Gueules Cassées - 2019 - Ypérite

 

Self Released – None

The face on the cover appears to be smiling. That is the first trap. It is not a living expression but the permanent exposure of teeth belonging to Hans Larwin’s uniformed skeleton, Death crouching behind a soldier in the 1917 painting Soldat und Tod. The album’s square crop removes most of the original composition. We no longer see clearly that the living soldier is aiming his rifle from a trench while Death kneels behind him with one hand placed upon his shoulder. Instead, Death fills the frame, helmet tilted, empty eyes directed outward, mouth fixed in an expression that can be read as delight, encouragement, mockery, or merely anatomy. A skull always appears to grin because the soft structures that distinguish joy from terror are gone. The smile remains after emotion has become impossible.
That makes the choice of image especially powerful for a project named Gueules Cassées, “broken faces.” The French expression belongs to the servicemen whose faces were shattered by bullets, shell fragments, explosions, burns, and other injuries during the First World War. The face is not simply another part of the body. It is where identity becomes visible to others, where recognition, speech, eating, affection, shame, authority, and emotion meet. A person can survive the destruction of the face while discovering that society has difficulty recognizing survival when it no longer resembles the person who departed.
The album cover reverses this history in a chilling way. Instead of showing a wounded human face, it shows Death possessing the most legible face in the picture. The soldier has been reduced to a shoulder, a section of uniform, and the implied body beneath the crop. Death receives the portrait. The human being becomes supporting scenery.
In Larwin’s complete painting, Death does not confront the soldier from across the battlefield. It does not wear the enemy’s uniform or rise from the territory being attacked. It kneels directly behind him as a companion, fellow combatant, instructor, or parasite. Its hand rests on his shoulder with disturbing familiarity. The gesture might be mistaken for encouragement were it not performed by a skeleton. Death does not need to stop the soldier from firing. It appears to approve.
This is a far more penetrating image of warfare than a conventional painting of Death swinging a scythe over armies. Death is not an external interruption of military purpose. It has been incorporated into the posture of the soldier. They look in the same direction. The rifle and skeleton form one machine, with the living body providing motion and the dead body supplying the destination. Death is not waiting at the end of the action. It is already present within the act of aiming.
The crop used for Ypérite intensifies that intimacy. We are brought so close that the skeleton almost resembles someone leaning into a photograph with a friend. The horror comes partly from this social nearness. Death has ceased to be an abstract destination and become the comrade who knows exactly where to place a hand. The soldier may not even realize it is there.
The phrase gueules cassées and the title Ypérite name two different kinds of wartime injury. One is visibly concentrated in the face. The other is dispersed through the atmosphere. Sulfur mustard transformed air, soil, clothing, equipment, and shelter into possible carriers of injury. Unlike the visible approach of a soldier or shell, chemical contamination could remain uncertain, its effects delayed while exposure had already occurred. The battlefield entered the body through breathing and contact. Environment itself became weapon.
That distinction gives the album’s combination of raw black metal and dark ambient unusual conceptual precision. Black metal can represent the visible violence of impact, attack, panic, machinery, and bodily rupture. Ambient sound is more difficult to locate. It surrounds rather than approaches. It does not stand before the listener as a discrete object but alters the conditions inside which listening occurs. One attacks the walls; the other becomes the air within the room.
“Silence” opens the record, but silence in a trench cannot be treated as simple peace. It may mean that bombardment has stopped, that an attack is being prepared, that communications have failed, or that the people who were making noise are no longer capable of doing so. Silence becomes suspense because the battlefield has trained everyone inside it to distrust absence. The lack of sound does not erase danger. It allows imagination to distribute danger everywhere.
The title also points toward the silence surrounding trauma after combat. Military history traditionally prefers movement, strategy, technology, commanders, victories, losses, and dates. The private aftermath is quieter. A damaged person returns to a society eager to resume ordinary life and discovers that experience cannot be translated into forms others can tolerate. Silence may protect the survivor from intrusive curiosity, protect the family from unbearable knowledge, or protect the nation from the consequences of its own decisions. What is not spoken does not disappear. It changes rooms.
“Un képi de sang,” “A Képi of Blood,” moves immediately toward the head. The képi identifies rank, nation, institution, and role. It is worn above the face and turns the individual into a recognizable military figure. Blood destroys that clean symbolic function. The uniform no longer represents an orderly hierarchy but absorbs evidence of the body underneath it.
A bloody cap is also a terrible condensation of modern warfare’s relationship to identity. The state provides the uniform, name, number, command structure, and official purpose. The body provides everything that can be wounded. When the head beneath the uniform is destroyed, the symbol may remain more intact than the person who wore it. The institution can issue another cap. It cannot issue another face.
“Dieu de la guerre,” “God of War,” asks where responsibility is located when destruction exceeds the scale of any single participant. War is often described as though it were a force with its own appetite, weather, logic, and momentum. This language acknowledges the feeling of being trapped inside an immense system, but it can also disguise the human decisions that constructed it. A god of war becomes convenient when no government, industry, officer, scientist, newspaper, voter, or soldier wishes to possess the whole result.
The First World War is especially vulnerable to this myth of inevitability. Its alliances, mobilization schedules, imperial competition, nationalism, military planning, fear, and assassination are often assembled into a mechanism that appears to activate itself. Yet mechanisms are built. Orders are issued by mouths, written by hands, carried by people, and obeyed by other people. Calling war a god captures its power while risking surrender to it.
The title track moves from the god to one of its sacraments. Ypérite is not merely another weapon name. It represents the industrial conversion of chemistry into atmosphere-scale suffering. A bullet travels through a visible path between weapon and body. Gas weakens that moral geometry. It drifts, settles, enters dugouts, clings to material, and crosses the distinction between front line and supposed shelter. The victim may not know precisely when the attack began or which breath carried it inside.
This invisibility changes the psychology of survival. The senses can no longer be trusted to identify the boundary of danger. Air, the substance required every few seconds to remain alive, becomes suspect. Protection requires apparatus, warnings, procedure, and faith that equipment is functioning. The soldier is asked to continue performing while one of the oldest unconscious agreements of life, that breathing sustains rather than injures, has been broken.
Black metal often uses poison, plague, and suffocation as dramatic imagery, but Ypérite needs no supernatural enlargement. Its horror comes from technical rationality. Someone studied compounds, production, storage, shells, weather, dispersal, protection, and battlefield effectiveness. The nightmare was not produced by an eruption of irrational savagery alone. It required intelligence, organization, experimentation, and administrative competence. Civilization did not temporarily disappear. Civilization concentrated.
“À l’ombre d’un arbre brisé,” “In the Shadow of a Broken Tree,” relocates the body beneath damaged nature. A tree ordinarily provides shade because it remains upright and extends living structure between the body and sun. A broken tree may still cast a shadow, but its protective symbolism has collapsed. The refuge has been wounded by the same environment from which refuge is needed.
