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September 14, 2020
Kathe Koja's Playlist for Her Novel "The Cipher"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Kathe Koja's novel The Cipher is chilling and original literary horror.
In her own words, here is Kathe Koja's Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Cipher:
Walk-on songs, theme songs, character songs: these were on my mind as I assembled the playlist for my novel The Cipher. Every main character, including the reader, gets a song. And darkness is the linking feeling, not flamboyant creepy midnight but the dark that hides the heart from itself, the grey lies the eyes tell when we don’t want what is true to be true, the shadows that fear finds in every corner, whether there’s a monster there or not; or a Funhole.
The Funhole itself is extremely dark.
CocoRosie – “Werewolf”/ for Nakota
The singsong timeless ache of this beautiful CocoRosie song echoes the barbed wire fragility of Nakota, Nakota who is also Jane, who is also Shrike, who has other names we will never hear or know. Maybe one of them is Werewolf, maybe someone once saw her in the light of some other moon. The beast’s heart is, after all, much purer than the human’s.
Beck – “Loser”/ for Nicholas
I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you, well, you know. The ultimate shrug tune.
BlackBird – “Howl” and “Time To Go”/ for Nakota and Nicholas
A couples’ dance for two people who should never have been a couple, the emotional intersection of Nicholas and Nakota creates almost as much chaos and dread as the Funhole itself. The hypnotic, lurching drone of “Time To Go” finds its mirror in the increasing vortex rotation of “Howl,” where the narrator confides to the listener that he has to keep his “arms around her so she don’t hurt herself.”
This pair of songs from the wonderful and much-missed Tony and Chip Kinman’s project BlackBird were in heavy rotation when I was first writing Cipher.
Camper Van Beethoven – “She Divines Water”/ for Nicholas and Nakota
Couples’ dance #2. One of these people sees the other one with almost terrifying clarity: warts, faults, hungers, and all. And the other one sees nothing at all.
“When I lie next to you I shiver and shake/Tell me you love me, I dream I’m awake.”
Rheostatics – “Record Body Count”/ for Randy
“The water was not that deep, but I almost drowned there.” Straightforward as a greasy sneaker print on a concrete floor, Randy takes no time at all to get to the point, whether that point is a sharp and rusty sculpture or the escalating madness of a culty crowd; and neither do the Rheostatics. “You can drown in a bathtub.” Even if you don’t mean to. Even if you’re trying really hard not to.
Mimi Goese – “Black Hole Sun”/ for Vanese
Vanese is Cipher’s compassionate moral center, offering help even though nothing can help, as well as being the most intelligent person involved, adept at reading the signs of doom large and small. Mimi Goese’s cover of Soundgarden’s classic turns the song completely inside out, floats it like a feather over the abyss, until it finally, inevitably, comes to a stop.
Iggy Pop – “The Passenger”/ for Malcolm
Iggy’s flat affect vocal is the equivalent of a glassy stare—“I stay under glass, I look through my window”—ironic observation being the assumed prerogative of the critic and the scenester, walled off, able to look at anything at all without becoming personally involved. Or affected. Or transformed.
Pixies – “Down to the Well”/ for everybody else
A deliberate song for a deliberate action: everybody who follows Nicholas chooses to be there, to continue to be there, to surround that hole of unknowable depth and watch the unwatchable video and stare at the face on the wall that stares back. “I can hardly wait till we go down to the well.” How many of them came up again? Whose fault is that?
Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians – “A Globe of Frogs”/ for the reader
“Ain’t you never seen a disembodied soul before?” Have you ever seen something really strange, so strange that at first it doesn’t seem strange at all, as if you must be able to define what it is—but you realize that you don’t know, you can’t know, you can’t stop looking, even though you want to? Robyn Hitchcock and the excellent Egyptians distilled that Funhole feeling in this song; Robyn Hitchcock is very skillful at making you look at things you would rather not ever see. A close second choice for this selection was his “Sleeping with Your Devil Mask.”
Scott Walker – “Darkness”/ for the Funhole itself
If you were locked into that dusty little storeroom, you might hear something like Scott Walker’s unforgettable lamentation, and the shout of those answering voices, and that tiny insinuating tambourine. “Charcoal sky will never come down.” Until you heard something else. And something else again.
Kathe Koja writes novels and short fiction, and creates and produces immersive fiction performances, both solo and with a rotating ensemble of artists. Her work crosses and combines genres, and her books have won awards, been multiply translated, and optioned for film and performance. She is based in Detroit and thinks globally. She can be found at kathekoja.com.
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