Category: Smog

Cheered by George Galloway’s takedown of Gavin Essler on Newsnight but then appalled by the idiocies of the former Spanish Prime Minister, for whom the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with the Madrid bombings or the London ones, I listened to Smog’s Knock Knock. An old album, one whose cover cheers me (H. has it on LP – that, and a gatefold Dongs of Sevotion), and one I know through playing at least a hundred times. Why play it? To remove myself from the world and from the news (‘It’s all bad news, on every page’), to clear a space.

Then is Knock Knock comfort music? Is it escapism, a kind of lullaby – that homecoming that would allow a favourite album to make the territory to which you return? Is it reassurance I seek? Writing quickly, and without thinking about it, I would say simply that Smog’s music – Bill Callahan’s voice, the loping repetition of the music, that of which is sung, its humour and its darkness, gives me truth. It as though it were one with the forces that steer the universe – as if he were able to sing of something like fate. Yes, that’s what I’d say, and I’ve said it before, each time as if for the first time, each time without thought.

Speaking the other night to a musical friend, I thought: I’ve almost found a way to write about music, I think, all except for one thing: how to mark a sense of despair, a sense of the inevitable, that great steering of the world into ruin? How to mark that in the music I love which is a music born in despair? Why do I always want to part ways with Deleuze and Guattari, with their marvellous, fierce joy? Why is it to songs attuned by sadness that I turn? Sadness – but also a laughter in sadness, as if to say: how could it be otherwise?

Could it be otherwise? Of course, but who has the strength to sustain hope in this otherwise, in the contigency of the present, in the contigency of the future? Of course I’ve said nothing about Smog. I’ve written of that mood in which I turn to the music and then that mood to which it attunes me. What of the songs themselves – their intimacy, their movement? What of the songs in which hope is possible and there is laughter and not laughter just at the inevitable downturn (‘Natural Decline’)?

Vague impression: there is comfort in the singing of Smog’s songs – in the singing of his narrators – at being able to sing them. As if a right has been won and a score settled. In the last reckoning, there was the song which records what happened, which witnesses it. So it is with a song like ‘Rock Bottom Diver’ from the new album, which is already a song of survival. The child, seeing a gold ring, leaps from the riverbank into the river. Upon what does he seize? Perhaps only the golden flakes of the reflected sun.

He takes leave of his family and he plunges; but then his parents, his sister, retrieve him again. But was there a gold ring, and was there a river? Was the plunge not a figure for the great fall from the world, the fall into addiction (‘The Bowery’), the fall from the plane of the everyday? Then it is a song of thankfulness – the one who fell was rescued. He is rescued (he rescues himself) and carries with him a kind of wisdom. He has touched bottom, as they say. There was no lower place; he looked. He was there and then turned and swam up to the light. The light of the sun as it dazzled across the water.

‘And from the bottom of the river/ I looked up for the sun/ which had shattered in the water/ and the pieces were raining down down/ Like gold rings that passed through my hands/ As I thrashed and I grabbed/ I started rising rising’.

And what of the song with the fancy title ‘Psalimpsest’? Great melancholy lightly sung, the song not a plunge into melancholy so much as its steady confirmation. The sense that it could only been thus, that there was never any choice. ‘Why is everyone looking at me/ as though something were fundamentally wrong?’ – that word ‘fundamentally’ stretched out – ‘like I’m a Southern bird/ that stayed North too long’. And then, ‘Winter exposes the nests/ and I’m gone’. Ah, but there is the song that allowed the narrator to mark his despair. There is the great beauty of the song in its brevity and its sweetness.

The third great song is the second one, with its strange title, ‘Say Valley Maker’. Song of passing down a river, song of the bliss of this passing marked by the singer’s entreaty that if it should stop flowing then he is to be buried and will be reborn:

‘Bury me in wood and I will splinter/ Bury me in stone and I will quake/ Bury me in water and I will geyser/ bury me in fire and I’m going to phoenix’.