Trees in First World War imagery often appear stripped, splintered, or reduced to black vertical remnants. They resemble bodies without becoming bodies, allowing devastated landscapes to carry physical grief without displaying human wounds directly. This can create emotional distance, but it can also reveal that industrial war does not stop at the border of the human figure. Soil is churned, roots exposed, water contaminated, animals displaced, and forests converted into fortifications, fuel, obstacles, and fragments.
To stand in the shadow of a broken tree is therefore to seek protection beneath another casualty. Human and landscape no longer occupy separate categories. Each records the force that passed through it.
“La Sainte-Gadoue,” “The Holy Mud,” turns the most despised material of trench warfare into something sacred. Mud destroys cleanliness, distinction, speed, privacy, and the fantasy that the soldier’s body can remain separate from the earth. It enters boots, clothing, food, wounds, weapons, bedding, and speech. It sticks to officers and enlisted men alike, although rank continues determining who receives the greatest exposure and least comfort.
Calling it holy is not simple irony. Sacred substances create contact between ordinary life and a larger order. Trench mud creates contact between living bodies, decaying matter, rain, waste, metal, blood, animals, and the dead. It is a terrible communion, administered without consent. The soldier carries the battlefield upon his skin and eventually inside his imagination.
Mud also frustrates the heroic image. Statues prefer clean vertical bodies, identifiable gestures, polished weapons, and permanent materials. Mud drags everything downward. It makes glory heavy. The more the soldier tries to move, the more the earth asserts itself. The holy mud is the anti-monument, a substance that remembers everyone while preserving no clear face.
“Brûlez, consommez!” can be translated as “Burn, consume!” or “Burn, use up!” The imperative belongs equally to fire, industry, appetite, and war. An industrial conflict consumes fuel, metal, forests, animals, money, labor, food, chemicals, and human time at a scale that turns individual lives into units of supply. The soldier is not only killed by the machine. He is fed into it.
The phrase also reaches forward into the way war is remembered and marketed. Historical catastrophe becomes documentary, tourism, game, film, collectible object, reenactment, music, and aesthetic atmosphere. None of these forms is automatically disrespectful. Memory requires material vessels. Yet every vessel risks converting suffering into something consumed for intensity and then abandoned once the sensation has passed.
A black-metal album devoted to the First World War cannot stand outside this problem. It transforms wounds, gas, mud, and death into imagery capable of giving pleasure, fascination, or catharsis. The question is not whether art should be forbidden from using historical suffering. The question is whether the dead and injured remain human presences within the work or become convenient texture.
Ypérite largely avoids the triumphalist imagery that would turn mass death into proof of national strength. Its titles remain close to bodily vulnerability, contaminated environments, shattered trees, mud, silence, and a date whose consequences were not visible to the people living through it. The project’s anonymity also prevents an individual performer from appearing on the front as heroic interpreter. Still, anonymity cannot guarantee ethical seriousness. It merely leaves the listener with fewer explanations and greater responsibility.
The phrase L’Esprit des Tranchées, “the spirit of the trenches,” is similarly double-edged. It may refer to solidarity among people forced into extreme proximity, the humor and mutual care that allow survival, or the altered consciousness produced by prolonged exposure to fear. It can also become a romantic myth used by later generations to imagine war as a forge of brotherhood and authenticity.
The trench certainly created forms of dependence difficult to reproduce in ordinary life. People relied upon one another for warning, food, communication, protection, rescue, and emotional endurance. Yet brotherhood does not redeem the conditions that made it necessary. Human beings can create extraordinary loyalty inside an avoidable catastrophe. The beauty of their response must not be converted into an argument for the catastrophe.
“28.6.1914” closes the album by returning to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie in Sarajevo. Ending with the date conventionally associated with the beginning reverses the normal historical movement. We have already passed through silence, blood, the war god, gas, broken nature, sacred mud, and consumption. Only then are we brought to the event from which the chain appears to begin.
This reverse construction prevents the assassination from being experienced as a clean opening scene. The date arrives already contaminated by everything that followed. It is no longer two deaths in a city but a symbolic doorway through which millions of later deaths are visible. The listener knows what the people inside the date could not know.
That difference between historical hindsight and lived uncertainty is one of the album’s deepest subjects. Looking backward, events form a line. One action leads to another until the outcome appears almost predetermined. Living forward, every moment contains alternatives, incomplete information, pride, fear, accident, and decisions whose scale cannot yet be understood. History makes catastrophe resemble destiny because the unrealized paths leave fewer records.
The album does not end with the Armistice, victory, defeat, reconstruction, or commemoration. It ends before the war has officially begun. This leaves the entire conflict waiting to happen again. Playback returns automatically to “Silence,” and the silence now contains the knowledge of the approaching date. The record becomes a loop in which aftermath precedes cause.
The cover completes that loop. Death kneels behind the soldier, but we cannot tell whether it is the death he will cause, the death awaiting him, the dead comrade he carries psychologically, or the total machinery of mortality using his body as an instrument. Its hand on his shoulder joins reassurance and possession. Its grin joins comedy and horror.
There is an accidental but piercing resonance between that grin and the motto later adopted by the organization of the Gueules Cassées: Sourire quand même, smile nevertheless. The two smiles could not be more different. Death smiles because a skull has no flesh with which to stop smiling. The wounded survivor smiles as an act of agency despite what has been done to the flesh. One is anatomy emptied of feeling. The other is feeling reasserting itself through damaged anatomy.
That distinction protects the human center of the album. The broken face is not frightening because it makes the wounded person resemble a monster. It is frightening because it reveals what organized human beings were willing to do to one another, then asks the injured person to carry the visible evidence through a society that would often prefer not to look. The monstrosity belongs to the process, not the survivor.
By cropping Soldat und Tod around the skeleton, Ypérite initially gives Death control of the image. Across its thirty-three minutes, however, the titles gradually return attention to what surrounds that face: the cap, breath, tree, mud, date, silence, and human body obscured beneath the uniform. The album becomes an attempt to uncrop history, to recover the conditions hidden outside the iconic picture.
The most honest war art cannot recreate the experience it represents. It cannot place the listener inside a trench without turning suffering into simulation. What it can do is interfere with distance. It can make familiar dates unstable, restore physical weight to abstract history, and show that the border between past and present is thinner than ceremonial remembrance suggests.
The soldier continues aiming. Death continues resting its hand upon him. The shell has not landed, the gas has not arrived, and history has not yet explained what the picture means. For one suspended moment, action remains possible. That may be why the cover is so difficult to leave. We are not looking at death after the fact. We are looking at the instant when Death has joined the soldier and is waiting to see whether anyone notices.

