After Progress from Savage Accumulation by The Uncivil Society

I have always loved mushrooms. I remember shopping for clothes when I was 4 years old at JC Penny’s and had chosen a sweater with a collage of mushrooms - I proudly took it to my mother to purchase, the look of abject horror on her face - I am assuming it was connected to her son having a plethora of puffy penis shaped fungi wasn’t how she rolled. Later in life when I briefly lived in the Czech Republic I was introduced to the joy of walking through the forests in fall and having my hosts show me how to discover “families” and identify edibles. In moving to the Pacific Northwest I attempted and miserably failed to create my own mushroom farm using plug spawn. What was left in my backyard resembled a mini clear cut. One of the many ways my life was shaped by the forced isolation of the Covid pandemic is that I took the time to sit still - something that is very hard for me to do, and appreciate the natural rhythms that occurred around me in my life - from the trees, birds, moss and fungi sprouting around me. One of my current hobbies includes taking photos of fungus - which are featured throughout this project.

The words for this project were inspired by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s book “The Mushroom at the end of the World”. Tsing makes the matsuake mushroom as a focal point for exploring what she describes as the end of capitalist progress as ecological degradation and economic precarity proliferate in the twenty-first century. She highlights both the resilience of the matsuake, which humans have found cannot be domesticated, and the entanglements between and co-dependency of different species—or multi-species "assemblages"—in not only surviving precarious and disturbed environments, but in creating new environments.

The music for this project was influenced by Astor Piazzolla.  I was introduced to Piazzolla by Chris Danielson, a friend who was part of the Socialist Book Club I participated in during college.  Sonically, I was immediately smitten by Piazzolla’s ability to take simple structures and synthesize them into wonderfully complex compositions.  Chris would argue that the factory labor which is the foundation of the capitalist economy because time, and “progress” are coordinated, and in a way I think that is why this form of music resonated with him as well.   I felt Piazzolla’s polyphonic approach which masterfully blends and reinterprets the temporal rhythms that create moments of harmony and dissonance would be a great template to work from.

While working on this project I encountered Ian Brennan’s book “Muse $ick” which also inspired me to reflect on how I make the music. Mr. Brennan argues how “western structures of melody and unified rhythm that have created a unified coordination of time - that has been perfected as two minute pop songs this is an embodiment of progress.” Because our time - your most expensive commodity, is being colonized through digital platforms, like the matsuake mushroom mistake we must seek out the spaces to empower our expression. Not only to to use, but to give back, to share both art and ideas in the hope of stimulating imagination and action.

The most challenging aspect of this project was to attempt to take away the 2 and the 4 of back beat - which is suggestive of your mothers beating heart, and replace it with other less tangible expressions. While researching production techniques I read an interview with Van Dyke Parks in (Tape Op #145- such a delightful loon!) He talks about working with an artist who uses time changes that switch between 3/4 and 4/4 to create a 7/4 time signature and loops to construct ostinatos - or roughly translated from Italian it means obstinate - a really great descriptor of my own personality! To create something that people might not going to immediately tap their toes to, but achieve a “scansion of poetry” through the geometry of songwriting and its construction to achieve music “so ironic in its unimportance (yet) so pronounced” in its effect. This idea drove the musical foundations of the guided improvisation, experimentation and ultimate expressions in this project. Lyrically, I attempted to synthesize “social events through the intimacy of poetry” by tapping into a whisper of fear, rather than delivering vocals through my usual tone deaf bleats. Towards the end of the recording I reunited with Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” and thought emulating her layered synth voices would be a nice technique for the cover song.

In a later issue of Tape Op (#149), I read about the musician Catherine Anne Davies - aka the Anchoress, whose recording techniques I applied to this project. First, I stuck with my “best” recording set up - in this case using my Royer 121 with an SM57 to close capture sounds and my Rode NT1 for open sounds. The other approach I appropriated was to record instruments first using a click track, then play drums - more like an accent last - a complete reversal of my process up this this point. By doing this, I pushed myself to pick out and articulate separate phrases and fuse them to create simultaneous melodies and learned to listen for the harmony and dissonance that I created. As Ms. Tsing states “this kind of noticing is just what is needed to appreciate the multiple temporal rhythms and trajectories of the assemblage”.

While constructing this project that examined systemic ruin, it became clear to me now that while we experienced the global crisis of Covid it evolved into System Crisis and now has attenuated into personal crisis as we live through the long shadow of trauma. Like being at war - which has manifested into physical conflict in the Ukraine, the disruptions are causing shortages both in human capital, physical creation and distribution of resources. This year, I feet the reward for going to work everyday is now you get to do more work. The more I look around and interact with haggard retail workers, maxed out health care providers I can only see wafer thin systems being stretched and strained to collapse. With colleagues we recognize our own stress and frustration, and realize that we are the system. The larger question to me is asking what is real and why do I give a shit about work so much in the first place. Outrage feels woven into the daily cloth of our country now. That’s just the way it is — we are perpetually angry, if not mildly irritated, almost all of the time. There are a number of reasons for that: political tensions, social media and its underpinnings of constantly being surveilled, the general feeling that things used to be better.

I do, because I love to do it. I understand that I am a hack musician, a terrible vocalist and a sloppy graphic artist. I don’t care about achieving perfection, because I am happiest while being engaged in the exalted messiness of my creative process. I don’t worry about capturing the perfect take. I am satisfied by the pure joy I derive from expressing myself without filter or restraint.

theuncivilsociety.com