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SOUTH PHILLY, TONIGHT // sober show, early show, great show, get there // 1602 Annin St., 6pm
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Tickets for tonight in St. Louis: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/5531291
I’m gonna be writing the finishing touches of an essay on challenges to cosmopolitanism in a library prior to the show.
BTW @RyanWasoba helped me fix my voice with his hospitality. LALALALALALALALALALALALA.
The Lakes of Zones B and C is now up on streaming services. Please enjoy.
Tidal:
https://tidal.com/browse/album/243503025
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/7BO7uSKtUAqDvboPkE6ua2
Deezer:
https://www.deezer.com/us/album/347113497
YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nH2F4pbljQc3nGS00EaqVHjYfwjdnss1g
Woke up:
4:00 a.m. in Park Slope, Brooklyn at a friend-family’s home, the kind of apartment that seems more like a living story than a building, the kind of apartment with books and records and instruments hidden in every corner, the kind of apartment that feels like a labyrinth of ideas and memories that no one who didn’t live there to co-write the living story will ever be able to access. Also, there was a noise in the backyard that phased in and out like two airplane motors, and I was not sure if it was two populations of crickets trying to sync up or two A/C fans.
Journey time:
3 hours: MTA to Amtrak to a local bus which I was delighted to see was actually a dedicated right-of-way rapid busway. Impressive, CT Transit.
Breakfast:
There was a very legit bagel place on the corner by the friend-family’s home. Everything bagel, toasted with tomato and peanut butter and onion. Don’t knock it ’til you try it, snob. Five stars.
Incidents of note on journey:
Lunch:
A 12-inch tuna sub from Subway in the middle of a grocery store parking lot. Calling it bleak would be an exaggeration for car people, but as a pedestrian it was fairly punishing. I worked on LUH papers again.
Soundperson’s name/shirt color:
Jordaan, also the promoter and a very stand-up kind of guy, also his birthday. Shirt was black. He also had a collection of radioactive clocks.
Dinner:
I ate pretzels the promoter put out to make people more thirsty and buy more beer.
Partial Setlist:
The Anthem of the Greater McMurdo Station Chamber of Commerce
Freeway in Heaven
Tanline Debris
The Crows of Emmerich
Spieltier
A Violent Translation of the Concordia Headscarp
…kind of blanked out in the middle…
Stars
Defiance
Incidents of note during performance:
There are many pianos and piano harps in various states of disrepair strewn about the factory. For the last few songs, I asked people to follow me down a hallway where I found one of the most playable pianos and finished the set in the semi-darkness there. The piano was out of tune, it was dark, and I had no contacts in, but I managed to Muppet-fist my way through most of the chords, and it felt really really good. But when I was done, I turned around and was cornered by a bunch of people I didn’t know at the end of a hallway in a decommissioned factory, and no matter how much my conscious brain told me the context, it felt really alarming.
Sleep:
00:30. Going into it I knew this was gonna be a fun one because I had no plans. Fortunately, Jake from CT neo-Swirlie-ites Pulsr was on hand. We listened to some music, he let me crash, and in the morning he gave me a lift to the New Haven train station through extremely heavy rains that slowly turned into minor flooding.
Days off (06 and 07 September):
These were mainly spent making progress on my LUH papers, so I won’t document them.
From a laundromat in Chicago (more about that tomorrow),
-030-
-CRM-
Woke up:
2:45 a.m. in Brieskow-Finkenheerd and getting out of bed took more will than any other rising in recent memory. But the sky on the walk to the train station was ore clear than I have ever seen it, and the silence was deafening, and I was happy.
Journey time:
16 hours, but 7 of it was spent just chilling in Amsterdam.
Breakfast:
two pretzels from Ditsch in Berlin-Gesundbrünnen.
Incidents of note on journey:
Lunch (previous day, in Amsterdam):
Green drink and spicy tofu burrito from Albert Heijn (excellent Dutch supermarket chain). Ate it in the transit hall at Centraal, whose ceiling is covered in an irregular grid of mirrors with beveled corners. Exquisite.
Soundperson’s name/shirt color:
Beatrice, dark blue with a small print icon I couldn’t quite identify
Partial Setlist:
Incidents of note during performance:
Dinner:
The promoter bought me a falafel. I’m spoiled for falafel in Berlin, but it held up. Respectable falafel.
Sleep:
00:00 in my pal’s flat in Stoke-Newington. Slept great.
