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October 30, 2020
Michael P. Daley's Playlist for the Anthology "Echoes of a Natural World"
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.
The anthology Echoes of a Natural World is a surreal and uncanny collection of new stories mixed with newly translated French classics.
Maryse Meijer wrote of the book:
"Obscure, hilarious, profane, and human, Echoes of a Natural World brilliantly juxtaposes fresh oddities with classic gems of French literature. Speaking from the margins of fiction, but never marginal, each piece in this collection affirms that great, weird writing never goes out of style."
In his words, here is Michael P. Daley's Book Notes music playlist for the anthology Echoes of a Natural World:\
There was a time when music was inextricable from my writing. That time is no more. But back then, around the age of 23, I would play music, mostly exotica, and try to channel the images that emerged in sound. Since then I’ve come to regard writing and music as totally separate aesthetic experiences, each bound to their own languages and sensations. And yet, maybe there are secret truths that all artistic works point to but can never fully iterate or encompass. So, when I was asked to make some notes on music related to my most recent book, Echoes of a Natural World: Tales of the Strange & Estranged—a collection of short weird tales by different authors—I kind of thought about it in that way. That is, not as direct musical corollaries to the book, but rather—a free association between words and jams within a simpatico, if not random, vibe.
And what are the themes of Echoes of a Natural World? Well, superficially “Nature.” Less superficially, human perceptions of “Nature.” And more broadly, the authors, in their own way, each discuss how the human mind might bring a lot of baggage everywhere humans go and how that might distort what is often considered to be immutable or eternal or, well, Natural. In other words, our expectations do not always jibe with reality, and sometimes mental realities reorder physical reality in subtle ways and vice versa. Echoes of a Natural World relays tales about that nebulous natural zone then, where the outer landscape meshes with the inner plane.
On a literal level, “Black Mountain” by Arve Henriksen on Strjon and “Rocky Mountains” by Wendy Carlos & Rachel Elkind from The Shining come to mind as favorite pieces of music. Obviously, both are conjuring up mountain visions with their titles, but they also, musically, have a dark, rising quality that creates an overwhelmed sense in the listener—kind of like the sprawling incomprehensibility of the natural world.
And while The Shining is pretty 101, “Rocky Mountains” doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Rather, people tend to focus on other soundtrack entries, like the in-your-face dissonance of Bartok. But what attracts me to this Carlos & Elkind piece is the restrained but deep sense of atmospheric foreboding—it encapsulates the anticipation of a still unknown outcome. When the piece plays at the opening of The Shining film, nothing has happened yet. But that fomenting, the promise of electrifying revelation or the possibility of touching something cosmic or satanic or otherwise out of reach to the workaday rationalist can be more powerful than the promise actually fulfilled.
Two influential books that really nail the atmospheric, anticipatory aspect are M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud and William Hope Hodgson’s House on the Borderland. In Shiel’s book—an early “Last Man” narrative in which a toxic purple gas is released from the arctic and seems to have killed everyone on earth except the narrator—the most powerful part is not the eponymous apocalyptic moment or the subsequent traversing of empty cities of the dead. Rather, my favorite moments are pre-apocalypse, where the depressive narrator emits this deep sense that something terrible is about to happen—that fate, or some hidden physic is controlling his life’s trajectory. Likewise, Hodgson’s famous novel really nails anticipation within the frame text that encompasses the meat of the book. And when it comes to Mark Iosifescu’s story in Echoes of a Natural World, this foreboding is very much central to the whole tale—the protagonist is haunted by this sense that something is off, but he can neither shake it nor define its meaning.
So, you could say that atmosphere is crucial. And Lovecraft probably said it best: “Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation.” The premium people place on “story” these days is one of the ultimate perversities of the modern era.