That rebirth is the song, the beauty of the incident recalled in song, even as it happened nowhere else. There is always that comfort with Smog: despair can be marked, it gives itself to be sung, it looks to clothe itself in a voice and a music.

Up goes the death count in London. Rising, too, the death count everywhere else. Lives in obscurity, lives unrecorded. The comfort, the non-comfort of Smog: recorded despair. Music which resonates with the despair of the world.

Bill Callahan has learnt not to rush songwriting. If it happens, it happens. Meanwhile, he’s got living to do. He drives from gig to gig, his guitar on the back seat. His favourite guitar was stolen once, but Bill Callahan regarded this as a liberation. ‘You shouldn’t own too many things. Or be too attached to any of them’, he told himself at the time, remembering the teachings of the Buddha. Oh, Bill Callahan is no Buddhist, but there’s some truth in Buddhism, he often thinks to himself. Besides, he likes the idea of living his life according a code. His code, which he’ll keep to himself.

Bill Callahan finds himself in an unfamiliar town. He’s playing a gig tonight, but there are a few hours to spare. He phones the venue. Yes, everything’s okay. They’re ready for him. Bill Callahan drinks his Heineken. He’s long since given up carrying a notebook with him to catch ideas for his lyrics. Still, he likes to sit and be still sometimes, to see what ideas come to him. The barman has brought him his snack. ‘Are you sure it’s vegetarian?’ Bill Callahan asks. Yes, it’s vegetarian; this is the West Coast, so he can trust them. They’ve heard of vegetarians here.

Now Bill Callahan is thinking about horses. He likes to write about horses, but he doesn’t take it lightly. It’s a serious business, writing about horses. Right now, the expression ‘let me see the colts’ is going through his head. It’s a name of a song he’s been working on oh for a couple of years. ‘Let me See the Colts’, that’s what it’ll be called, when he finishes it. He doesn’t take it lightly. It’ll be a serious song; one to end an album with, perhaps.

Bill remembers a story his sister told him about when she used to look after horses. One day, she said, she went into the stable and found the two horses she looked for lying down, one on one side of the stable, one on the other. In the middle, there was the donkey standing upright, not knowing what to do.

Then, the miracle; a phrase comes to Bill Callahan: ‘there’s nothing as still as sleeping horses’. Yes, that was the phrase Bill Callahan had been looking for. ‘There’s nothing as still …’ he wonders whether this is true. Has he ever seen a sleeping horse? He thought they only slept standing up. But no, thinking about it, he has seen horses sitting down, their long legs folded up. ‘There’s nothing as still as sleeping horses’: yes, this is the lyric he was looking for. Now he feels the song is complete. He’ll try it out later, after the gig.

Drag City would like Bill Callahan behind the new Smog release. ‘Come on Bill,’ they say to him, ‘promote it. Do some interviews. Do an overview of all your albums for Uncut. Do a new photoshoot. Keep an online touring journal.’ But Bill Callahan has his eyes closed and he is dreaming. And when Bill Callahan rises, it will be to turn his old car out of the Motel and on to the Freeway. Bill Callahan is a stranger to the world and to himself. This is how he likes it. The landscape rushes by. Bill Callahan, eyes open, is dreaming.

One might trace the same play of forces I tried to identify in the music of Cat Power in that associated with Will Oldham. Once again a music has sometimes joined itself to the individual who bears the name Will Oldham, but has done so in a way which must make him uncomfortable. I have written before of my admiration for the way he allows the name under which he records and performs to change; this is impressive: it indicates a great modesty before the work. But another manifestation of this same discomfort is manifest in the incautious remarks he makes about Bill Callahan – remarks he should avoid all the more because he knows what it is to become the locus of a terrible and wondrous birth: that if Bill Callahan needs to withdraw Will Oldham above all should understand the necessity of that withdrawal and the strength it gives the music of (Smog).

