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Hemlock Smith Michael Frei [words] Michael Frei, Stéphane Babey, Philippe Simon [composition, performance: piano / vocals / bass / bowed, e-bowed and plucked guitar / trumpet / drum machine / rifles / lightbulb / roadworks / Jaipur’s Monkey Temple monks / synthesizers / laptops] Julien Feltin [electric guitar on Metaphors] Roger Duperrex [bird loop on L’Appallissade]
This threesome, calling themselves Hemlock Smith & Les Poissons Autistes, is a collaboration between two entities that have come together for the purpose of the Three Times Dead project: Hemlock – which is the artistic alter ego of singer-songwriter Michael Frei from Lausanne, Switzerland – and the duo Les Poissons Autistes, which is comprised of Stéphane Babey and Philippe Simon, existing between Lausanne and Geneva. This duo has several albums with sonic landscapes to their credit. These two entities on the Swiss art music scene became aware of each other through the web sampler Bon pour les Oreilles Vol. 2, issued by the Swiss magazine L’Hebdo in 2007. Frei is described in the informative texts submitted with the disc as “sweet pop”, while Babey and Simon are identified with “noisy landscapes”. The unlikely thing happened that these opposites were drawn to each other, and a cautious collaboration took shape, now resulting in this CD. The accompanying leaflet states that Three Times Dead “mixes the two worlds together rather than presenting them as opposites; the sweet pop loses itself in the drones, the soft piano intertwines with a screeching guitar, the voice develop severe new facets and mutates into an instrument of its own.” I’m always happy and energized when I hear something that I didn’t expect; something that moves me in some way, and which I could not have foreseen. This CD gives me one of those experiences. This unexpected quality of these tracks in part has to do with the texts, as well as with the way these texts are dealt with; the way they’re articulated and the fashion in which they appear in their sonic surroundings. I get three associations right away on my first spin-through, in chronological order from Randy Newman’s album Little Criminals (1977), which my former wife Judy played to me when we lived in Dallas, Texas in 1978, over Derek Jarman’s astonishing CD Blue, dealing with HIV and AIDS (1993) right up to Robert Wyatt’s Comicopera (2008). All these albums, in their special ways, work with poetry and music and melancholia, and have touching points with Hemlock Smith’s & Les Poissons Autistes’ Three Times Dead; sometimes through intonation and articulation, sometimes through moods and modes, and all the time through a common tradition of narration and sound, albeit expressed in individual ways through a common purple torque of melancholy. This music makes me smoothly sad; gives me feelings and moods that I thought my body had forgotten, the way you might rediscover the pull of gravity, which you normally never really give a thought, but in which you feel compelled to once again question your sense of freedom. If you don’t consider gravity, your body might feel free, but the moment you start sensing this invisible pull, you realize that it’s hard to feel free within a body extending through space and time. Melancholy. Gravitational pull. The illusion of freedom. A body sprawling through our known dimensions. Somewhere here the intellectual and emotional center of Three Times Dead falls in on itself, halting at the Horizon of Events, while our perception hovers inside a semi-transparent reverberation – faint but everywhere! It is impossible to distinguish gravity from acceleration, says Einstein, but he also says that gravity is nothing but bent time….
