Long cords of milk unravel through water
Pale Ribbons Tossed into the Dark, the band of Djuna Lee, Jameson Feakes, and myself, are releasing our debut album 17 November at the Bird in Boorloo/Perth, with special guests Lia T & Stina and Steve Paraskos. The Bandcamp preorder is here — we are selling CDs too. I hope you come along if you’re around, and I hope you like the album.
It took about four years to make it — three if you write off this year, as it’s sat, idling, in our downloads folders since February, unbothered by the demands of culture. That’s afforded me luxurious time to sit with it, tease out the allegories of its production, speculate on what this machine does before it becomes content. I suppose it’s on-brand of me to start by hedging my bets: debut albums never have it all worked out, and I think this points to better things while not quite reaching them. But it’s still pretty strong. Our live shows are getting better and we’re having good ideas for LP2. But this is about LP1, Pale Ribbons Tossed into the Dark. What follows is mostly autobiography and dry aesthetic analysis, in the mold of Anne Boyer’s advice to “reconstruct… your own previous errors of thought and elucidate… what factors lead to a changed mind.” I co-founded the project with a precise critical agenda in mind, and by the end it was a footnote in a project that was altogether less questioning. I thought it represented something, but it might be better if it doesn’t, and even then, I care more for the social context of this album than the ideas it presents. How many other aesthetic quandaries might be resolved by the cliché that the real treasure is the friends we made along the way?
For a long time prior to this I’d built my music practice to resemble media critique. The media, tools, instruments, and technologies used to make culture are, borrowing Tobi Haslett, “shot through with violent antagonisms,” and these are encoded in all aspects of cultural life, including music production. Building a compositional practice that highlights or challenges these frictions can thus impart some political intent on forms that have traditionally recused themselves from having to represent anything with material or ideological precision, such as instrumental music. It’s making music about making music, an attempt to symbolically align musical process and ethical, critical engagement with the world. Good practice as good praxis in microcosm. This approach gave me a clear sense of purpose, an avant-garde whose geometry was clear enough to know where I was running to and whom I was running from. Making compelling music in this context was a challenge that motivated me for years.
It started while researching DAWs. The dearth of thoughtful DAW criticism that wasn’t blank dismissal or wilful ignorance seemed an opportunity to put my music to work. I read widely for concepts that resonated with DAW-based composition, the DAW’s interface, and broader spheres of digital cultural production. I’d then work in the DAW to amplify those resonances, which inevitably fed back into what theory I needed to read or develop next. I kept up this cycle for three years or so, and released Thru in 2017 as a crystallisation of this method.
Afterward, I’d felt lacking in my musical life, corresponding to all the things DAWs inhibited: I missed meaningful live performance, improvisation, collaboration without hierarchy, immanence. I wanted to continue this programme of composition as media critique with a medium that fulfilled these traits, so I took a gamble and bought a Roland stage piano, the kind with thousands of presets which are naff at best and culturally harmful at worst. Stage pianos are an institution of the Gigging Musician. They are workhorses for a normativity complex that is more legible to capital and cis-heteropatriarchal indices of power. They reinforce claviocentrism, the cultural logic that the piano keyboard is the best, most universal interface for musical expression. Their assimilation of so many genres of live performance seemed a necessary object of critique. It was an appealing challenge. How could this incredibly normative instrument be used in meaningfully idiosyncratic and counter-hegemonic ways, and what critiques could be made here that weren’t simply transplanted from other instrumental traditions, such as the acoustic piano?
The first few attempts at a kind of musical critique of stage pianos flopped. I played several sets in 2018 and 2019 with varied approaches. One set was a kind of psychedelic minimalism, lots of knotty arpeggios, performed in a deconstructed club music context to about eight people. Another performance riffed on the political forms of adult contemporary with tongue firmly in cheek, sampling artists like John Farnham while using presets I associated with cover bands or ageing soft-rock royalty. I did a few more maudlin sets, dense washes of notes similar to The succession of a whale carcass, albeit undercut by presets with a discomfiting artifice. I didn’t feel great about any of them. I spent a year and a half spinning claviocentric circles around myself, unable to find the right angle to cut through it.
In August 2018 I was tapped to do a duo improv set with Djuna for NoizeMaschin!!, a monthly-ish show then based in a hackerspace in the industrial suburb of Osborne Park. The conceit of this particular show, curated by Josten Myburgh, was to pair musicians who hadn’t played together before. Prior to our set, I half-heartedly suggested that we start on E, loudly, and take it from there. A previous band was quick to leave, their van squealing loudly about four minutes into our set. We both quietened down to give it its solo. The rest of the performance has this alluring and precarious quality, a nice contrast between Djuna’s tempestuous bowing and my grounding repetition on a preset that sounds lifted from a deep-cut Whitney Houston ballad. Jameson was in the audience and suggested the three of us jam together.