Day off:
Woke up late, headed for airport, slept more on plane, watched three moves:
Info for tonight’s show is here.
From the Amtrak to Connecticut,
-030-
-CRM-
Woke up:
5:00 a.m., in Berlin
Journey time:
9 hours.
Breakfast:
half of a börek my friend Sebastien gave me.
Incidents of note on journey:
Soundperson’s name/shirt color:
Boris/light brown
Setlist:
False Metal
Freeway in Heaven
Wasted on the Senate Floor
Sad React
Compressor Repair (request)
Erica Western Teleport
The Magnetic Media Storage Practices of Rural Pakistan
The Anthem of the Greater McMurdo Station Chamber of Commerce
…some others I’m forgetting
Incidents of note during performance:
In “…Rural Pakistan” I sometimes stomp on the floor on 1/4 notes at the end while I say “GONE. GONE. GONE.” to exhaustion. The stomping sounds like this: BLAM, BLAM, BLAM, BLAM. This works best on a wooden or metal stage with a hollow cavity beneath, which is usually true. I wanted to do that tonight, too. But some stages are solid, and when you stomp on them, it just sounds like this: pt, pt, pt, pt. I didn’t check what kind of stage I was dealing with before the show, and I really go for it to stomp, and I’m being all dramatic and wrapped up in the song, and when the beat hits…pt, pt, pt. I just screamed louder though, it was fine.
Dinner:
I missed an opportunity to steal an avocado from the Lucy Dacus dressing room so it was just bread and a piece of ginger while I walked.
Sleep:
3:30 a.m., on train. Slept great. 10/10.
LONDON — TOMORROW — CLICK HERE FOR TIX — VERY FEW AVAILABLE — YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED, CRYSTAL PALACE — https://www.eventbrite.com/e/emporer-x-live-performance-tickets-410549403317?aff=ebdsoporgprofile&keep_tld=1
31 August was the last day of Germany’s 9-Euro Ticket scheme that gave everyone in the country free nationwide public transport for three months. If I was patient, I could get to the Lucy Dacus show I was opening in Cologne for more or less free. So of course I did. 9 hours of intersecting local transportation networks later, I was there. I took a Covid test, found the backstage area, started setting up my music stuff and making a set list, and that was that — jumping off a cliff into my first public transportation tour since the pandemic — my first long-form solo trip.
I have been very lucky to have been asked to share the road with many friends over the years. I’m always grateful to ride in their vans, to stay in hotels with them, to open for them in front of guaranteed huge crowds every night. The bond that forms between musicians who share touring life together is among the strongest and fastest humans can form. I’m writing this from Amsterdam Centraal, and last time I was here it was after just such friends a group of friends brought me along tour with them and gave me one of the most fun times I’ve ever had as a musician. That would not have happened alone; you need friendship for moments like that. I need that too and I’ll travel with friends in bands for as long as I’m lucky enough to be able to do it.
But traveling in the world, solo, hyper-exposed to its horror and beauty, probably often dehydrated and underfed…this is how I started making art, and this is where I’m happiest. Throwing my bag on the luggage rack and getting out the laptop and beat machines to compose looking at the landscape while a baby screams and a kid plays Candy Crush too loudly, getting off the train in predator mode, tracking down the show in a squat or a de-consecrated church or some guy’s dad’s pool supply warehouse.
It’s easy to miss the wildness when you’re in a group. When I’m traveling with people I know and love, we’re in a bubble. This is a ton of fun. And it’s very different than sharing trains and buses with people in general, as a group. When traveling solo, I’m merged not with my cohorts but with the public, an abstract mass consciousness, grumpy and alert and intent on going somewhere. I’m deeply alone most of the time, alone in a crowd, alone just like everyone else, and therefore paradoxically never less alone. It’s also a reminder that the art form I chose is, to the vast majority of those people with whom I share a wordless journey, inscrutable. (This is probably true for all participants in subcultures, not just obscure indie pop acts.) I am alone, experiencing a kind of group alienation that subcultures are built precisely to paper over and which therefore I cannot access in a van with friends. “Let’s create an intentional society in which everyone values X” is empowering for members of the subculture that values X, and it’s not something we should stop of course. More subcultures, more vans, more and deeper intentional niche communities! But we should remember about the rest of the world too, not just in our jobs or political acts but when making and consuming our art. For we who make and consume owe it to the societies we serve to remind ourselves that they will likely never ever hear what we do, and if they did hear it they’d probably dislike it — and yet, the work we do must nevertheless hold sufficient value to be worth our exclusive focus, such that their children or their children’s children will hear the world of our time represented in our work, their forebears visible in it even if they could not participate actively in the work’s creation. We must remember that subcultures are veins of specific and rare ore, surrounded by common rocks. What we make must be of sufficient value to be worth mining.