Track 1. Birmingham [4:12] The Birmingham track, which the group uses to introduce the album, starts on that lyrical, withheld but closely miked note that immediately has me remember one particular tune by Randy Newman called In Germany Before The War (there was a man who owned a store, in nineteen hundred thirty-four, in Düsseldorf…), starting with the line “In Birmingham, before the war, there were some monuments, so proud they roared…” – so this angle must be intended, and not something I just discovered inside my huge frames of reference. It is also amusing to find that Michael Frei applies those funny, Dylanesque emergency rhymes: the war / they roared! Nice! I wonder what the intention was, when bringing Randy Newman into this avant-garde scene in Switzerland? On the Newman album, there is a song called Sigmund Freud’s Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America, where one stanza goes: “In the year of nineteen five, merely trying to survive, took my knapsack in my hand, caught a train to Switzerland…” I am pleasantly surprised by the fact that I seem to speak mostly about Randy Newman and an old late 1970s’ album of his, thus evoking feelings inside me from my time as a newly married immigrant in Texas, and about Albert Einstein and his history, also opening the door to my ex-father-in-law’s Central European Jewish descent in Kassel, Germany, from where he narrowly escaped Herr Hitler to seek refuge in the USA. I would never have though that this new, experimental and avant-garde CD from Everestrecords would throw me into these layers of history, personal as well as universal, that it does, from bar 1 – but this is one of the great pleasures of reviewing music; you never know where it will take you. Hemlock Smith & Les Poissons Autistes, by way of words as well as music, grounds this set of songs in a wide and deep sweep through human history, just by hinting at an old Randy Newman album, which in turn widens the perspective into the acute mid-century refugee state of the intellectual European Jewry. The vocals, though very close, right up your face (you feel the gusts of his words, when the singer sings) soar and halt in breathless utterances, like sunlight through mist, balancing the clear glass chords of the piano – carefully, tenderly, in a delicate equilibrium. In verse two a suspended layer of transparent synthesizer drones are added, as the chronology of the text has moved from “before the war” to “during the war”. Consequently, and in the same meager, transparent setting, the third verse appears “after the war”. This very melancholy recollection ends in resignation and dejection, with statements like “you wore a veil of shattered glass” and “we’re settled dust […] and now we’re lost”… until finally: “we stumble on, because we must…” This Birmingham track leaves me in a serene sadness that I seldom feel. Track 2. I Rehearse My Death Every Day [5:11] The text of this piece is so filled with depressive remarks that the title is fully conceivable! How about lines like “I dress in clothes I once liked”, “I eat an old piece of bread. I would share it but there’s no one to share it with…”, “I call the elevator. It’s the only thing I call…”, “I get out of the house having talked to no one, not even to myself…”, “I work all day at a work I don’t like” – and finally, repeated: “I rehearse my death every day”. This music keeps on being extremely beautiful. I didn’t expect this when I saw the three Swiss gentlemen posing as some burlesque musical jesters in black and white photographs for the public relations stunt, but it’s a fact as track two commences its death rehearsals… It sounds like long, extended strokes on an electric viola – I come to think of Walter Fändrich’s CD on ECM (ECM 1412) [1989], simply called Viola – but I would assume it’s in fact a bowed electric guitar, since viola isn’t listed in the group’s instrumentation. It might be appropriate to point out that the death rehearsals exposed in this piece are negative ones; the results of mistakes or bad luck or personal psychological loads – or Karma – and not the positive kinds of “death rehearsals” that are important ingredients in Buddhist philosophy. In my sonic collections, for example, I sport a 5-CD set with Dalai lama’s lecture Advice on Dying, read by Jeffrey Hopkins. That is a hopeful and positive death rehearsal, with the aim of either a good rebirth or, indeed, Enlightenment and liberation from the Wheel of Samsara. It seems that the death rehearsals of this beautifully sounding Hemlock Smith & Les Poissons Autistes piece describes the bewilderment of the secular Westerner’s scattered, futile and aimless existence in materialistic hopelessness. The quite wonderful tones from the bowed electric guitar does not sound secular, though, but could easily fill the space of a cathedral with piety and meekness. It has a liturgical quality to it, not unlike some William Byrd compositions I recently enjoyed. As the voice comes in, stating: “I rehearse my death every day”, it is kept low and intimate, but very, very close, as if the narrator puts his mouth right to your ear, speaking under his breath – and this is where I sense the similarity with Derek Jarman’s compelling AIDS CD Blue from 1993, on a Mute Records CD (CDSTUMM 49). He also talks close to your ear about things of decisive importance, and the music and soundscape of Jarman’s work has the same soaring, blinding feel. This could be the inner monologue of any depressed soul wandering the corridors of a psychiatric clinic or the monotony of the rooms of poverty in a forlorn, run-down suburban tenement house. The winding, shrill bands of high-pitch, bowed electric guitar are reproduced and layered like high clouds in the mind of the stooping person, as he’s locked in a loop of desperation: “I dress in clothes I once liked”… Darker bands of audio are added, the atmosphere tightening around the throat of the narrator. The beauty of the music contours the desperate predicament of the subject. It’s a piece about loneliness and the basic, structural isolation of people in Western civilizations. Perhaps Facebook is the only place left to feed on communication? Track 3. The Flat Hands [6:28] This piece shows a much whimsier attitude when you study the lyrics, on par with the latest SJ Esau (Sam Wisternoff) CD Small Vessel, which I reviewed on Sonoloco recently. I got the texts for Hemlock Smith & Les Poissons Autistes’ CD Three Times Dead from their MySpace location, and maybe they should be more careful with the spelling, because there are numerous misspellings in the lyrics for this bit, and I don’t think it’s intentional, though, of course, you can never be sure… A dark electronic bass drone hits it off, soon accompanied by a repetitious gesture in an ambience of a big hall of sorts, until the crunched vocals spit out the funky lyrics in an alienated, grating fashion, most of the timbers of the voice cut off, leaving only this barbed wire toxicity, to which the words are fastened with clothes pegs. The distortion is invasive, when compared to the close encounters of the vocals in previous tunes. Here the lyrics rise like faint smoke from piles of leaves in October, seen from a window of a passing train.