Various Artists - 1997 - Gummo

 

London Records – 422-828-927-2  456.42MB FLAC

Teen friends Tummler (Nick Sutton) and Solomon (Jacob Reynolds) navigate the ruins of a tiny, tornado-ravaged town in Ohio that is populated by the deformed, disturbed and perverted. When not gunning down stray cats for a few bucks, the boys pass their time getting stoned on household inhalants. Elsewhere, the mute Bunny Boy (Jacob Sewell) dons rabbit ears and is bullied by kids half his age, and sisters Dot (Chloe Sevigny) and Helen (Carisa Glucksman) dodge a pedophile.

Gummo does not begin by explaining where we are. It drops us among images, voices, weather, debris, children, animals, damaged houses, private rituals, and people who appear to have been living long before the camera arrived. The soundtrack behaves the same way. It does not guide the audience toward a proper emotional response or gather the fragments into a reassuring story. It opens with Absu, moves through sludge, industrial music, powerviolence, black metal, death metal, noise, cello, marijuana drift, and an old hymn, creating something less like a movie score than a box of tapes recovered from several unrelated bedrooms after a tornado.
That is one reason the film can strike with a force comparable to The Outsiders while producing an entirely different emotional weather. The Outsiders gives its discarded young people a tribe, a code, recognizable enemies, and a tragic nobility. Its greasers know that they belong together even when the larger world considers them inferior. Gummo arrives after that structure has broken apart. Its people do not gather beneath one name. They form temporary pairs, families, games, transactions, grudges, fantasies, and accidental communities, then drift away again. The film offers no stable gang through which the audience can organize its sympathy. It presents an America of scattered private nations.
For someone raised in a naval family, moving through different regions of the United States during the 1970s and 1980s, these people may not feel like invented grotesques at all. Moving repeatedly exposes a child to forms of American life that more settled people can mistake for isolated abnormalities. Every town contains its own unofficial cast: the child who dresses strangely, the family living inside an arrangement nobody discusses, the old person surrounded by broken machinery, the teenagers who create an entire civilization from bicycles and vacant lots, the religious household, the dangerous household, the funny person whose humor cannot be separated from pain, the person everyone recognizes but nobody fully knows. They are not exceptions to America. They are part of the country’s actual population, usually edited out when America prepares its official portrait.
Gummo feels like an homage to that unofficial population, although it is an ethically unstable one. The camera looks with curiosity, affection, fascination, and sometimes the appetite of a trespasser. It gives people screen time who would almost never receive it in a conventional film, yet the act of displaying them can also turn poverty, disability, eccentricity, and private disorder into aesthetic material for viewers who are free to leave the theater afterward. This argument has followed the film because the film cannot settle it. Korine’s gaze can feel democratic in one scene and exploitative in the next. The same image can register as recognition to someone who has known similar people and as spectacle to someone encountering them only as cinematic strangeness.
The soundtrack intensifies this uncertainty. Its extremity can protect the people onscreen from sentimental interpretation by refusing the tasteful music usually used to instruct an audience to pity them. At the same time, black metal, death metal, power electronics, and horror imagery can make the town appear infernal, as though its inhabitants belong to a human junkyard. The music does not stand outside the film and resolve the moral problem. It participates in it. It can humanize by expressing interior intensity, or dehumanize by transforming a person into one more alarming texture.
The opening sequence of the album makes its intentions unmistakable. Absu’s “The Gold Torques of Ulaid” arrives with mythological velocity, immediately enlarging the scale beyond a Midwestern town. Eyehategod’s “Serving Time in the Middle of Nowhere” then drags everything back into suffocating physical existence. That title could almost describe the film’s condition: time being served without a clearly identified sentence, in a place outside the routes by which national culture imagines itself moving forward. The Electric Hellfire Club adds theatrical Satanic machinery before Spazz detonates the wonderfully named “Gummo Love Theme,” compressing affection, mockery, speed, and violence into less than three minutes.
Calling a powerviolence track a love theme is not merely a joke. Gummo’s forms of love are rarely separated from roughness, embarrassment, dependency, threat, and play. People insult one another while remaining together. Children fight, wrestle, imitate adults, humiliate each other, and return to the same shared spaces. Family tenderness occurs near weapons, filth, exhaustion, and instability. The film does not suggest that abuse is secretly love. It shows that human attachment continues forming under conditions that do not resemble the clean emotional categories used in respectable stories.
Bethlehem’s first appearance changes the soundtrack’s center of gravity. The vocals sound less like conventional aggression than consciousness rupturing under pressure. The German language further removes the music from explanatory function. Most American viewers are not meant to translate every word. The voice communicates through strain, pitch, breath, and psychic exposure. It gives the film access to an interior scream that its quiet faces may not publicly express.
The Burzum instrumental that follows replaces the scream with circular isolation. Whatever moral and political judgments properly surround its creator, the music’s function inside this sequence is one of suspended movement, a repeated passage through an environment that never reaches an exit. The soundtrack then turns to Bathory’s “Equimanthorn,” importing another European fantasy of ancient violence into the American landscape. These selections reveal that cultural geography is never as local as it appears. A child in a damaged Ohio town, a teenager in a military community, a metal fan in Finland, and a tape trader in California can inhabit the same imagined darkness without ever meeting.
That was especially significant in the pre-streaming 1990s. Obscure music did not simply appear through an endless recommendation feed. It arrived through friends, mail, record shops, zines, dubbed tapes, borrowed discs, and unexplained names written by hand. Every unfamiliar band carried the sensation of evidence from another hidden settlement. Gummo’s soundtrack preserves that feeling. The artists do not appear as neatly organized representatives of subgenres. They feel like intercepted transmissions whose relationships must be discovered by the listener.
Sleep’s “Dragonaut” is the album’s great movement song. Its riff does not hurry, yet it creates enormous forward motion, a machine built from repetition and weight. In the film it belongs naturally to bicycles, neighborhood streets, patched clothes, improvised purpose, and boys moving through a world that offers them very little formal destination. The bicycle becomes more than transport. It is temporary sovereignty. A child who controls almost nothing may still choose where to turn, how fast to travel, whom to follow, and how long to remain away.
The soundtrack’s central run through Brujería, Namanax, Nifelheim, Mortician, and Mystifier forms its most physically threatening district. Here the body becomes meat, medicine, sacrifice, machinery, and evidence. The songs sound built for spaces where ordinary social language has failed or been rejected. Yet the sequence is not interchangeable extremity. Brujería’s theatrical brutality, Namanax’s environmental electronics, Nifelheim’s blackened attack, Mortician’s horror-cinema density, and Mystifier’s occult momentum create different relationships between listener and threat. Some confront from directly ahead. Others contaminate the surrounding air.
Mystifier’s “Give the Human Devil His Due” may supply the soundtrack’s most useful phrase. The devil is human. This does not deny spiritual evil or reduce every religious symbol to psychology. It places responsibility back into recognizable hands. The film contains cruelty, neglect, predation, and humiliation, but it does not need a supernatural creature to import them. They emerge through boredom, power, imitation, appetite, injury, poverty, and the ordinary human capacity to treat another living being as an object.