And then there are the remarks in interviews in suchlike where Will Oldham will speak of his admiration of Beatty’s film Heaven Can Wait or the film trilogy Lord of the Rings. Why this desire to appear normal? And why is this desire already a parody of itself, which does it laugh at the parody Will Oldham makes of himself when he pretends to be a ‘regular guy’. But these are, once again, a sign of an embrassment before the work, which is to say, the movements which traverse him and the others with whom he records (his recordings are a work of friendship). Compare him to Tarkovsky, who is more comfortable assuming the mantle of artist-prophet. But then Russia has a place for such artists (Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky …) – we do not.

Then there is a temptation to account for oneself, as Will Oldham did some silly writings recently published in The Observer about the genesis of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (I’ll put in proper links here soon). No explanations are necessary, and I think Will Oldham also knows this, which is why he scatters his recordings over different formats, collaborations and (now) rerecordings, which I have yet to hear. Yes, Will Oldham knows this and this knowledge sits uneasily alongside his public persona, the masks he wears because he is a singer and performer of great magnitude. These masks are not a sign of actorly self-indulgence but of the singular demand to which he has always responded (a response which splinters itself, which necessitates disarray, fragmentation …)

Nevertheless, writing this, I think to myself: I love Bill Callahan more. This is silly – why, after all, should one need to choose between one genius and another? Isn’t it enough that we have two such individuals? Isn’t it a great gift to think: these are my contemporaries? Nevertheless, when I think of (Smog), and particularly an album like Rain on Lens, which is always underappreciated, I think of words like truth and absolute. How spurious! And yet this music is driven, it is pushed out of itself according to some great and awesome force. It is driven, it drives itself – this is a music of a terrible urgency (a music of fragments, to be sure, but ones which are as if magnetised in the same direction; they do not point everywhere, which is what, perhaps, they do with Will Oldham). Bill Callahan is not a virtuoso – and that is his magnificence. In him, there is a need to write, to sing, to perform which is absolute. I will write, without justifying this claim, that the continuity from album to album, from song to song with Bill Callahan springs out of a source that will not permit him to wear a mask. When I think of Bill Callahan’s face I think of a void, the night, darkness without stars.

[repost]

Write, try to write – the daily drama. And so much to write, but wasn’t that always the case? I have a simple admiration of those who work, for whom work, writing, is a necessity. From whom words must come, even if words are impossible. Wait until they come. Like Bill Callahan in a rented apartment.

It is necessary: isolate yourself until there is only waiting. Until all you are is waiting. Waiting waits in your place. And then, one day, it may come, it may not, but it may be possible to write one passage or another.

There is Bill Callahan in an anonymous apartment in an anonymous Midwest town. Writing ‘River Guard’. Writing in the afternoon, in the morning. Everyone else is going about their business in the everyday. Bill Callahan has let the everyday enter his heart. It is turning there. It speaks to him. It speaks dispersal. Now Bill Callahan is the stranger he wanted to be. And it is as a stranger he sings. And it is as strangers that we meet his songs.

Dispersal. Will Oldham surrounds himself with friends. He records with friends, friendship is the sign under which his work his realised. But Bill Callahan is alone, even when he is with friends. This is because it is fate to him, his music. A solitary fate. He tours with his guitar, just him, and his songs. He sings out of his experiences of the vast space between the walls of an apartment. He sings from the experience of watching dust motes drift in the empty air. Of diffuse light as it falls on everything. He withstands the great but even pressure of this light. He bears what the rest of us do not know we bear. He treats himself without mercy. It is inevitable: it is necessary to write, to sing. ‘It is necessary to travel’, Burroughs liked to say, ‘not to live’.

The last lines of ‘River Guard’ allow Bill Callahan to speak of driving alone. To the highest place. Watching the wind in the trees. Alone, high up, absolute. Think of the opening scene of Donnie Darko. Understand that incredible solitude which is born of the need of the work in you. A need which can only be spoken of in the infinitive. To write. To sing. Until Bill Callahan is no one but an occasion for the event which resonates through him as he knows it resonates through the whole universe. As though he resembled Pythagoras for whom the universe was a great song and a great roaring which no one could hear. The spheres in which stars and planets were encased turned in great circles, said Pythagoras. And as they turned they made a great roaring music. And that music permeated everything, saturating every atom. Until every atom danced.