My next random thought goes to the first time I heard “Stranger In Paradise” by Tony Bennett (originally from the musical Kismet). I was 17 and had taken a summer job as a janitor at my Catholic high school. But the managers had over-hired and they couldn’t keep track of all these unskilled teenage janitors and so me and my pal would punch-in for the day and then slip off for what became a Ferris Bueller’s Day Off situation but for an entire summer. We did stuff like paint murals along the breaker rocks of the South Shore, take naps in parks, eat cheeseburgers, and frequent a lot of cultural institutions. One museum visit changed the course of my life in some way—a dual exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center. One of these exhibits was on outsider art (Henry Darger, Adolf Wölfli etc.). The other was on inflatable art. The outsider art blew me away and reordered my teenage sense of beauty right there on the floor. The inflatable art (stuff like Warhol’s balloons) I thought was just unbearably lame in the way that scene art tends to be. But in the back corner of the inflatable gallery, there was a video that juxtaposed outer-space scenes and floating, neon geometric shapes with the croons of Tony Bennett’s “Stranger in Paradise.” I was transfixed. These psychedelic visuals had finally properly contextualized the “old-school” crooner music that followed me around in the suburbs, in Southwest side Italian restaurants and in my grandpa’s black Cadillac. And as a result, “Stranger in Paradise,” recontextualized, had suddenly imbued the once-dull Midwest strip malls and elderly BluBlocker types with an immense magic and haunting. This music became the sound of new worlds opening up—but they were old worlds too, time as neither a strange loop nor a flat circle, but something not so measurable. This is all a potentially unrelated tangent, but there’s a bit of this setting in my story “Concerning the Discovery, Taxonomic Implications, & Initial Impressions of a Whispering Mold.”
This calls to mind, asymmetrically, “Lunar Rhapsody” by Les Baxter from Music Out of the Moon. It’s an early effort from the later well-known exotica composer. In this case, he is working with, on one hand, traditional orchestral sounds and, on the other, otherworldly wordless vocalists and a theremin. There is a real tension within the piece, where the music both contains recognizable, gauzy cocktail piano but is also threaded with just wild sounds that are apparently supposed to embody outer space but more acutely reference that inner space of dreams. And what really blows me away about this music—besides the immediacy of the music itself—is that it came out in 1947. Popular culture has led us to believe that things only really got “psychedelic” and interesting, musically or otherwise, in the late 1960s—probably because the hippie-turned-neoliberal-consumer was exceedingly talented in zero-sum nostalgia-brokering. But then you listen to music like “Lunar Rhapsody” and imagine a WWII veteran farmer tuning in on his radio one night and hearing these sounds to which he has no prior context—sounds that are so “far-out” that they form a liminal experience—that somehow, a schmaltzy space age rhapsody speaks closer to the truth of fantasies and atomic bombs and memory than anything he’s heard before. And then, maybe, you realize there’s been this weird current all along throughout history and that the best art (no matter what medium) tends to tap into this eternity in one way or another, coded in its own contextual references of the day. In a broad way, this is what the scholar, and Echoes of a Natural World translator, Sam Kunkel focuses on when he studies 19th century Orphic literature—fiction as a route to that eternal zone. Henry Miller, in a letter about surrealism to Lawrence Durrell, said something along these lines too, that surrealism was just one iteration of an attempt to merge with that universally elusive dream. But in regard to Kunkel’s translations, Marcel Schwob’s “Lucretius, Poet” and Joris-Karl Huysmans’ “Hues of Red,” in particular, touch upon the liminal in an explicit manner.
Fever Queen’s “I’m Sorry,” an interlude from The World of Fever Queen (released on First To Knock earlier this year) also harnesses that deep-spaced golden age tone (in this case covering Brenda Lee) in the form of a cosmic belter. The angelic harmonizing balances the threnody atop carnivalesque keys and down-turning synths. Really, the brief piece inverts an age-old tune into a mystical passage.
All this monologizing on Tony Bennett, cosmic preoccupations, and atmosphere leads to another exceptional area of musical endeavor: the crooner on a spiritual trip. “Leaf” by Arcesia from Reachin’ Arcesia is one of the ultimates in this regard. The album—which I first heard about via Paul Major—is a freeform psychedelic lounge experience that has so much raw immediacy it’s hard to digest sometimes. The singer, better known as Johnny Arcesi, was a big band guy that apparently got “turned on” during the counterculture years. Furthering the tenuous connection to Echoes of a Natural World, Arcesia riffs hard on nature metaphors—not only in the beautiful lament on ephemerality, “Leaf,” but also on “White Panther” and “Butterfly Mind.” This is a well-known “cult” entry among record collectors, featured in the must-own book Incredibly Strange Music and so on. Some listeners poke fun at it, even in a loving way, because Arcesia is so emotionally open that polished technique can’t always keep up. But that same rawness is what makes it a perfect piece of musical expression—its force is undeniable. In a way, Dan A. Stitzer’s 1917 story “The Occult Hand” does a little bit of this for me in Echoes of a Natural World—not that it’s super emotional, but it is earnest in such a way that it is a bit discomforting and hard to pin down at first.
