.
I’m glad to hear that it sounds American – this song is really tied to the land that I was conceived upon. That is, the area surrounding Tampa Bay.
My grandfather and grandmother are (were?) among the multitudes of people who flock to Florida to spend the chilly winter months. This year, when they were only three or four hours away from their final destination, my grandpa decided to keep pushing on instead of stopping to rest. He and my grandma ended up getting in a very serious car accident. He ended up a with a suite of life-threatening injuries.
It was weird for me because I got the news while I was on the road to Florida myself. When I got there, I drove straightaway to Tampa to visit him in the hospital. Most of my time in Florida actually correlated to his subsequent (and amazing!) recovery from the accident, throughout which I ended up driving the stretch to Tampa Bay pretty regularly.
I will be honest, I think this song is about all those people that have something that shocks them into realizing how much their families or friends mean to them, and the reciprocating love that human beings can show for each other during hard times.
Whoa, waves. (Which I have heard that lochs have. Or sometimes ginger hairs.)
Cracker Cowboy
Haha. After all that stuff about American folk here you go with a song about a cowboy. More experimental folk – you sound vaguely Dylan-esque at times, but there’s another element to it, almost a theatrical circus sound that carries it away from where he was it. Does that make sense, and why is that?
Yes, it does make some kind of sense. Let’s see…
Bob Dylan was from Minnesota, originally, and so I think that any resemblance I have to him is derived from two parts respect and one part locality; especially in the tonality and linguistic flair of his voice.
The circus part stems from my ridiculous love of clowns. I know they’re very badly received by society today, and I think that largely reflects a fear of uncertainty that our age clings to. Our ABSOLUTE UNDERSTANDING of the world in this GLOBAL AGE is mocked by the social power of the enlightened fool. You can’t be lost anymore. Or amazed.
I am a clown. I hear and feel the humors of space born of uncertainty, and I situate myself in such a way to transmit those humors into a document. A record of time and space. A record you may be listening to right now.
But, wait a second! What is this circus business? The Cracker Cowboy was actually a pictorial tribute on the wall of the (only) bar in the small Florida town I lived in. So the song is a tribute to a tribute, I guess.
How do you go about writing a cowboy song – or any song for that matter? What I’m really asking I guess is how do you choose subject matter for lyrics, and while we’re there what are the recurring themes of the album?
Characters like The Cracker Cowboy are capable of singing through a voice of their own. He just popped out of my head fully fledged with his silly country anthem to boot. The tinky loop I started with was largely responsible for the end result, I think – sometimes a loop is good enough to build on, and this one was awkward and funny in an appreciable way. Not too much substance to it, but some rather odd spaces, at least.
Let’s see, themes… Definitely dream, and the superficial difference between dreaming and waking-life. That gets sticky quickly, and we’re tumbling into the boundaries between myth and non-storied life. Or death and being alive.
It is also an album about the United States of America, specifically the State of Florida. That is a real place, amazingly.
Bird
Spoken word poem intro gives way to folky acoustic experimental soundscape, complete with possibly whale sounds (?) and whizzes. What’s “Bird” all about then?
Here’s the third big dream of the album. If you can follow along with the words, you might recognize that Bird was an entity I met in my dreams. She is startling because she doesn’t represent any real world analogue for me. In a way, she’s the first person I really got to know while I was asleep.
The dream went a little like this: Some friends and I were waiting for a special show to start in a bar-room. It was going to be spectacular; I could tell by the hum in the air. There were supposed to be monster trucks driving on the bar, itself. Prior to that, a poetry reading was supposed to happen. (I guess this was the hip kind of monster truck venue…)
Bird just walked up to me and started talking. She was all-enveloping. From the first moment I met her, she understood me like she was reading a book – sweeping across my face with an absolutely clairvoyant gaze. She absorbed anybody she spoke to like that. It was weird, but I felt like I had known her for twenty years after twenty minutes.
Apparently, we were way too early for the main event, so we went for a walk down the crooked sidewalk and into a narrow, wooden building of impossible passages. Bird could disappear and reappear through them seamlessly.
Much later on, when the monster motors were just memories in my mind, I stood in a moonlit, sandy space with my grandfather and admired a scalped old pine. A pack of tourists were inspecting it the next morning; except they didn’t know what to make of the stringy nest stuck high in the tree. Grandpa and I knew it was Bird’s work.
Incidentally I like it a lot – it confirms my belief that you have a natural poet-voice. Do you ever play this stuff live? I can just see you in my mind cinema hustling at spoken word events or open mic nights.
I do occasionally play live, though it’s quite rare. Honestly, I have a great desire to assemble a physical band with complements to the Atom Band. That would convince me to play-out with more vigor. Making waves for people can be a serious undertaking.
Bars
This is my favourite song on the record, there’s always a point within it that makes my brain jump to attention – not a particular point in the song, just at some point I get the inevitable “Oh, what’s this one again?” feeling. Curiously it sounds like The Pixies on a folk trip with all the parts fitting perfectly – the electric guitar lines, floating recorder, tapping rhythms, and chime of bell. Vocally it’s right on the money – raw and ragged but full of fire. Where the fuck did a song like this come from?
