John's Apothecary (A self-serious blog)

Robin Holcomb.The Graveyard Song. Little Three (1996)

Robin Holcomb introduced me to the avant garde, its stylistic cues something parallel but skewed, slightly or mightily.  This track lays down the essence of her craft.  An ode to God sung almost as church hymm, yet tinged with atonalities & desperations which generally don’t find their way, into the pews. 

Holcomb’s album from 1996 is a distillation of Americana impinged with a Downtown New York modified-classical scene.  Her work would go quite nicely with Erik Friedlander’s.  (An indulgence, I think a collaboration could turn extraordinary.)

The lyrics, printed below, are exalting.  Her metaphors drip with milk & honey, yet she never gives us too much.  I love this song more every time I hear it.  It grows deeper with age.  At 42, God is driving me to catch up for lost time.  He urges me to share his love, as if tomorrow would never begin.

Holcomb’s song seems a perfect road map for the next 40 years.  Her reverence is timeless & humbling.  Hope you enjoy.

The Graveyard Song

How soon he’s right, how son forgot

Give of the little that you know

We know he died because he loved

And his death is our dying.

No one knew you but to love you

No one named you but to praise

Sit beside me, we’ll lay down low

We were friends in my better days.

Sum your life and brand the stone

The chisel won’t help you any

Sons and daughters of you I see

Born and unborn, they are all singing with me.

-John the Apothecary

Erik Satie (1866 – 1925). Gnossiennes Number 5, Modere. Gymnopedies, Gnossiennes & Nocturnes

Erik Satie wrote music at the end of Empires: the Hapsburgs, the Hollenzollerns, the Ottoman, the British, empires crumbling, unbeknownst to themselves, even as they sang triumphant, Romanticism linked inextricably to their demise.  When Satie penned this Gnossiennes, in the 1880s, he certainly felt something amiss, the artist as harbinger.  The Empires, themselves, busy in conquest, expanding, unaware of the forces soon to be unleashed, the world turned over. 

In his slight & refined piano Gymnomipedes, Grossiennes & Nocturnes, Satie links old to new.  Austerity belies his recordings larger forces, atonality dappled with the late Romantism of Brahms, foreshadowing more radical musical elements. The Weimar Republic was still 40 years away.  Picasso wasn’t born.  And somehow, like Art Nouveau that occurred a decade later, at the end of the century, Satie had linked crumbling Romanticism to Schoenberg & shortly thereafter, Messiaen.

It is my belief that Satie, currently, grows in stature with each passing year.  His delicate balance of elemental Romanticism & the coming dissolution are prescient & defining.  Satie remakes the world in his own head, before the world remakes itself.  He captures a moment before jazz but after Beethoven perfectly foisted, not just on the early 20th century, but even today, western culture 2010. 

As you listen to Satie’s short exercise in restraint, listen as if it were written yesterday, as if the world Satie imbued in the late 19th century, exists currently, outside your Upper East Side flat.  Satie’s music has leaped a century forward, into the 21st.  As empires devolve towards anomie & gold is no longer just for mercantilists, perhaps Satie sensed this too, a soothsayer like Nostradamus, written not in Quatrain, but instead in Gnossiennes.

Silver Jews. The Frontier Index. The Natural Bridge (1996)

Dave Berman’s Silver Jews, first & foremost, were a poetry band, slackers wired into the ethers.  My pharmacist once said, “They don’t even try.”  And he has a point.  To the novice, it appears addled, sewn together without care.  To the aficionado, however, their lack of polish is not lazy, but instead, appears effortless.  I don’t believe that these songs were haphazard.  The Frontier Index is example A.

The greatest thing about The Natural Bridge, the album, is its ability over time to keep on giving.  Perhaps sonic barriers were never broken, but the limpid poetry is for keeps.  When I first heard this album on its release sixteen long years ago, it had a timelessness attached.  The proof is that sixteen years later, if its possible, the album has improved.

This line, alone, is one of the greats in art music canon.

Boy wants a car from his Dad
Dad says, first you gotta cut that hair
Boy says, hey Dad Jesus had long hair
and Dad says
that’s right son but Jesus walked everywhere

or

A robot walks into a bar
orders a drink
lays down a bill
The bartender says, hey we don’t serve robots
and the robot says, oh but someday you will

If you have never tried the Silver Jews, I implore you to do so.  They continued on for another decade.  They were never better than The Natural Bridge.