Another great couple cuts, when it comes to spiritualized crooner vibes, are “Nature Boy” into “Oh My Brothers of the Earth” by Herb Jeffries on Echoes of Eternity. The tacky yet ethereal airbrushed jacket art alone is transcendent, but the music slaloms back and forth along that rarely crossed border separating the tumescent tough guy lounge lizard and the back-to-the-earth softie. Jeffries executes it all in a way that illustrates we have a thousand lives within each of us and that it is the combination of personas and beliefs that is more interesting than any fixed sense of self.
But speaking of “Nature Boy,” the composer of the song, Eden Ahbez, is a hero in my book—particularly when it comes to his song “Full Moon” from Eden’s Island. This piece is a romanticized vision of a solitary life with nature. He says: To surf and comb the beach / And gather sea shells and drift-wood / And know the thrill of loneliness / And lose all sense of time / And be free. While Ahbez was a proto-hippie who did actually live in nature, I read his lyrics within the song as purely speculative—it’s what he would do and thus the vision of back-to-nature in “Full Moon” is completely unmarred by harsh realities. But even though it is romanticized, it is beautiful because of its anticipation, its desire for perfection and oneness with nature. This is a historical trend obviously throughout human civilizations. We invest our desire for spiritual freedom into nature—that, if only we could get back to that state of grace, the natural state, we could dream the dream that the dreamers dream, as Ahbez writes. Almost all of the stories in Echoes of a Natural World also address these human expectations of perfection and redemption in nature in some form or another, but unlike Ahbez, the stories largely undermine those romantic expectations with a darker reality. Jean Lorrain’s “The Toad” and Julia Bembenek’s “Stolen Peaches” in Echoes of a Natural World are both great illustrations of this divergence in the expectation-versus-reality dilemma. One step further, Janice Law’s story, “Little Brother,” explores what happens when humans try to control nature itself.
Mystical participation, or oneness with nature, as a concept flows nicely into “I Am a Peach Tree” by Harry Partch from 17 Lyrics of Li Po. Like Eden Ahbez, Harry Partch is another household name within households of a certain proclivity. Partch, like Captain Beefheart, sometimes gets ragged on these days as a “try-hard” in certain suspect internet corners. But Partch was ambitious and odd and original and is one of the few that successfully fuses American working class, beat/hobo, and “everyday” aesthetics with the otherworldly, absurd, classical, and cosmic element. That fusion of industrial America and psychic America, in its own way, I think plays out in certain stories of Echoes, like Lou Perliss’ “Underground,” Mark Iosifescu’s “Journey to the Ills,” and again maybe my own story “…Impressions of a Whispering Mold.” There’s a volatile goofball element in Partch too—a kind of danger but playfulness—that is present in Jeremy Kitchen’s “The Legend of Day-Glo Maria.” More literally, I think of Julia Bembenek’s “Stolen Peaches.” And while, Bembenek’s story doesn’t anthropomorphize peach trees like Partch, both works speak to a deeper peachy essence than meets the eye—that, within a peach tree, there can be an entire world.
And lastly, I should mention that we fine people over at First To Knock have a more overt musical connection to Echoes of a Natural World. We pressed up a limited edition translucent green flexi-disc record as part of a special pre-order package. The music on said flexi is “CCCZA Organism Report: Whisper Mold” by Augustus Muller, the incredibly talented and visionary composer/producer of the darkwave duo Boy Harsher (along with Jae Matthews). Muller’s piece is a kind of musical interpretation of my story “…Impressions of a Whispering Mold,” but like any good reinterpretation it forges out into its own territory and stands alone. Real lush dark synth waves are undergirded by nervous arpeggiations and collaged whispers. It’s a brief track but one that just nails atmosphere in the way a few electronic greats of yesteryear (mostly Germans) have been able to do. By the time you read this, the flexis might be gone, but I hope for your sake that ain’t the case.
Michael P. Daley is a writer and cultural historian. Daley’s work concerns politics, subcultures, crime, and art. His writing has appeared in publications by Anthology Editions, Sinecure Books, Pleasure Editions, Boo-Hooray, Frank151, Challenger, and his own imprint First To Knock. He is a former counterculture archivist and political news editor.
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