Sounding out the limits of stage pianos in a collaborative and social setting made much more sense than my previous solo attempts. There wasn’t much method to it. We jammed every few weeks for a year or so, recording several hours of improvisations in the garage of my share house on Loftus Street in North Perth. I’d use stage piano sounds that were thicker with connotation, tending towards 80s/90s pop ballad sounds. It was low-stakes and leisurely, like the synergies would take hours to emerge, not seconds or minutes. It was fun. I condensed the best jams into snappier pieces, we re-recorded most of them, made some new pieces out of the offcuts, and after COVID hit it took nearly two years to fill in the rest of the soundworld.
We were making pretty and unchallenging music, in spite of our pedigrees that were historically suspicious of such things. This ambivalence weighed heavily on me, like I was reneging my own musical values and experimental music writ large, the critical framework that had given my creative life meaning at risk of being discarded because it wasn’t fun enough. I carried myself with a tedious self-consciousness at times. Tracks had working titles like fromage, compliments were sharply deflected, and I doubted whether these minor-fall-major-lift progressions were capable of unusual aesthetic effects at all. I was unsure if this music refuted critique, if a compelling stage piano critique had to refute my experimental music background, or if the instrument simply had me beat.
This project of composition as media critique had become a withering feedback loop in a tiny echo chamber. Symbolically aligning practice with praxis is fine, I think, but of course it’s just that: symbols upon symbols. I’d shuttered myself in this architecture of signs because I figured it would cultivate a more meaningful connection to music, less beholden to platform metrics and quantifiable value systems. Maybe so. But it was also alienating, a repellent layer of mediation. This isn’t a unique epiphany during the COVID era. We’ve all reprioritised our wellbeing recently, and many have found that our careers, in creative practice or more gainful employment, won’t stave off anomie if they’re alienated by circumstance or design. I stopped conceiving the album as a critical project — certainly not about stage pianos — and it started becoming something more enjoyable, sociable, and agreeable to this decade’s collective decline in mental acuity.
It still felt like an abyssal leap. I’d been re-reading Doireann ní Ghríofa’s stunning essay ‘Mandible’ for years, which beautifully weaves Irish history, the author’s experience caring for her child in neonatal intensive care, and the figure of a blue whale feeding her calf. Blue whales feed their calves at a distance, she writes. Since the calf cannot attach to the mother, the mother secretes milk that is “rope-like in consistency,” while the calf swims alongside to catch it in its mouth. She invokes a devastating image: “Long cords of milk unravel through water to the calf’s mouth, pale ribbons tossed into the dark.” The ambiguity of the calf’s presence or absence, the endangerment of whales globally, the sense that the care we give might not be enough — maybe there is a sliver of metaphor for cultural production in this decade here, though I’m hesitant to be so precious.
Anecdotes like this often germinate in the public imaginary through nature documentaries that construct the pathos of their subjects by personifying them, assigning them human emotion and intent. Leo Kim writes nicely along these lines here. Soaring orchestral music is a central driver of this anthropocentric project. The track “Fable Guide” plays into this most explicitly, its corny stage piano sound evoking the materially and culturally specific baggage of this project. Most of the tracks are named with this idea in mind. I suppose you'd call this media critique, one snuck in sideways from my usual insularities.
But it's not like I'm trying to mount an argument. Lately I’ve thought of music-making as less of a vehicle for ideas and more as an excuse to think through something interesting while attending to the everyday demands of craft. It’s not formal or demanding, the way that 'concept albums' compel you to listen with a specific agenda. It's just part of the atmosphere of production, like listening to a podcast while racking up hours editing DAW automation data. Other ideas I dwelled on, apart from natural representation and stage piano aesthetics, include the metaphors of physical modelling synthesis, flat soundstages in a band context, and reifying multiple constituent temporalities rather than constructing the illusion of a singular coherent time. I haven't got much of a position on any of them though. These ideas emerged organically from the practice and I wouldn't have riffed on them in other projects. Maybe that's useful context to a small group of connoisseurs, but I’m pretty comfortable now with this stratum of music being unresolved, lower stakes, ‘inside baseball.’ Seems like a better fit. More connected to the epochal question of what we need out of music right now, as listeners and makers.
Music critic Sasha Geffen tweeted this year “idk if I think of art as good or bad anymore, I think it might be closer to ‘open or shut.’” Pale Ribbons Tossed into the Dark is an enduringly open project to me. I hope some of the above ideas cut through, but personally, they are less important to me than learning to be a more collaborative musician. Djuna and Jameson are incredible and it's a privilege to make music with them. I regret that this newsletter isn't more about their remarkable musicianship. Boorloo/Perth’s exploratory music scene has been an important part of my musical life lately, a scene I’d admired for years but hadn’t really felt part of until I learned to play better with others. Thinking locally has improved my sense of purpose. The sea is getting darker but it isn't getting lonelier.