The phrase also resists the audience’s temptation to imagine evil as something belonging exclusively to this town. Viewers can watch Gummo from cleaner rooms and reassure themselves that its people occupy a distant moral landscape. Yet the act of looking is part of the film’s economy. Curiosity can contain care, but it can also consume another person’s exposure. The human devil is not always the wild figure onscreen. It may be the respectable observer who requires someone else to remain degraded so that normality can feel secure.
Destroy All Monsters’ “Mom’s and Dad’s Pussy” introduces a different form of disorder. Its childish voices and obscene absurdity collapse the distance between playground chant, family language, underground art, and deliberate offense. It sounds like something children might repeat because adults react to it, before the words have stabilized into adult meaning. Gummo repeatedly returns to this borderland where children inherit fragments of sexuality, violence, religion, commerce, and shame without receiving a coherent explanation of the systems producing them.
The second Bethlehem piece descends again into psychic extremity, but the album then performs one of its most important gestures. Mischa Maisky’s performance of the prelude from Bach’s Second Cello Suite appears without claiming a higher moral status than the surrounding metal and noise. The cello is not sent in to civilize the compilation. Its grain, repetition, melancholy, and physical bowing belong to the same world. What changes is not the seriousness of the music but the social institution through which that seriousness is normally recognized.
Placed here, Bach reveals a kinship with the album’s heaviest material. Both rely upon repeated structures, physical discipline, tension, resonance, and the transformation of private anguish into pattern. The distinction between cultured beauty and underground ugliness becomes unstable. A cello can sound desolate enough to inhabit Xenia, while a distorted guitar can carry architecture as rigorous as sacred music.
Sleep returns with “Some Grass,” a small drifting chamber after the weight of “Dragonaut.” Then the soundtrack ends with Rose Shepherd and Ellen M. Smith singing “Jesus Loves Me.” It would be easy to treat this as irony, a childish hymn placed after blasphemy, murder fantasies, noise, and bodily horror. Yet the ending is more disturbing and more tender when the hymn is allowed to remain sincere.
“Jesus Loves Me” is one of the simplest promises a child can receive. Love is guaranteed before achievement, beauty, cleanliness, intelligence, obedience, or social approval. Placed at the end of Gummo, that promise travels toward people the larger culture often regards as disposable. The hymn does not clean the town or explain its suffering. It asks whether divine love, if it means anything, can include lives that respectable viewers find difficult to look at without disgust.
The answer cannot be outsourced to the song. Religion appears throughout American poverty as comfort, inherited language, discipline, fantasy, community, threat, and genuine spiritual survival. A hymn may be sung in a loving home or an abusive one. It may support a person through catastrophe or be used to prevent difficult questions. Gummo leaves this contradiction intact. The final sacred song does not defeat the preceding darkness. It enters the same room.
The physical soundtrack is not a complete inventory of the film’s music. Some of its most memorable emotional reversals come from songs left off the album: Buddy Holly’s “Everyday,” Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” Almeda Riddle’s “My Little Rooster,” and other pieces that move through pop, folk memory, jazz, rap, and radio familiarity. Their absence makes the CD a companion construction rather than an audio replica of the movie.
This difference matters. The film’s popular songs often reveal the ordinary emotional lives of people whom the harsher music initially frames as threatening or strange. “Everyday” allows innocence, longing, and play to coexist with sexual confusion. “Like a Prayer” transforms a basement exercise ritual into something between self-improvement, humiliation, faith, and danger. “Crying” gives sentimental language to a boy whose grief might otherwise remain disguised by cruelty and chemical escape. The familiar songs do not prove that the characters are secretly normal. They demonstrate that normality was always too small a category.
The soundtrack CD selects the harsher nervous system of the film and makes it portable. Heard alone, it feels like a major-label compilation assembled by someone who had temporarily gained access to the distribution machinery and filled it with music that machinery was not designed to carry. Absu, Eyehategod, Bethlehem, Nifelheim, Mortician, Mystifier, Namanax, Sleep, Bach, and a children’s hymn occupy one official object without being reduced to a genre sampler. The disc resembles the film’s town: incompatible lives sharing geography without merging into one culture.
That is also why Gummo can remain personally important decades after the initial theater experience. It does not merely recall the late 1990s. It can reopen memories of people encountered across American childhood, especially a childhood shaped by relocation. Each move interrupts one social world and reveals another. Faces disappear before their stories are finished. A friend, neighbor, difficult child, strange adult, temporary classmate, or family at the edge of town may remain in memory as vividly as a major relationship precisely because no later information arrived to close the image.
Gummo is made from that unfinished quality. Its vignettes do not develop into conventional destinies because most people encountered in life are known fragmentarily. We see someone once at a bowling alley, repeatedly through a bus window, for one school year, during a parent’s assignment, or in the few months before another move. We may remember a posture, bedroom, voice, injury, joke, smell, song, or strange statement without ever learning what became of the person. They remain suspended inside us, neither fictional characters nor complete biographies.
The film gives this fragmentary memory a form. Its people are not required to become examples of social problems or symbols of redemption. Some are funny, cruel, beautiful, frightening, gentle, irritating, vulnerable, and ridiculous within minutes. That instability resembles actual recognition more closely than the moral sorting performed by most films. To acknowledge someone’s humanity does not require declaring every action harmless. It requires allowing the person to remain larger than the worst or strangest thing the camera records.
The tornado is therefore more than backstory. It becomes a model of memory and culture. A tornado tears objects from their intended locations, damages structures unevenly, exposes private interiors, and deposits unrelated materials together. Gummo’s editing does the same thing. So does its soundtrack. Ancient metal, Southern sludge, European black metal, American noise, classical cello, stoner repetition, obscene nursery rhyme, and Christian reassurance are scattered across one field. The listener walks through, trying to determine which objects belonged together before the storm.
Perhaps they never did. Perhaps America itself is this accumulation, not a unified story but millions of local worlds connected by roads, military transfers, mail, television, tapes, churches, school systems, rumors, and songs. The soundtrack does not solve that country. It lets its incompatible frequencies sound at the same time.
When the CD ends with two voices singing that Jesus loves the children, the statement hangs over everything that preceded it: the damaged town, the cruel games, the bicycles, the bedrooms, the heavy riffs, the parents, the abandoned spaces, and the people whose faces conventional cinema would have corrected, mocked, hidden, or replaced with professional actors. The song makes no distinction between the photogenic child and the disturbing one.
That may be the spiritual challenge concealed inside Gummo. Can a person look directly at lives that produce discomfort without turning away, romanticizing them, declaring superiority, or converting them into collectible strangeness? Can recognition survive disgust? Can love coexist with judgment? Can art show damage without claiming ownership of the damaged?
The film never supplies a safe answer. The soundtrack keeps the question physically active. It presses through speakers with the force of several undergrounds colliding, then ends in a voice small enough to belong to a kitchen, Sunday-school room, front porch, or memory. The feast contains metal, dirt, prayer, noise, sentiment, cruelty, humor, and tenderness because the wine could not be paired honestly with anything cleaner.

