Sunday, August 27, 2017

Wound (for Heather Heyer) - Black Kaspar (2017)


Live at the Mammoth's small outdoor stage, Louisville KY 8/17/2017

This was, of course, the Thursday after the weekend of the Charlottesville fiasco. 

I was on the road between Traverse City and Louisville on that Saturday, and Sharri and I had stopped for some food and a beer in Grand Rapids; we learned about the shitstorm by checking our phones while we were waiting for our orders. We were horrified to find what was going down . . . by that time Heather's death had been confirmed, and the police had "a person of interest" in custody. The next day we marched with BLM down Broadway in Louisville.

Everyone still had that feeling of dread Thursday when the show rolled around (hell, as I write this, two weeks after the event, the dread still hasn't abated one bit). I toyed with going into a rant at the start of the set, but there was no point in me yelling at my friends, so I let it go. Along those same lines, I had no specific intention of reflecting the events of the time in our set, but we're improvisers: at some point, if you are honest with improv music, what is in your head is coming out. 

Our usual trio was augmented by Insect Policy's Brian Manley on bass (I wish he had been a tad more present on the recording, because he had it on lock that night). The Mammoth is an old abandoned/repurposed warehouse in a largely deserted industrial area off Broadway at 13th. We were playing on the small outdoor stage that night in support of New Orleans's Cult Wife. The outdoor stages are literally cut into overgrowth created by weed trees that had been let go for decades without culling. The paths carved out were illuminated with Christmas lights; there was lighting and small torches (oddly recalling the tiki torches of the Friday Charlottesville white supremacist march, but recontextualized) everywhere in the grove, creating an otherworld/fairieworld vibe in the low canopy. So: you roll up to the grassed over parking lot, you park, then pass by a table set up at the entrance to a two track lane that goes back into the undergrowth. When you get back in, you follow the paths cut into a close tree canopy and lit with torches and small colored lights. Well back into the grove is set a small stage.

Thunderstorms had been pounding Louisville all day Thursday, but by 8 pm the storms had moved through. What hadn't moved through, however, were the temperatures clocking in at just under 90 degrees at 100% humidity. The air was so thick that I had to take my glasses off, disorienting me even further. There was a thin layer of wet grit on the stage that I had to set my pedals and cords in to; it was so damp that I was almost sure that my amp would start acting like it was submerged in water. The simple act of setting up my equipment left me completely drenched, with water/sweat pouring off my body. At that point I decided to leave my good guitar in its case, grateful for the fact that I ponied up 40 bucks for a beater electric earlier in the summer. Jeff (the drummer) decided to set up on the ground in front of the stage: somebody had to set up in the wet grit, and it best not be people connected to sources of electricity. 

We set up quickly. Chris tuned up his guitar; in spite of the fact that I had a tuner in my abbreviated signal chain, I decided to go with a detuned guitar instead. A very brief level check on the strings (20 seconds or so), and we were off. About twenty minutes later we were done.

I don't spend a lot of time discussing politics with my bandmates, though I know where they stand. As I noted earlier, we had no intention of making a political statement, and I don't even know that it necessarily ended up being a political statement, at least not to the degree that we were MAKING A STATEMENT. Politics, however, are inescapable, and become even moreso at crisis points. And this, clearly, qualifies as a crisis point. Just living is political, and in times like this, everything political gets amplified, while the apolitical gets contextualized and mapped upon the political. The sounds we put out drew from the air, and projected back into the air. Politics is in the air; we inhaled and exhaled.

Titling improvised music is an odd task. I'm okay at it, but Jeff is better, so I'll probably be subcontracting that job out to him more in the future. In this case, though, the title seems apt to me: this is an injured howl, a raw wound radiating pain into the swamped dark of a Louisville August night. I hesitated before dedicating it to martyred Heather Heyer - such a move reeks of exploitation, even if not deliberate - but in the end, I wanted to say her name. I was also inspired by No Hate, the Wolf Eyes tribute, which (to my mind) stands as some of their very best work. They too exposed the raw wound opened by the blade of oppression, they too chose not to dance around the elephant in the room.

In the end, I believe that "Wound" is upfront about the pain, but more defined by a snarl not unlike the snarl of the anarcho-kitty that I chose as the visual representation of the song. And when it's done, it fades away into the night . . . just another howl blunted by heavy atmosphere, just another faded voice in the Louisville dark. Just another dead soldier memorialized in a manner forever inadequate.










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