Archives : all posts by Sean

Децла (Detsl) - "Вечеринка у Децла (Party at Detsl's)".

Natasha and I climbed into Andrei's big black 4x4. We decided to leave the dog at home. She took the passenger seat and I was in the back, leaning against the backpacks. Andrei got in after us. Hes is a barrel-chested Magadan native, shaved almost bald, bulging at the shoulders. He wears a tight black T, camo pants. Tasha - my interpreter - has shades, a dayglo hoodie, giant raver sneakers. I am a timid Canadian writer. Andrei says something in Russian. "Let's go?" Tasha asks. "Let's go," I say.

A hard rock cover of Cat Stevens' "Wild World" is playing.

As soon as we roar out of the junkyard and onto the freeway I notice very clearly that I do not have a seatbelt. The windshield has a crack in it; every Magadan windshield seems to have a crack in it. Andrei has a black and white GPS, a DVD player mounted above the dash. He does have a seatbelt but he is not wearing it. He never wears it. For the next five hours, the No Seatbelt alarm pings in the dash behind the wheel. It is almost soothing. It is almost, almost soothing.

We are on the Magadan oblast federal road to Yakutsk. The name looks more elegant in cyrillic: Якyтск. We are not actually headed to Yakutsk because Yakutsk is 1,200 miles away. This is just our route to the mine at Dneprovsky, a former gulag, where we will be camping tonight. The road is pitted and lumpen, but paved. We pass Magadan's crumbling tenements and soaring radio towers, pass the immobile fairground and the doleful Mask of Sorrow. Now Andrei is really gunning it. The city pours away behind us and there are just acres and acres of thick forest on rolling hills, pines on cascading slopes. A bundle of reindeer bristles swings where fuzzy dice might swing. This is a souvenir from the town of Omyron. It says so, in beading. Also Omyron's lowest recorded temperature: -72°C (-96°F). As I admire the doodad I realize that although it swings where fuzzy dice might swing, it is not swinging from under the rearview mirror. That is because there is no rearview mirror. Andrei pushes a button on his USB flashdrive and the Russian dance music gets louder.

So we're driving through the taiga. I check, just to make sure: "We're driving through the taiga, right?" Natasha checks with Andrei. He nods. This seems to be a stupid question. Dandelions skirt the side of the road, in places, like we are skimming down a suburban off-ramp. In other spots, the asphalt turns to dirt - we have to raise the windows to keep from being choked with dust. Gigantic trucks thunder past us, their dust-clouds like the trails of comets. The SUV has very good suspension. I am hanging on for dear life to the car's interior handles. We climb a hill and now emerge into new landscape: from the initial raking hills we are in some kind of plateau valley, ringed with mountains. Atka passes in a blur: a concrete hammer and sickle, apartment blocks, what could be a lake but which is instead a large slab of ragged white ice. It is June. The car's bass booms. "This is Black Lake," Natasha says, pointing through a break in the trees. There are no birds or fish at Black Lake. When I ask why, Andrei replies: "Nobody knows." He has a five-year-old son, he tells us. He wants to give him a motorcycle.

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Elsewhere: Matrix Magazine and Pop Montreal are once again presenting LitPop, a one-of-a-kind literary contest. Submit poetry or short fiction for the chance to snag round-trip airfare to what is arguably the best music festival on the continent, plus a VIP pass, accommodation, and publication in Matrix. This year's judges are Ken Babstock and Melanie Little and it's all a stunner of a deal, a grand opportunity, a thing you should do. Anyone in the USA or Canada is eligible. Deadline is July 1.

Alina Simone - "Just Here to Watch the Show (demo)". Saint Petersburg has been around much longer than me, and it will be here after I'm gone. It will be solid and regal under blue sky. It will be radiant and proud. It will let its gold domes wink at dusky midnight, it will hold a million people in its squares. The trees here are taller than the trees at home, and the forest around the Polytechnic is full of trilling birds. I imagine studying there, in vaultlike classrooms with peeling walls, all day spent staring at an exploded view. The diagrams would be on bright white paper, like the shafts of light in the central stairway, where great scientists have walked, have chewed on sandwiches. And in the evening I would go out from the Physico-Technical Institute, in among those tall trees and trilling birds, and I would just disappear into the capital, where my true love lives. [buy]

Brightblack Morning Light - "Everybody Daylight". This is my second experience of White Nights, after the short time I spent in Dawson City. St Petersburg bears the nighttime glow in a different way. It does not diffuse into grassblades, empty horizon. Instead it reflects off colonnades and palaces, dazzles down boulevards. The people on the streets do not have Dawson's weary drunkenness, staggering to white-lit beds. They walk upright and clear-eyed. They jostle on the subway. They laugh on the bridge. This is a city which remains lucid with fatigue: it would shoot its arrow straight, find the apt word. It would win at every winter. It would devour every spring. Sometimes summer is like a cool blue bead in the palm of your hand. [buy]

[photo by me, this week, in the Ioffe Institute]

Fulton Lights - "The Riddle in Me". A man has a sword in his chest. If he is lucky he can choose the right moment, with glinting in his eyes, to reach inside himself, to draw the blade, to cut through the thorns or chains or enemy. If he is unlucky, someone else will be the one with shining look: she will draw the sword from its scabbard beside his heart and she will cut him straight through.