Dur-Dur Band - 2013 - Volume 5

Awesome Tapes From Africa – ATFA004

Before the first full song begins, Abdinur Daljir introduces the members rd. Rather than presenting the group as a single magical name, the introduction allows the name to unfold into people: singers, guitarists, horn players, keyboardist, bassist, drummer, conga players, backing vocalists. The band becomes audible as a community before it becomes music. Each announced name briefly steps forward, then rejoins the larger organism. What follows is not the expression of one commanding personality but a social structure in motion.
The word dur-dur is commonly translated as “spring,” which feels almost suspiciously perfect for this music. A spring is a source emerging from underground, water becoming visible after traveling through hidden layers of earth. It is also a season of return, movement, color, and renewed public life. Dur-Dur Band possesses both meanings. The music rises from a deep network of Somali poetry, melody, rhythm, dance, family life, religious understanding, and oral memory, yet it arrives wearing the bright electrical clothing of late twentieth-century funk, disco, soul, reggae, jazz, synthesizer pop, and international radio. Nothing is simply imported or preserved. Sources meet beneath the surface and reappear as something newly local.
Volume 5 was recorded in Mogadishu during the final years of the city’s great nightclub era and reissued internationally in 2013 by Awesome Tapes From Africa from a surviving cassette copy. The exact year has become slightly unstable. The label’s original notes identify the recording as 1987, while current physical-edition descriptions call it a 1989 tape. That uncertainty belongs to the object’s history rather than diminishing it. Many recordings survive inside archives designed for completely different lives than the ones they eventually acquire. A cassette copied for circulation within one musical community may become, decades later, the nearest surviving doorway into a vanished arrangement of musicians, venues, studios, listeners, streets, and nights.
The hiss is part of that doorway. It is not the sound of Mogadishu itself, and it would be sentimental to pretend that every technical imperfection carries mystical historical truth. Hiss is friction produced by a recording and duplication medium. Yet here it also marks the distance the music has traveled. The band performs in the foreground while time moves continuously behind it. Rather than placing the listener inside a spotless reconstruction of the late 1980s, the reissue lets us hear the difficulty of reaching them. The music penetrates the damage without erasing it.
Dur-Dur Band was considered a “private band,” meaning it was not tied to the state institutions that employed many Somali musicians and often expected political or patriotic material. That word private does not mean isolated. The group was large, popular, public-facing, and built for places where people gathered. Privacy here means a degree of artistic independence, particularly the freedom to sing about love, domestic negotiation, longing, disappointment, faith, money, family, and dance rather than carrying an assigned government message. The result is political in a quieter and perhaps more enduring way. It preserves the emotional life of ordinary people.
“Hayeelin,” meaning approximately “Don’t Do It,” begins with romantic despair intense enough that the singer contemplates ending his life. The response comes from the surrounding voices: do not do it; God will make things easier. The arrangement turns private crisis into communal dialogue. Despair speaks in the singular, but care answers in the plural. The band does not leave the suffering voice alone at the center of the song. Rhythm, chorus, and reassurance gather around him.
This interaction reveals something essential about Dur-Dur Band’s music. The groove is not an escape from serious feeling. It is a way of carrying serious feeling without letting it become motionless. Sadness is placed inside bass, percussion, horns, voices, and dancing bodies. The pain remains real, but it is prevented from becoming the only available reality. Music creates companions around an isolated thought.
“Halelo” answers the uncertainty of “Hayeelin” with fulfillment. A couple announces that they have reached the destination they sought together. Love is not described as one person conquering or possessing another. The achievement is shared, and the male and female voices confirm it from their respective positions. The call-and-response structure does more than decorate the melody. It dramatizes mutuality. One voice makes a claim, and the other is permitted to answer.
The performance has the buoyancy of a celebration already in progress before the recording begins. Guitars flicker around the beat, horns arrive in bright clusters, and the rhythm section maintains a pocket spacious enough for every voice to remain distinct. Dur-Dur Band’s size does not produce congestion. The musicians understand that a large ensemble becomes powerful through placement rather than constant activity. A horn line appears, leaves air behind, and allows a guitar or vocal phrase to occupy the newly illuminated space.
“Fagfagley” moves the record into domestic comedy and conflict. Its central woman is accused of talking excessively and demanding more from her husband than another wife receives. The situation emerges from a specific social context involving a polygamous household, but the emotional mechanics are immediately recognizable: comparison, resentment, unequal expectations, competing definitions of fairness, and the use of ridicule to weaken someone whose demands have become inconvenient.
Calling the woman a gossip or endless talker may describe her behavior, but it may also function as a strategy for avoiding what she is saying. Throughout history, people with less formal authority have often been accused of talking too much when speech is the primary instrument available to them. The song allows the conflict to remain funny without making it simple. A household is revealed as a small political system in which resources, affection, duty, and voice must continually be negotiated.
“Ilawad Cashaqa,” “Hold on to This Love with Me,” returns to the uncertain beginning of a relationship. Questions have accumulated without answers. One person has waited for an invitation into the other’s heart and now insists that the situation be stated clearly. The phrase “with me” contains the song’s entire ethic. Love cannot be held by one person on behalf of two. The request is not merely for affection but participation.
The guitars throughout Volume 5 often behave like conversation. One supplies clipped rhythmic punctuation while another sends small melodic figures around the vocal. The keyboard can thicken the harmony, imitate orchestral color, or suddenly announce the technological decade with a bright synthetic tone. Horns provide emphasis without permanently becoming the main event. Beneath them, bass, drums, and congas keep the songs from becoming illustrations of their lyrics. The body receives its own argument.
“Garsore Waa Ilaah,” “God Is the Judge,” places a couple before the uncertainty of a shared future. The woman is prepared to make the journey but asks whether her partner will help carry the decision. She knows that many people plan to remain together and still become separated. Faith does not remove human responsibility. God may judge fairly, but the couple must still act, choose, assist, and endure.
The song’s title might initially suggest surrender to divine verdict, yet its story emphasizes cooperation. The future cannot be guaranteed by intensity of feeling alone. Love becomes an activity requiring repeated decisions by people whose certainty will fluctuate. The divine judge does not replace communication. God’s permanence instead reveals the instability of human promises and the care required to keep them alive.
“Aada Fududey Iga Ahow” presents perhaps the album’s most complicated domestic decision. A divorced man has remarried. His former wife, the mother of his children, returns and asks for reconciliation. He ultimately tells the new wife that his bond with his children and family history prevents him from continuing with her. No arrangement avoids pain. Loyalty to one relationship becomes abandonment within another.
Popular love songs often make emotional truth appear singular: follow the heart, return to the original love, choose the person who understands you, or remain faithful to the newest promise. This song recognizes that several truths may exist simultaneously and demand incompatible actions. The man’s responsibility to his children is meaningful. The new wife’s injury is also meaningful. A choice can be understandable without becoming harmless.
“Tajir Waa Ilaah” widens the album’s moral vision from romance to wealth and human limitation. God is complete; human fortune changes. A person who possesses abundance today may have nothing tomorrow and therefore has no stable ground from which to despise someone with less. The song joins economic humility to kindness toward women and emphasizes decisions made together.
These ideas do not arrive as a sermon detached from pleasure. They travel through one of the band’s warm, rolling arrangements, where ethical instruction becomes dance music. This may initially appear contradictory only because modern commercial culture often separates seriousness from bodily joy. Dur-Dur Band does not. Wisdom can be sung in a nightclub. A dancing person can consider mortality, responsibility, generosity, and God without leaving the floor.
“Dholey” contains some of the album’s most striking electronic color. The synthesizer bends and darts around the percussion, giving the arrangement an unmistakably 1980s brightness while the singer describes heartbreak severe enough to disturb physical orientation. The ground becomes dizzying. Voices seem to descend from the sky. Shared birthplace and common history cannot prevent abandonment.
The song is musically exuberant while emotionally wounded, but neither side cancels the other. This is not upbeat music hiding sad words. The arrangement demonstrates how longing actually behaves. A person can remain physically alive, socially active, beautifully dressed, rhythmically responsive, and inwardly destabilized at the same time. Pain does not always slow the body. Sometimes it makes every sensation brighter.
“Amiina Awdaay,” “Where Is Amina?,” is built from absence. The singer searches for Amina, remembers his promise, and imagines the happiness of marrying her. A name repeated in song becomes a form of temporary presence. Amina is missing from the singer’s physical world but occupies the entire musical space. The band constructs a room from which she is absent and then fills that room by calling for her.
Recorded music performs a related act. It summons people who are no longer standing together. By the time Volume 5 reached international listeners in 2013, the original social geography of the band had been scattered by war, migration, death, exile, and time. Yet pressing play gathers these voices into the same arrangement again. The reunion is real within sound even when it is impossible in place.
“Dooyo” closes the album with a woman hearing drums and declaring that she will not resist the dance. The rhythm is medicine. Dooyo has taken possession of her, and stopping is no longer desirable. After an album filled with romantic crisis, family complications, moral judgment, economic humility, abandonment, and longing, dance becomes not a trivial conclusion but a practical form of healing.
To call rhythm medicine is not metaphorical decoration. Music changes breathing, muscle tension, attention, memory, proximity, and the experience of time. It does not solve the circumstances described in the preceding songs. It alters the body that must continue living through them. The dancing woman is not cured of every problem. She has entered a condition in which the problem no longer occupies the entire field.
There is a temptation to hear Volume 5 primarily as a document of what Mogadishu lost. The city’s musical infrastructure was devastated as civil war began, performers dispersed, venues closed, archives became endangered, and later extremists attempted to suppress music itself. That history cannot be ignored, but allowing catastrophe to become the album’s main subject would repeat another kind of erasure. It would define Somali cultural life chiefly through its destruction.
Volume 5 does not sound like ruins. It sounds like expertise, humor, argument, flirtation, faith, fashion, electricity, rehearsal, nightlife, friendship, and professional musical confidence. The people on this cassette did not know themselves merely as inhabitants of a tragic historical prelude. They were living in their present, making contemporary music for listeners who understood its language, references, personalities, and dances.
The reissue listener therefore carries a responsibility not to convert the record into an exotic ghost. Its value is not that Western collectors rescued an otherwise silent culture and granted it meaning. The music already possessed meaning, popularity, circulation, and a sophisticated audience. The international reissue extended the route. It did not create the spring.
Awesome Tapes From Africa’s decision to remaster a cassette copy rather than wait for an imaginary perfect source respects a crucial archival truth: sometimes the surviving copy is the master history has provided. Preservation cannot always recover first-generation tapes, original artwork, exact dates, complete credits, or untouched sound. The responsible act is not to disguise uncertainty but to carry forward what remains with enough context that future listeners can hear both the music and the conditions of its survival.
The shifting fidelity across Volume 5 gives the album the feeling of movement through rooms and nights. Organ appears thick and physical in one track; synthesizer becomes sharper and more metallic in another. Live drums may seem to yield to machine-like regularity. Vocal textures and instrumental balances change. Instead of one sealed studio session, the tape feels like a vessel into which several moments of Dur-Dur Band’s life were gathered.
A cassette is especially suited to this kind of survival. Tape is linear, vulnerable, portable, recordable, erasable, duplicable, and intimate. It passes through hands. Every copy may slightly alter what it carries. The hiss grows, high frequencies soften, cases crack, handwritten information becomes detached, and still the music travels. Like oral memory, it survives not by remaining physically unchanged but through repeated acts of transmission.
The introduction now takes on a deeper meaning. Abdinur Daljir names the musicians because a band is not an anonymous historical atmosphere. It is people. The names resist the tendency to let distant music dissolve into generalized phrases such as “Somali funk,” “African disco,” or “lost sounds.” Categories help us find the doorway, but the introduction asks us to meet whoever is inside.
Then the band begins, and all those individual names become one moving body without disappearing into it. Voices trade perspectives. Guitars interlock. Horns answer. Percussion thickens the road beneath the melody. A woman hears drums and finds medicine. A desperate man is told not to die. Couples reach destinations, lose them, renegotiate them, and ask God to judge what human beings cannot settle cleanly.
The spring continues flowing through a damaged cassette. Its water carries hiss, love, advice, gossip, faith, synthesizer light, household argument, nightclub electricity, and the names of people standing together in Mogadishu before history scattered them. Volume 5 is precious because it remembers a city, but it remains alive because it does more than remember. It still moves.