Bill Callahan is alone, it is late. He’s alone with his four track. He has been out for a drive, he’s returned. He’s full of the night. The wind blows through him. He is not a man but a night. Now it is time to sing. The song speaks through him. It is the night speaking. It is the great roaring behind the night. It is what Van Gogh saw when he painted ‘A Starry Night’.

You have to be alone, very alone to see what Bill Callahan saw. So alone that you are no longer there. Lonely even for yourself, for the one you once were. No-one speaks, no-one writes. Sometimes Bill Callahan thinks: it is God. But he knows it is not God. He knows there is a great gift, a great giving, but it is in the gift of no one. Giving gives. No formulation suits it. Better to think of it as a resonance, a drone.

I can hear this drone on The Doctor Came at Dawn. It is there in ‘Spread Your Bloody Wings’ and at the beginning of ‘Carmelite Light’. One day I will have to explain why it is there in My Bloody Valentine and Slint (the latter have reformed and are curating All Tomorrow’s Parties, Camber Sands. See you there.)

He moves from town to town, renting this apartment and then that; he stays in, playing his guitar, writing, putting songs together, painting, working on his novel. He wants to be a stranger (Deleuze would say: to become imperceptible. They called Burroughs El hombre invisible, didn’t they? (see them before they see you. Avoid them)). He tours; he plays in bare feet, if he is happy, you can see it, but if he is not, he will not hide that, either.

Bill Callahan: I have heard the new songs he’s playing on his new tour, which are as fine as everything he has done. I won’t try, in a few lines, to invoke them. Sometimes I dream of writing a short book on Smog – for, say, the new series on albums from Continuum Press (I would write on The Doctor Came at Dawn, which is an album I like to say is absolute, that is, it has no relation to anything else). Yes, a short book, to get away from anything academic (the poison of the academy, which kills anything it touches): limpid, resonant …

Derrida always said you must incorporate the signature of what you write on in your own signature. That’s why he is critical, in a recent book of interviews, of Deleuze, Foucault, even Lyotard: none of them, he seems to say, takes the written risks that he takes. Except Lacan. And it is Lacan he acknowledges (but Derrida is in conversation with a psychoanalyst). So a book on Smog would have to be Smoglike and Bill Callahan’s signature would have to sing in my own. My words would have to sing with his voice, resonating with it.

Youth, age: what is that happens with age? For myself, the awareness of a melancholy which affirms itself in its constancy the less I find reason to complain. It surprises me: perhaps it is what is called a temperament, a kind of fate.

Presence of a mood like the low noise in David Lynch films. Darkness against which the bright things of the world stand out and which stands more darkly behind the things of the night. It matters only because it surprises me, because it seems like fate and because of that response to artworks, to events which attune me to what I must take to reveal the truth of the world. Smog’s The Doctor Came at Dawn is one such artwork. Does it offer consolation? No: it seems to speak truth, to speak from truth, to present the simplicity of things.

Simplicity: at these times, at the eye of melancholy, pure calmness. Carried on the great movement of the world, at its pace. With a knowledge that is as it were steered by this movement. I listen and think: this is how things are. By this I don’t refer to the lyrics of this song or that, but to a kind of drone I hear in these songs. A resonance which resounds with what is deep and true in the world.

What do I hear? The voice that is sung against this resonance. That will occasionally resonate with it. That sings with a tone that arises from the same depth, but slightly offset from it, so that it can be heard in its distinctiveness above the instruments. That baritone. And behind it, the pulsing that one hears so often in Songs by Smog (think of ‘The Morning Paper’ or a new song, ‘A Southern Bird’) …

A melancholic’s truth? No: a truth which speaks itself from the heart of a mood. Which would resound in a different way in a song of joy, or would speak itself in another way in a song of lament. But Bill Callahan does not sing to mourn. The music of Smog is affirmative, his voice, the music let speak what Kafka calls a merciful surplus of strength. Strength which is given through melancholy and struggles from it into a kind of joy.