This is a roundabout way of describing the sharp edge of this song. It is nicked & razor-sharp. Fulton Lights' Andrew Spencer Goldman continues to find new edges for his musical project, like he is leaning his body into a diamond belt, throwing his gardens in the thresher. Am I Right or Am I Right has grit, funk, megaphone reverb. "The Riddle In Me" is mostly guitars - guitars like shearing steel, guitars like stabs of strings, that ceaseless rocking riff, white lines under tire-treads. Maybe Tom Petty would write this song after spending all night with a Gang of Four record, his cheek pressed against cinderblock. Maybe he would write this song if he needed to draw the sword in his chest and get out.

[the album is finished, it just needs you - Soundcloud / / Facebook]

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Elsewhere: James Irwin, whose Western Transport I called "the best LP of any unsigned act in Montreal" has now made this beautiful record available through Bandcamp. If you like Bill Callahan, Cass McCombs, Laura Marling or Mount Eerie, you will like this. Go get the whole thing.

(painting by Jon McNaughton)

Fairport Convention - "Both Sides Now" [buy]
Carly Rae Jepsen - "Both Sides Now" [buy]

It don't change: we really don't know clouds at all. Or love. Or life. We are dizzied by moons and Junes and ferris wheels, by synths and strums, men's and women's voices. We are seduced by time's backward creaking and forward skim. We don't see the backs of mirrors or the movies playing behind people's eyes. Our lovers are only so naked. But we have songs about these things - we have that, songs new & old, telling us glad and melancholy about all we do not know.

Arlt - "Tu m'as encore crevé un cheval". Crever means to puncture, to burst. Un cheval is a horse, a pony, a stallion. So listen to France's inimitable, extraordinary Arlt and imagine a horse that slowly deflates, there in the vegetable garden. Or imagine a colt on the wide & open range, on the red sand, exploding like he has been popped with a drawing pin. Or imagine the other thing, the real meaning of crever un cheval, imagine riding a horse into the ground, riding a person into the ground, demanding so much of them that they become smaller and smaller, hunched and weary, until finally they can fit through the little doorway on the side of the hill; and they stand there in the hill's inner room, in the cool humidity of black earth, and take deep breaths; they pick up a guitar; they play a song that sounds like a joke without a punchline.

Arlt crossed the ocean and made this album in Montreal, at the dear new Hotel 2 Tango, with kingmaker sunglasses champ & mensch Radwan Moumneh. Feu la figure does not sound like Montreal. It still sounds like raindrops on cobblestone, insects in the trees, crumbs and café au lait. I hope Arlt will not take offence. There is an electric guitar that sounds like a singing saw, a shrilling kettle, and it is wonderful music that will make the buildings keel over, make mother come in with a cup of honeysuckle, a ticking clock, an old photograph of your uncle's death.

[buy]

(photo source)

Songs:Ohia - "Hold On Magnolia". Punching the moon, punching it right out, with a wish or a strong look or just stubborn persistence. Luc thought of this as he squinted at the night sky, black sky, dark indigo. That clean white disc. Something like that, you'd take out in one of three ways: A punch, hard, knuckle scuff. A look, eyebrows narrowed, from a certain kind of gentleman or femme fatale. Or by persistence, stubborn persistence, keeping on & keeping on until finally it quit. Luc thought about how the moon could be a metaphor for so many things: death, glory, student strikes over tuition fees. He imagined a month where Montreal's streets were filled with two types of people: the ones who clung on, white discs pinned to the chests; and the ones who would win, one way or another, punching the moon right out. [Jason Molina is alive and getting better, thank god: I have not given up because you, my friends have not given up on me. / buy his records]

Sonny and the Sunsets - "Pretend You Love Me". A great one, cool and hot. That's how sand works: gets cold quickly, heats up fast. But "Pretend You Love Me" isn't sand, isn't desert, despite all that lap steel. Instead it's flowering, sprouting, ivy curls. It's buds, spuds, beet greens, gladiolas. There is flute, reverb and bassline groove. Sonny and the Sunsets are planting a garden overtop all that strife and spite, the passive-aggressive drama. Rakes and hoes, bags of seed, microphones and electric guitars. [Longtime Companion is released on 26 June / pre-order / I wrote about another song by Sonny Smith last month]

Lakes of Canada - "Born Again". Love the chorus here, the overearnestness smoothed out into something soft-lit, dreamy, easy as Spanish moss. It's an elusive aesthetic - part sandbank bonfire, part spinning vinyl record, the sleeve propped up against a potted plant. If only the verses had the same warm sound, hi-fi MOR instead of lo-fi strum. [Lakes of Canada launch Toll the Bell at Montreal's Il Motore on Saturday / website]

(photo source)