Position Normal - 2025 - Modern and Unique 2

 

Self-released – none

The person on the cover has become furniture, television, worker, and viewing audience at the same time. A paint-spattered body reclines heavily in an old brown chair, but where the head should be sits a small glowing screen. Another television rests beneath the feet like a footstool, discarded appliance, or technological altar. The figure may be watching through the television, being watched by it, dreaming inside it, or simply too exhausted to distinguish any longer between consciousness and programming. The surrounding collage of red fabric, wood grain, carpet, gloves, overalls, and obsolete electronics turns an ordinary room into a homemade command center whose commander appears to have fallen asleep during transmission.
Modern and unique sounds like language copied from a furniture advertisement, estate-agent listing, motel brochure, or handwritten sign beside an object at a yard sale. The phrase promises two qualities that should be easy to recognize but become slippery when placed together. Modern means belonging to now, although “modern” also names styles and technologies that became old decades ago. Unique promises that nothing else is quite the same, although advertising applies the word to thousands of nearly identical products. Add the number two and the title becomes beautifully self-contradictory. The unique thing has acquired a sequel.
Position Normal has always lived inside such verbal creases. Even the group’s name joins movement and stability. Position suggests where something has been placed, while normal promises that the placement follows an accepted standard. Yet very little in this music remains where language or culture normally leaves it. Voices become percussion. Household objects become instruments. mistakes become architecture. A title begins as a sentence and wanders away before locating its verb. Normality is not rejected from outside. It is entered through a loose floorboard.
The first Modern and Unique, released in 2023, was largely instrumental and presented as music made with instruments rather than the sampled voices and scavenged recordings historically associated with Position Normal. Its sequel greatly enlarges that idea. Chris Bailiff plays real and software piano, acoustic and electric guitars, double bass, congas, bongos, tambourine, synthesizers, and shakers disguised as produce. John Cushway returns with lyrics, stories, and the special vocal presence that has always allowed Position Normal to make speech sound half remembered before it has even finished being spoken.
Only two samples are admitted into the entire record. One is a dog barking twice. The other is a 1990s drum-and-bass fragment used in the hidden “Techno Non Stop.” For artists once celebrated as masters of the found fragment, this near-abstinence is more radical than continuing to add increasingly obscure source material. Position Normal has not abandoned collage. It has begun manufacturing the scraps itself.
That distinction is easy to miss because the new playing still sounds inherited, recovered, overheard, or transmitted through unsuitable equipment. The musicians can create a piano phrase in the present and make it feel as though it has survived inside a cupboard since 1978. A guitar need not be sampled from a forgotten instructional record to carry the posture of forgotten instruction. Original material can become found sound when it is recorded, cut, titled, and placed as though the makers discovered it among their own belongings.
Recording onto VHS is central to this peculiar time-fold. Videotape was designed to preserve moving images, with sound accompanying the picture. Using it primarily as an audio body leaves the image channel haunted by whatever is absent. The album becomes the soundtrack to a missing television program whose episodes may once have involved a man in an armchair, laughing trees, dirty dumplings, marine holidays, unexplained staring, and a dog permitted exactly two barks.
VHS also belongs to domestic memory in a way that pristine digital recording cannot imitate. It remembers shelves of unlabelled tapes, programs beginning late because someone failed to press record in time, advertisements interrupting films, family events accidentally taped over, tracking lines, remote controls with missing battery covers, and voices continuing after the picture has turned to snow. Position Normal does not merely use obsolete technology for warmth. It uses the social habits attached to that technology.
“Light Introduction” begins like illumination being introduced to a room rather than a band being introduced to an audience. The title could mean a gentle opening, but Position Normal titles rarely stay obedient to one meaning. Perhaps Light itself has arrived and must be presented. Perhaps the introduction weighs very little. Perhaps an introductory passage has been left near a window and faded. The music opens the curtains without establishing what kind of day has begun.
“Khee,” played on piano and guitars, has the quality of a word heard correctly but spelled privately. It may be a name, sound, exhalation, or key with its first letter slightly displaced. This is how language often enters Position Normal: not as clean semantic information but as a physical object handled long enough to acquire fingerprints. Cushway and Bailiff understand that a spoken syllable can remain compelling after meaning has loosened. The mouth becomes a small synthesizer made from muscle, air, memory, and social embarrassment.
“Dorian Chords” briefly announces musical theory with the solemnity of an educational film, only to disappear after little more than a minute. The Dorian mode traditionally occupies an emotional space between major brightness and minor sorrow, making it perfectly suited to Position Normal’s cheerful unease. Their melodies often appear pleased with themselves while something in the room remains unmistakably wrong. Happiness is not exposed as false. It has simply put on a cardigan belonging to someone who has been missing for years.
“Larfin Trees” performs one of the album’s tiny acts of word-morphing. Read aloud, the trees begin laughing, but the altered spelling makes the laughter belong to a regional accent, a child, a comic character, or somebody repeating a phrase they never saw written down. Trees can laugh through leaves and branches, but they can also appear to laugh at the human need to assign them expressions. The track lasts only forty-five seconds, enough time for the forest to make its remark before returning to ordinary vegetation.
“Think About The” ends before naming what should be considered. The title resembles a command clipped from a longer sentence, leaving the mind permanently leaning forward. Think about the what? The consequences, children, price, smell, future, old days, person beside you, dog outside? The missing noun turns thought into a room without furniture. Position Normal repeatedly discovers that incompleteness can be more generative than explanation. A complete sentence delivers information; a broken sentence recruits the listener.
“Book Looks” is the album’s emotional hearth. The song had circulated before this full release and was already singled out for the way its murmured domestic lyric evokes a man who loves the smell of his house and the people inside it. Home becomes animal, architectural, affectionate, and faintly claustrophobic. People share air, fabric, food, skin, habits, books, dust, and the smell produced by remaining near one another for years. The house does not merely contain the family. It gradually acquires them.
The title itself may suggest judging a book by its cover, a book returning the reader’s gaze, or the particular appearance a person acquires after too much time alone with printed matter. Position Normal’s homes are never simply cozy or sinister. They are burrows constructed from attachment. Safety and enclosure grow from the same walls.
“They Are Not Staring” addresses the social fear that other people have become a tribunal. The reassurance is specific, yet its specificity makes suspicion stronger. Nobody tells us not to worry about staring unless somebody has already felt watched. The sentence may be spoken by a friend, therapist, parent, conspirator, or one part of the mind attempting to calm another. Under a television-headed figure, the claim becomes even less secure. They may not be staring, but the screens certainly are.
The four “Theme Tune” pieces divide the album into imaginary programs. A theme tune traditionally promises recurrence. It tells the viewer that the same characters, room, and problems will return after the opening credits. Here no programs accompany the themes, so the listener must invent them from surrounding fragments. The album begins to resemble a television schedule from a country whose programs were all cancelled before transmission, leaving only their miniature musical identities.
This structure also suits the record’s unusual chronology. Bailiff describes its contents as spanning from the late 1980s to now. Instead of arranging those decades into a documentary progression, Position Normal lets old and new constituents coexist without identification badges. A youthful idea may be completed by older hands. A recent performance may pass through VHS and emerge sounding earlier than its source. Time is not a line but a house in which several versions of the residents occupy different rooms.
“Overwhelming” gives a large word less than two minutes in which to demonstrate itself. Modern life generally imagines the overwhelming as accumulation: too much information, noise, responsibility, memory, choice, grief, work, media, or future. Position Normal responds with compression. The miniature does not defeat excess by becoming empty. It traps excess inside a small container and allows pressure to become character.
“Dirty Dumplings (Done Dirt Cheap)” drags an AC/DC title into the kitchen, replacing dangerous deeds with inexpensive food that may have fallen onto the floor. It is ridiculous and exact. Much of domestic life consists of heroic musical energy being spent upon small edible objects. The dumpling deserves a riff too. Position Normal’s comedy does not simply mock grandiosity. It redistributes grandeur to objects and situations usually denied it.
“Someone Else’s Bare Minimum” contains an entire social philosophy. The least one person can manage may exceed another person’s greatest effort. Standards that appear objective often conceal differences in health, money, confidence, training, time, support, and luck. The phrase can sound accusatory, compassionate, resentful, or liberated depending upon which word receives emphasis. Someone else’s minimum should not become the ruler used to measure your maximum.
“Are Glued” is another grammatical fragment whose missing subject enlarges it. Eyes are glued. People are glued. Pieces are glued. We are glued to screens, chairs, habits, homes, histories, and one another. Glue repairs by preventing movement. It restores the object while permanently changing how the repaired area can flex. Much of the album behaves this way, fastening decades of material together without hiding the joins.
“And I Muddled All the Ins” turns muddling into a physical occupation. Perhaps the speaker confused every entrance, mixed up all the interiors, or disturbed the small words hidden inside larger ones. “Ins” are people with access, fashionable insiders, or the opposite of outs. To muddle them is to sabotage the border separating belonging from exclusion. Position Normal’s work has always invited outsiders into the living room while making insiders wonder whether they entered the correct address.
“Wham Marine Holidays” resembles the name of a budget travel company, a television special starring a pop duo on a boat, or a collision between sudden impact and organized leisure. Holidays promise temporary escape from the normal position. Marine holidays add water, unstable footing, unfamiliar creatures, and the possibility that the accommodation is slowly drifting away. The title alone constructs a brightly colored brochure whose small print may contain the actual song.
The secret bonus piece, “Techno Non Stop,” finally admits a recognizable 1990s dance sample. After an album built almost entirely from newly played material, the borrowed break arrives as a veteran performer wearing an old fluorescent jacket. “Party Party Drugs” is placed in parentheses like the hidden explanation adults feared beneath rave culture. Yet the track’s status as a secret bonus revives another vanished media pleasure: the unlisted song discovered because the CD continued playing or the cassette contained more tape than the printed sequence admitted.
Digital platforms usually make secrets difficult. Every track has metadata, duration, waveform, and searchable title. Position Normal preserves the vocabulary of concealment even when concealment has become theatrical. The secret is openly named, the bonus is part of the official program, and the non-stop music stops after three and a half minutes. Each claim cheerfully undoes itself.
That may be what modern and unique finally means here. Modernity is not a clean replacement of old tools by new ones. It is the strange simultaneous presence of software piano, VHS audio, 1990s sample CDs, late-1980s ideas, digital distribution, acoustic guitars, vegetable-shaped shakers, Bandcamp metadata, old televisions, and a duo whose original tape methods anticipated the layered flexibility now associated with computers. The future did not remove the attic. It installed wireless internet inside it.
The album’s short duration and tiny pieces prevent nostalgia from becoming monumental. Position Normal does not build a grand memorial to obsolete media. It continues using the debris. Their relationship with the past is practical, comic, and affectionate. Old technology is not worshipped because it was superior. It remains useful because every medium teaches the imagination a different way to arrange time.
On the cover, the television-headed body may therefore be neither victim nor warning. It may be the musician’s self-portrait as receiver, player, laborer, and archive. Paint covers the clothes because making things is untidy. The screen glows because reception continues. The chair supports a body carrying several decades of unfinished material, and the second television waits below like a spare head.
Modern & Unique 2 does not return a legend by pretending no years have passed. It permits all the years to enter at once. The songs arrive as themes for missing programs, domestic spells, verbal crumbs, half-remembered jokes, modal sketches, little rooms, and handmade transmissions. Nothing is polished into timelessness. Everything remains timed, taped, touched, and slightly out of position.
That is where Position Normal continues finding its unique normality: not in preserving the past unchanged, nor in proving its relevance through fashionable modernization, but in allowing old and new materials to live together without deciding which one is haunting the other. The television watches the person. The person wears the television. The archive becomes an instrument, and the newly played instrument immediately begins remembering something that may never have happened.