And that’s true even for some of the larger bands in our various subcultures. The biggest band you’re a fan of is probably something 99% of people around you in an average train station have never even heard of, let alone like. And yet we as participants in subcultures owe these people too — we must document them, serve them, tell their stories as well. Subcultures cannot just sing about themselves, and that’s what we do when we never leave our milieu.
That’s why I’ll always tour this way too when I can, no matter how lucky I get with great friends bringing me along for the ride.
London tomorrow.
We.31.Aug. – Cologne, DE – Luxor (supporting Lucy Dacus)
Sa.03.Sep. – London, UK – Free the Gallery (RSVP)
Mo.05.Sep. – Forestville, CT – Forestville Ind. Ct. (RSVP)
Th.08.Sep. – Chicago, IL – Cafe Mustache
Fr.09.Sep. – Moline, IL – Blackhawk Room
Sa.10.Sep. – Minneapolis, MN – Herr Garage (RSVP)
Tu.13.Sep. – St. Louis, MO – Sinkhole (Tix) / (FB)
We.14.Sep. – Columbus, OH – Spacebar (RSVP)
Th.15.Sep. – Washington, DC – catgut.friends (Tix/RSVP)
Fr.16.Sep. – Portland, ME – Find Thrift
Sa.17.Sep. – Somerville, MA – The Center of the Universe
So.18.Sep. – Brooklyn, NY – Sovereign (Tix)
We.21-Sep. – Atlanta, GA – Railroad Earth (RSVP)
Fr.22.Sep. – Jacksonville, FL – The Moasis (RSVP)
Sa.24.Sep. – Greater Nashville, TN – Foxwood
We.28.Sep. – Edinburgh, UK – Thompson Balcony
Th.29.Sep. – Sheffield, UK – Delicious Clam
Fr.30.Sep – Norwich, UK – Lowell Records
2022.08.01.A: The blog format amplifies the urge to be coherent and humorous. The blog format diminishes the urge to be accurate. I’m doing my best to ignore the former and oppose the latter.
2022.08.01.B: The closest thing I can think of to the medieval equivalent of a blog post is the papal encyclical. It’s hard to think of human civilization without some form of each of the following:
2022.08.01.C: There is at least one important difference between a blog post and a social media post. A social media post has as its imagined target a small group of people contemporaries. A blog post has an eye towards an indefinite, arbitrarily-sized public in either the present or the distant future. Not all people use either medium this way; there were a lot of LiveJournals that read like FB callouts and a lot of FB pages that read like ye bloggs of olde.
2022:08.01.D: The above applies mainly to text format comms; I claim no understanding of the new video stuff (IG, TikTok, etc.) I’m sure there are smart people who think writing with text is on the way out, like love letters and square dancing. I’m also sure they’re wrong. Conversely, I’m sure there are smart people who think the prevalence of video apps is killing human ability to compose in text format. I share their emotional fear, but in the cold morning air I think they’re wrong for the same reasons that we’re still using bowls after 20,000 years.
2022:08.01.E: Square dancing exists today mostly as an ossified traditional practice.
(That many of our current musical forms are in the process of becoming ossified practices like this is something to be discussed another time.)
Contrast this with the murga:
The differences between square dance and murga are obvious:
2022.08.01.F: A brief list of current group-level cultural production which shows murga-like signs of life as opposed to ossified practices like square dancing (NOTE: no one should rule out a square dancing revival! Living cultures routinely mine and repurposes traditional forms, and sqaure dancing shows some signs of being ripe for this. Note similarity with some practices below.)
Other tradition-informed but living group cultural practices exist. Common thread: in these practices individualism is on the back burner. A group takes the forefront, either as the source of a narrative or a necessary co-creator of the work or both. This is not a threat to individual expression; on the contrary, it provides more material for people with neoromantic tendencies to work with.
2022.08.01.H: Neolithic poetry almost certainly existed. We are unlikely to ever hear it. This is an incalculable complication in the effort to understand the nature of consciousness.
2022.08.01.I: Contemporary people (like me above) use the word “consciousness” precisely where previous generations would have used the word “the soul.”