Why did Smog become (Smog) with Rain on Lens? Why put parentheses around a name? Out of discretion. The word, for Bill Callahan, is a word too many. The name is too imposing, too forceful. Isn’t this suspension – withholding, through parenthesis, the movement that would see this word take its place among other words – only a sleight of hand? Perhaps Bill Callahan is signalling to us that the name risks getting in the way – that Smog have become too imposing, that they are linked to a style. It is necessary to become minor again, to deviate, to rediscover a movement which has no coherence or identity in itself. And then to begin anew, as if from nothing. Remember the Japanese poets who, upon achieving fame in a particular place, would change their name and go elsewhere.

The words, the wisp of melody are born out of the drone as out of a primordial reverberation, the birth and rebirth of the world. The drone calls them back, too, even as it attunes them in the song – even as these words resonate with a deeper resonance. And this is the glory of Smog: the ‘content’ of the song answers to the profundity of its birth; the simplicity of the music – a few notes, repeated – lets be the unfolding and refolding, the pulse, of its source. Where does the song come from? Bill Callahan? The words issue out of the reverberation that is there before everything. They repeat the cosmogony by which everything becomes present. The tenacity of Smog (the greatness of an album like The Doctor Came at Dawn): drawing music again and again to the source.

Bergman complains more than once that Tarkovsky makes only Tarkovsky films – this is true, of course, but what’s the problem? None for those of us who rather like the idea of the exacerbation of a particular style – of a stream of artworks allowing an artist to construct a self-contained world. Take the gorgeous rewrite of Duras’s The Lover. The Lover from North China, published six or seven years later, is more fragmented, bitty, and the characters act in a manner which is – let us say – implausible. Particularly moving is the introduction of the servant boy, Thanh, who, if memory serves, is the dedicatee of the book. Everyone is always weeping. And everyone is in love with the younger brother – this is marvellous I think. And there are more silences than ever.

There’s a good blog in here somewhere, if only I was sober enough to write it. Here is my point in rough, unsubstantiated outline: the exacerbation and rarefaction of a style foregrounds, in the work, both the artificiality and self-sufficiency of the artist’s world and the kind of substrate of that world. A substrate? That word is not right – I am thinking of the materiality, of an absolute density that makes itself present when the work presses itself towards an experience which dissolves its protagonists, its verisimilitude, its attempt to present a real or convincing world. How clumsily I am expressing myself! I will have come to back to this another day.

Few works can endure the attraction to this black star. Let me say, very simply, but also in a way that is entirely unsubstantiated, that Smog’s The Doctor Came at Dawn is the great artwork which comes closest to dissolution. Do not tell me it is mannered or monotonous. The greatness of this album is the way it endures absolute breakdown and sustains itself by enduring the terrible gravitational force which threatens to tear it apart. It is an argument which few would agree with, but I think Rain on Lens bears witness to the same threat. This is a tenacious album – some find it monochrome – but that is what allows it to draw close to breakdown and survive.

What is great, utterly great, about Bill Callahan, is the way in which he imposes a tone upon silence, the way he allows it to resound in his work, in particular, in the strange drone you can discern on some of the tracks on The Doctor Came at Dawn. His music, because it is simple – and what a great struggle it must be to maintain and endure this great simplicity –, forms a kind of echo chamber. What resounds there? Somewhat pompously, I hear truth. Yes, truth is always the world I associate with The Doctor Came at Dawn. Not because it accurately represents the world, or corresponds to it; not even because it holds together as a self-enclosed suite, with perfect coherence, but because it lets breathe – but is it a breath or a death-rattle? – a murmuring outside words and a sonority outside music. As if it is attuned to the origin of the world, when nothing had yet emerged from darkness. As if songs themselves were a seismograph attuned to the great but distant movement of the earth.