Humdrum - 2024 - Every Heaven

 

Slumberland Records – SLR-284

The face on the cover has already passed beyond an ordinary expression. Its eyes are stretched wide, the mouth held in a gigantic smile or scream, and the halftone printing breaks the surface into thousands of dots, as though the figure has been transmitted through an old newspaper, photocopier, television screen, and memory before reaching us. Turquoise and magenta ordinarily suggest brightness, summer merchandise, candy wrappers, swimming pools, and inexpensive pop pleasure. Here they cover something grotesque. The image feels delighted and terrified at once. It is the face of someone entering heaven who has suddenly realized that heaven may be too intense for a human nervous system.
Every Heaven is an equally unstable title. “Heaven” generally names the final perfect place, singular and absolute. Adding “every” multiplies perfection until it becomes personal, temporary, and perhaps contradictory. Every person may carry a different heaven. One heaven is romantic union, another solitude, another youth, another the right song arriving during a difficult year. A former relationship can become heaven in memory even when living inside it was impossible. An old musical era can feel like heaven to someone who did not fully inhabit it the first time. Once heaven becomes plural, it stops being merely a destination after life and becomes the name given to those moments when life briefly seems to fit.
The project name pulls in the opposite direction. Humdrum means ordinary, repetitive, lacking excitement. It describes routine after wonder has departed. Placed beside Every Heaven, the name creates the record’s central tension: transcendence is being sought through familiar materials. These songs do not attempt to invent a previously unheard musical language. They return to chiming guitars, softly diffused vocals, melodic bass movement, propulsive drums, pastel reverb, and the emotional grammar of late-1980s and early-1990s indie pop. The revelation is not that the past can be perfectly recreated. It is that old forms remain capable of receiving new lives.
Loren Vanderbilt began Humdrum after the pandemic interrupted and eventually dissolved Star Tropics. That origin matters because the album is saturated with movement following stoppage. Songs written from 2019 onward gradually became a bridge between one creative identity and another. The music frequently sounds as though it is running, but not necessarily running away. Sometimes it is running beside someone, back toward something, around a bend, beneath the sky, or simply fast enough to restart circulation after an emotional numbness.
The brief title track assembles the album piece by piece. Guitar, rhythm, reverb, and atmosphere appear like parts of a landscape becoming visible at sunrise. Because it contains no conventional lyrical argument, the piece acts as an invitation rather than an explanation. Near its end, a sampled voice asks what it is about this place and observes that it resembles another world. The question describes the emotional technology of indie pop. A few guitars, a drum pattern, and the right production can construct a parallel environment whose geography is made entirely from association.
Those associations are proudly visible. The guitars carry the bright, liquid movement of early R.E.M., Felt, The Railway Children, and the melodic edge of Sarah Records, while the wider atmosphere remembers New Order, Pale Saints, Ride, Slowdive, and the period when indie pop and shoegaze had not yet been organized into separate museum rooms. Yet the album does not merely imitate a record collection. Influence has passed through Vanderbilt’s own history, including Star Tropics, Chicago, the pandemic, adult relationships, disappointment, and the particular questions of continuing to make romantic guitar music as a queer artist in his thirties.
“There and Back Again” makes return its explicit structure. The title is familiar from Tolkien, but here it also points toward Sarah Records’ final release, the label closing its doors by looking simultaneously backward and homeward. Vanderbilt uses that phrase to describe an on-again, off-again relationship whose repetitions have become a form of geography. Two people travel away from and toward each other so often that the route itself begins replacing the destination.
The music moves with far more confidence than the relationship it describes. Drums press forward, guitars shimmer, and the melody supplies the certainty the words cannot locate. This is one of pop music’s most durable forms of emotional alchemy. Doubt becomes singable without being solved. The listener receives forward motion while the narrator remains unsure whether the relationship can survive another bend. The body is carried ahead by a song whose mind is still looking backward.
“Superbloom” turns this motion into romantic possibility. A superbloom occurs when dormant seeds respond to unusually favorable conditions and suddenly cover a landscape with color. The apparent miracle depends upon life that was already present but invisible, waiting beneath dry ground. As a love-song image, it is almost too perfect for a project born after pandemic isolation. Feeling has not been manufactured from nothing. Conditions have changed enough for buried capacities to emerge.
The invitation to run together through heaven gives the song its buoyancy, but the question remains an invitation rather than a guarantee. Love is imagined as coordinated movement. One person cannot create the shared escape alone. The song’s exhilarating guitars therefore carry a quiet vulnerability: the speaker is already running and hopes the other person will choose the same direction.
“Wave Goodbye” contains one of the album’s simplest word-morphs. A wave is a gesture of departure, but also a moving body of energy. To wave goodbye is to communicate separation through motion, while a sound wave allows the goodbye to continue long after the original gesture has ended. Recorded music preserves departures this way. Someone leaves, a band ends, a relationship closes, but the emotional wave continues traveling through speakers.
The song is bright enough that goodbye does not become complete devastation. Humdrum understands that departures can contain relief, affection, regret, and momentum at once. The jangle keeps opening windows inside the loss. Sadness is present, but it has air moving through it.
“Test of Time” slows the album just enough to ask what survives repetition. The phrase is often applied retrospectively to music, relationships, institutions, and promises that remain meaningful after novelty has faded. Yet no object passes the test of time unchanged. Records age, production styles reveal their decades, memories alter emphasis, and people hear beloved songs through older bodies. Survival is not immunity from change. It is the ability to continue communicating while change accumulates.
This is especially relevant to music so openly devoted to earlier styles. Every Heaven does not prove the timelessness of jangle pop by stripping away its historical identity. It proves it by allowing that identity to remain audible while discovering a present need for it. The chiming guitar still works because longing has not become obsolete. A chorus still lifts because human beings continue needing brief structures in which uncertainty can feel complete.
“See Through You” introduces a sharper kind of perception. To see through someone can mean recognizing deception, but it can also mean seeing a person as transparent or insubstantial. Dream pop frequently creates voices that sound partly dissolved inside the surrounding instruments. Here that softness does not eliminate confrontation. The song’s energetic surface and more suspicious emotional position create a tension between attraction and recognition. Beauty no longer guarantees trust.
Scott Hibbitts’ lead guitar is crucial throughout the record because it rarely functions as ornamental soloing. The lines act as second voices, answering or complicating Vanderbilt’s melodies. They brighten corners, extend phrases beyond the lyric, and supply small upward motions when the words become uncertain. Melissa Buckley’s backing vocals perform a related function, widening the private monologue into a social space. Even though Humdrum began as a rebuilding project centered on one songwriter, the finished album does not sound sealed inside one person.
“Eternal Blue,” the album’s longest piece, allows the emotional weather to expand. Blue is sky, water, distance, sadness, devotion, and the color created by light scattering through atmosphere. Calling it eternal turns a passing mood into a horizon. One can move toward the horizon indefinitely without reaching it, yet it continues organizing the landscape.
The keyboards and layered guitars give the track a greater sense of scale without abandoning the album’s intimacy. It feels like a private emotion discovering that the sky has been feeling it too. This is one of dream pop’s characteristic gifts: inward states are projected outward until weather, light, and distance seem to participate. The person is not cured of sadness, but sadness is no longer confined to one body.
“Ultraviolet” names light beyond ordinary human vision. We know it exists through its effects even though our eyes cannot directly perceive it. The title therefore belongs naturally to an album concerned with hidden emotional continuities. Love, grief, influence, identity, and memory frequently become visible through what they alter rather than through direct observation.
Musically, the song’s brightness seems almost capable of exceeding the visible spectrum. The guitars shine while the emotional content remains harder to locate, producing the pleasurable uncertainty that separates dream pop from straightforward confession. Not everything felt intensely can be translated into a clean statement. Sometimes music records the effect without identifying the source.
“Come and Get Me” reverses the running imagery by asking another person to cross the distance. It can sound flirtatious, defiant, vulnerable, or exhausted depending upon how the invitation is heard. The speaker is available but unwilling or unable to complete the entire journey alone. Pop songs are filled with such invitations because desire is always partly a problem of geography. Someone must move.
The album’s drums make that movement physical. They are not buried beneath shoegaze haze or reduced to decorative timekeeping. Their pulse gives the record a cardiovascular character. Slumberland’s description of the pause between heartbeats is particularly apt: silence may be brief for one person and terrifyingly extended for another, but the next beat changes the meaning of the pause. Humdrum sounds like that returning beat.
“Underneath the Sky” closes without attempting to reach beyond the atmosphere. After every heaven, superbloom, eternal blue, and ultraviolet illumination, the final song places the listener underneath rather than inside the sky. This is a modest but important position. The sky remains above, visible and unreachable. Transcendence has not abolished earthly location.
To live underneath the sky is to share one enormous ceiling with people traveling in different directions. Lovers separate beneath it. Bands dissolve beneath it. Records are made, mailed, discovered, forgotten, and rediscovered beneath it. The phrase joins intimacy to scale without requiring the individual to become cosmic. A small human life can remain small and still participate in something immeasurable.
The cover’s ecstatic, frightened face now begins to resemble the listener caught between those scales. Its expression is too large for one emotion because the album’s heavens are not purely comforting. Nostalgia can restore and imprison. A familiar musical language can provide shelter while reminding us that the period associated with it has disappeared. Renewal carries evidence of whatever had to end before renewal became necessary.
There is sometimes a suspicion that artists working through visibly older styles are avoiding the present. That suspicion mistakes time for a row of locked rooms. Music never travels neatly from past to future. Riffs, recording methods, clothing, formats, local scenes, and emotional codes disappear and return because each generation encounters them under altered conditions. The person hearing Felt or Sarah Records decades later is not having the original experience badly. They are creating another experience from the surviving signal.
Every Heaven is convincing because Vanderbilt does not pretend to have discovered these sounds without predecessors. The references are part of the pleasure. Listeners can trace guitars toward R.E.M., vocals toward The Wake, rhythms toward New Order, haze toward Pale Saints, and romantic directness toward Sarah Records. But influence is not subtraction. Mapping the tributaries does not make the river disappear.
Slumberland is the ideal home for such a record because the label has spent decades treating indie pop not as a frozen period style but as a renewable social language. Its releases repeatedly demonstrate that modest-scale music can carry enormous emotional weather. Every Heaven enters that continuity without becoming anonymous within it. The album knows the neighborhood, but it has its own address.
The word “humdrum” finally loses its insult. Repetition is how songs become companions, how routes become homes, how relationships acquire histories, and how a person rebuilding after collapse discovers that another day has arrived. Heaven may not be one permanent destination waiting beyond ordinary life. It may be hidden inside the humdrum, appearing whenever familiar elements suddenly align and the next heartbeat arrives on time.