Well, like most of us, I’ve spent far too much time in bars. The weird thing is that I don’t even really like them. I do like music, though, and they tend to go together.
I’m very quiet at bars. I like to think and listen to the roar of voices in them. I don’t drink much. And though I can’t completely take credit for the thought, I usually liken our attraction with bars to flies congregating around sweet, sticky stuff. From there, the progression to moths and streetlamps follows pretty clearly.
Analogously, I tend to be a drunkard-of-streetlamps at night, spinning and bouncing around between them. I like to walk aimlessly around the backs of buildings and empty spaces. Good thinking in those spots.
In a way, this song is a cheer or lament for all the people who are also intoxicated by streetlamps.
Extracting Sunlight From Cucumbers
It’s the comical-serious “If I was…” folk song and possibly one of the most instantly accessible things on the record. “If I was a musician I would be a singer hawking words of no interest to you / my voice sounds like it’s made out of glue (glub glub)” – that line, and the way you present it makes me grin every time I hear it. But it begs the questions: 1. Why “Extracting Sunlight From Cucumbers”? and 2. If you could be anything, anything at all, then what would you be?
1. In Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver visits the Grand Academy of Lagado and meets a half-insane researcher who claims to have been ‘extracting sunlight from cucumbers’ for the past eight years. It was originally intended as satire of contemporary science, I believe, but I appreciate it more as a mixture of pure dream-like mania and science. The hilarity of some fellow meaninglessly grinding cucumbers into a pulp for eight years is splendidly hilarious to me. Both extremely diligent andfutile.
2. I would be an scientist and an artist. Preferably at the same time. Working on that.
This Too, Shall Pass
Bluesy reworking of the opening track, but blink and you might miss it. What’s the longest track you’ve ever put out on a record? And what’s your thinking about song length? Two minutes keep em hanging on for more? Epic ten minute free for alls? Or just however long the song takes?
My earlier songs were much longer – most were at least three minutes, some up to six or seven minutes long. I think the award for the longest song on a record goes to ‘Red Truck Pulls Up’ off of One-Hundred Consecutive Lines to Dewdroplets (2004). It’s a meandering delay-feedback experiment that clocks in at 11:33. (“Oh wow! This effect pedal is really cool! Hey, now check out what this knob does…” ) Sometimes Chime experiments would feature 30-minute fluxes of song, though they were medleys of many poetic works.
These days, though, I resonate with a song that does what it needs to do in about two minutes. I like frankness, though I often struggle to be frank. I like my insanity highly concentrated, and honestly, I think a two minute song can seem pretty long depending on the content material. Take ‘Chicago Soul Food’ for instance.
Light Eternal
As much as I personally love “Bars” I suspect that to your everyday man on the street, that this will be the record’s obvious stand-out song. I know the chances of your everyday man on the street finding himself in possession of a Simon Piler record is reasonably unlikely, and being your everyotherday man on a beach I don’t profess to speak on behalf of the masses – just this is what my hunches are telling me. It’s a folky lullaby to close the curtains, really beautiful poetic imagery over stripped back acoustic guitar. Is this your favourite song on the album?
In some ways, it is my favorite, yes. It’s one of my only songs that has gotten consistent, quiet, contemplative comments from people. Of course it’s fun to know that someone has thoughtfully enjoyed something you’ve created. Then again, I could also say that Abyss is my favorite, though it would be for a much different reason; mainly that it is a very bizarre but excruciatingly planned song, and moreover, I think that it works in spite of all that.
I wrote Light Eternal for two non-related people. (And interestingly, two people whom the ‘everyday person’ might not relate with.) The first was one of my friends from Sioux Falls who has lived for many years with a diagnosis of Schizophrenia and has bounced in and out of state hospitals. He was an incredibly hardy bicyclist. The second was a tough and likable Wisconsinite woman I knew at the same time; ultimately the only lesbian I’ve ever gotten to know well. Both of these people had the solitary-person’s low, roving spirit. I felt a kinship with them for that reason.
And while we’re here at the end, what did you learn from making the record? What new things did you try?
As far as learning goes, Smally, I’ve had a boom. I think my musical voice is continuing to improve through better choices of arrangement. This album represents another step towards consolidating my thicker, multi-voiced tracks into stylistic and ultimately meaningful pieces. That might sound chalky, but I really do believe that in order to do something musically stunning, you either have to have strong notational skills (written composition) or a high-quality mechanism of arrangement in conjunction with a series of musical rules (improvisational composition). And I do consider myself an improvisational musician. Besides that, I also took a few steps in understanding relative loudness in application to sound sculpting. Software is a powerful tool for synthesis and manipulating sounds, and I think I’m getting better at using it how I’d like to.
And ideally what would you like people to take away from it?
Take what you wish, but try listening to it as you’re falling asleep.
**(I also wanted to say, “Thank You” for making this album possible for everyday people to get ahold of. While I had the chance, you know.)
Find out more about Simon Piler and The Atom Band at: www.myspace.com/simonpiler