Angel Olsen - 2024 - Cosmic Waves Volume 1

Jagjaguwar, Inc. – none

The cover appears at first to show fireworks suspended against a black sky, but the longer one looks, the less certain their scale becomes. They might be stars, flowers, radio signals, microscopic organisms, or diagrams of sound expanding from several separate sources. Thin lines connect smaller bursts to a large central bloom, turning the image into a bouquet and a communications network at once. Nothing is represented realistically, yet the arrangement immediately explains the record. Five distinct artistic bodies send out their own colors and patterns. Angel Olsen receives those transmissions, carries them through her own voice, and sends altered waves back.
A cosmic wave is a magnificent contradiction in scale. “Cosmic” stretches toward distances that exceed ordinary imagination, while a wave can be intimate enough to enter the small bones of the ear. Waves travel without transporting their source intact. A singer remains in one room while the vibration continues into another room, another city, another format, and another person’s memory. The receiver does not obtain the original event. It receives energy shaped by everything the wave has crossed.
That is the operating principle of Cosmic Waves Volume 1. It is not quite a compilation, covers album, label sampler, split release, or Angel Olsen record, although it contains qualities of all five. Its two sides form a listening circuit. Five artists each present a song of their own choosing, establishing how they wish to enter the room. Olsen then chooses a different song from each catalogue and answers through reinterpretation. She does not hold up the same composition twice and ask the audience to select a winner. Each artist receives two openings: one self-portrait and one portrait made by an attentive outsider.
This distinction protects the collection from becoming a talent-show arrangement in which an established musician demonstrates how much better she can perform songs by lesser-known artists. The first side belongs entirely to the invited voices. They are allowed to create the initial conditions, select their own points of entry, and remain stylistically incompatible. Olsen waits until the record has heard them before she responds.
Her imprint name, somethingscosmic, quietly returns to “Some Things Cosmic,” a song from her earliest cassette-era work. That origin makes this release feel circular without becoming nostalgic. Olsen entered public musical life through a small tape label and now uses the leverage accumulated across her career to construct another modest doorway. The gesture does not recreate the world of hand-dubbed cassettes, where discovery depended heavily upon letters, mail orders, tiny catalogues, local shows, and recommendations moving slowly between friends. It carries that spirit into a different distribution system.
Volume 1 is important. The number turns the record from a one-time exercise into a possible continuing method. A volume belongs to an archive, library, encyclopedia, or sequence whose total boundary has not yet been established. It says this constellation is not definitive. These five artists do not represent every direction worth following. They are the first group of signals Olsen has chosen to amplify.
“Glamorous” begins by placing glamour somewhere far from polished celebrity. Poppy Jean Crawford’s guitar-heavy performance is forceful, ragged, and physically present, carrying the kind of vocal authority that can make aggression sound melodic without domesticating it. The title becomes less about perfect surfaces than the charisma generated when someone refuses to shrink. Glamour is not cleanliness here. It is voltage around a person.
The song also disrupts any expectation that Olsen’s compilation will be populated only by delicate singer-songwriters resembling her quieter work. Crawford enters loudly enough to rearrange the room. Her presence argues that curation should reveal the curator’s curiosity rather than merely reproduce the curator’s established brand. A useful recommendation does not always say, “This sounds like me.” Sometimes it says, “This changes what I think I can sound like.”
Olsen answers Crawford later with “The Takeover,” but she does not attempt to reproduce the same guitar force. Her version draws the song toward spectral 1960s pop, allowing melody and language to move forward while the original surface changes. Crawford has said that hearing Olsen sing her words made her reconsider them, because another voice emphasized the message from a different angle. This may be the most intimate power of a cover. It returns a song to its writer as something simultaneously familiar and no longer privately owned.
A takeover ordinarily means one power displacing another. In the context of a cover, however, the takeover becomes mutual. Olsen enters Crawford’s song, but Crawford’s language also takes over Olsen’s breathing, timing, and melodic instincts. Interpretation is not conquest unless the interpreter refuses to be changed by what she interprets.
Coffin Prick’s “Blood” moves into stranger electronic territory, built from psychedelic synth color, nervous motion, and a rhythmic intelligence that makes the human body feel partly mechanical. Blood is usually invoked as proof of organic authenticity: blood relatives, blood sacrifice, blood pumping beneath the skin. Here the title enters a synthetic environment and raises the question of where the body stops when electronics begin reorganizing its movement.
Olsen’s response, “Swimming,” performs one of the album’s most radical transformations. The original song’s viscous electronic atmosphere is converted into buoyant retro pop. Swimming is already a useful image for reinterpretation. A swimmer cannot command the water to disappear. Progress depends upon entering resistance, learning its pressure, and coordinating the body with a medium that could otherwise overwhelm it. Olsen swims through Coffin Prick’s composition rather than standing above it. She changes the stroke, temperature, and surrounding light without pretending the water belongs to her.
Sarah Grace White’s “Ride” marks the point where the first side’s early turbulence begins opening into greater space. Its hypnotic restraint gives every melodic decision more consequence. A ride implies movement without necessarily identifying who controls the vehicle, where it is going, or whether the passenger can leave. This uncertainty suits a record built around artistic invitation. Agreeing to be interpreted by another musician means surrendering some control over where the song may travel.
White’s voice and sparse construction demonstrate that intensity does not require density. A melody can command attention by refusing to fill every available surface. The song becomes an open landscape through which small changes travel a long distance.
Olsen chooses “Sinkhole” as her answering piece. The pairing subtly reverses the direction of “Ride.” One moves horizontally through space; the other opens vertically beneath it. A sinkhole forms when apparently stable ground has been hollowed from below. Its collapse looks sudden, but the conditions have often developed invisibly for years. Emotional life can behave the same way. A person may appear to move forward until one ordinary step discovers the absence concealed beneath the surface.
Olsen’s rendering turns the song into suspended atmosphere rather than spectacle. She does not need to dramatize the fall. The most frightening part of a sinkhole may be the delayed knowledge that the ground was already disappearing while daily life continued above it.
“Make Believe You Love Me” by Maxim Ludwig places performance directly inside its title. Make-believe is childhood play, artistic invention, denial, acting, and the temporary agreement to behave as though an imagined condition were real. Love already requires interpretation because no person can directly enter another person’s consciousness. We infer affection from words, decisions, touch, consistency, sacrifice, memory, and the stories we tell about those signs. The title asks for one more layer: even if love is absent, could its behavior be performed convincingly enough to provide shelter?
Ludwig’s minimalism gives the question little room to hide. The song does not bury uncertainty beneath elaborate production. Its emotional weight depends upon how much emptiness can remain around the request without breaking it.
Olsen answers with “Born Too Blue,” finding an expansive old-songbook sadness inside Ludwig’s writing. The phrase turns melancholy into an original condition rather than a passing mood. To be born blue suggests arriving already tuned to frequencies other people may hear only during loss. Olsen has always been unusually capable of making sadness feel like a physical architecture, with rooms, corridors, windows, and stairways rather than one undifferentiated dark cloud. Her interpretation does not cure the blue. It gives it shape enough to inhabit.
There is a danger whenever a famous interpreter covers an obscure songwriter this beautifully. The cover can become more visible than the source, causing listeners to treat the original artist as raw material for the established artist’s achievement. Cosmic Waves attempts to resist this by constructing the entire release around names, sequence, and reciprocity. Ludwig is heard first. Olsen’s version points backward toward him rather than pretending the song arrived ownerless.
“Wonder Now” by Camp Saint Helene closes the first half with wide-open folk atmosphere. Its title joins two relationships with time. Wonder is an astonished way of looking, but it is also an unresolved question. “Now” insists that the question be encountered in the present rather than postponed until certainty arrives. Wonder now, before knowledge becomes complete enough to make surprise feel unnecessary.
The band’s spaciousness makes the song feel less empty than environmentally large. Silence becomes sky rather than missing information. This is a different form of cosmic music from synthesizers imitating outer space. The cosmic can be reached through a voice placed carefully against open air, allowing scale to emerge from restraint.
“Farfisa Song,” Olsen’s final answer, brings the collection back to a smaller and more domestic technology. Farfisa organs carry associations with garages, chapels, psychedelic records, community halls, inexpensive studios, and musicians seeking grandeur from a portable instrument. After the cosmic title and stellar cover, the record ends by naming a particular keyboard. The universe returns to circuitry, keys, fingers, and a sound made by someone in a room.
That descent is appropriate because every cosmic wave eventually becomes local reception. The signal may have crossed enormous conceptual distance, but hearing occurs through material: cartridge, stylus, speaker cone, digital converter, cable, air, eardrum, memory. The cosmic does not cancel the ordinary mechanism. It requires it.
Olsen recorded and mixed all five interpretations herself, which gives the second side a private workshop quality. The performances are not framed as authoritative studio monuments. They resemble messages assembled after sustained listening, each retaining some of the soft distortion, reverberant distance, and inward experimentation associated with her earliest recordings. The circle back toward Strange Cacti is therefore not only institutional. It is audible in the willingness to let a song remain slightly ghosted around the edges.
Covering another person’s work is a special form of attention because it requires entering decisions that were not made for one’s own body. A melodic interval may sit awkwardly in the new singer’s range. A word may carry an emotional history she does not share. A rhythmic emphasis may resist her habits. The interpreter can either correct these differences until the song resembles her existing work or allow the resistance to teach her another way of moving.
Olsen describes this process as learning from other people’s words and melodies, and the record supports that idea. Her covers do not simply display her versatility. They reveal what happens when a recognizable artistic identity becomes temporarily permeable. Voice remains personal, but personality does not have to be a locked house.
The compilation format has always carried a social promise. A listener may purchase a record for one familiar name and leave with several unknown ones. Labels, zines, DJs, mixtape makers, bloggers, record-store employees, friends, and older siblings have long performed this curatorial labor. Streaming algorithms imitate part of the function by identifying statistical similarity, but similarity is not the same as trust. Human recommendation includes biography, surprise, affection, error, and the desire to give someone else a stage.
Cosmic Waves is especially valuable because Olsen’s admiration becomes material support rather than merely a list of names in an interview. She commissions music, places the artists on vinyl, covers their songs, shares the attention attached to her name, and directly asks listeners to buy their records, attend their shows, and tell other people. The compliment becomes infrastructure.
Still, the record cannot entirely eliminate the imbalance it uses for good. Olsen’s name appears most prominently. Many listeners will enter through her half, and some may treat the first side as preliminary material. Generosity does not erase hierarchy. It can, however, redirect hierarchy toward circulation. The established artist becomes less a summit than a transmitter.
The cover diagram captures this beautifully. The central bloom may initially look like Olsen surrounded by smaller stars, but the lines also allow energy to move inward. The center is being formed by the surrounding bodies. A curator is not simply someone who shines light upon others. She is someone whose own understanding has been reorganized by what she has heard.
The album’s deepest subject may therefore be listening as a creative act. Listening is often treated as passive consumption, but careful listening changes the receiver. It creates new associations, reopens memories, alters standards, and makes previously impossible combinations available. Olsen listens closely enough to identify not only songs she admires but songs she wishes to inhabit. Then she returns evidence of that listening.
The wave travels out, reaches another body, and comes back changed. Neither version cancels the other. Each provides information about what the song can carry.
Volume 1 leaves the network open. New artists, styles, friendships, and interpretations may enter later installments. Even without another volume, this first collection proposes a durable model: discovery followed by attention, attention followed by transformation, and transformation directed back toward the source rather than away from it.
The stars on the cover may be flowers after all. A bouquet is assembled from separate organisms whose differences create the arrangement. Its purpose is not to prove that every flower is identical or that one bloom deserves ownership of the others. It says: these existed together for a moment, someone noticed the relationship, and the act of noticing became another object capable of traveling.