Track 4. The Man in the Grey Suit [3:41] A quick browsing of the lyrics indicates that Michael Frei once again addresses Death, in the guise of the man in the grey suit, the man with the black tie: “He has me cornered, he has me measured…” This is one of those closely miked endeavors again, that I’ve already come to appreciate very much from these three musicians. A piano opens in thinly stocked tones, taking its time, and a scraping sound, perhaps from a bowed guitar, emerges. The vocals are half spoken, half sung, on tiptoes through the transparency. There is a certain trench coat ambience to the vibrancy of this almost hypothetical haze of sound. Perhaps it stems from Roger Duperrex’s guitar body brushing, which I otherwise cannot make out. This is a reasoning, inward cabaret song: one still moment of reflection in a rare, silent corner of a wild life; a dandy smelling his final fate. Track 5. Metaphors [4:29] Behind a cleverly swept filter of time I feel this liturgical sensation again, in a mystical Church Father kind of way; a taste of that original holiness that since long has withered away and grown stale, forming traditions and ceremonies; hard shells around the original secret for lukewarm citizens of perverted societies. Through the purple veil of mystique that Hemlock Smith & Les Poissons Autistes so beautifully spread in long, winding, smoky stretches of timbres, I get a sense of connection, of immediacy: a kind of shortcut through the centuries, down the culture layers of history. The anonymous drone is pulsating slowly, with a slight distortion, as if something was vibrating against something else, like the sound of a loudspeaker cone about to crack up. The drone picks up some lighter, more colorful timbres, but keeps up the pulsating progression. A cautious, withheld melody disengages out of the drone, rising slightly above the fundamental harmonics. This is where the male voice begins its almost whispering speech-singing: “Speaking in metaphors is something I can do; describe phantom entities, utter silence too…” A screeching electric guitar, whining and moaning intrusively, enters, played by Julien Feltin. White noise way up in the spectrum of sounds, harsh and sharp, might be some kind of electronic manipulation. Synthesizers and laptops are counted among the sound sources on the CD, and that may mean anything. The music, which balances its grey mist – with strains of inherent color-blazing dots – around a softly swaying melody, slowly tightens and increases in volume and harshness, while manipulated guitar tones in a mimicry of dreamy sea birds soar way inside an August Strindberg oil painting. The sensation of loudspeaker distortion grows ever more distinct, and the electric guitar wails like Hendrix at Woodstock. The hushed voice comes back, summing up the lyrics: “I haven’t said a thing…” Beautiful! Track 6. If You Had Done More Sports (Wheelchair Suicide According to Charles Bukowski) Here we have a go at one of the most original pieces on the CD. It’s in fact a story all unto itself, told in its entirety on a backdrop of pumping, polished drums, discriminating percussion, some snapping fly-spot electronics and scratching, scraping fuzz box guitars: a story told in a hushed, snarling, spitting lingo, making me think of readings by the beat poets: Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder – but even more of a contemporary literary and musical genius: Mike Daily from Portland, Oregon, who struck the literary and musical world with amazement with his novel and double CD ALARM in 2007. Nothing I’ve heard since can measure up to Daily’s effort, but If You Had Done More Sports (Wheelchair Suicide According to Charles Bukowski) is a short visit in that same realm of genial, pumping, relentless musical-poetic showroom of the present! At the very end the narrator breaks into actual singing for the first time: “…and the wheel of fate turns round and round… wheelchair of fate, turns round and round and round…” reminding me of Joni Mitchell’s The Circle Game. The whole piece is very cinematic, like a scene from a film, so the references to movies are appropriate – and fun! The entire text of this piece: “Here I am, sitting in my top-notch, guaranteed-for-life wheelchair, a crouched and pathetic figure on the first floor of my completely tasteless Hollywood mansion, staring down the spiral staircase, the stairway to nothingness and oblivion. Images keep flickering in my head: Gene Tierney throwing herself down the stairs because she didn't want her baby, Richard Widmark pushing the old lady down to her demise in Kiss of Death. I remember the old woman having a chair with really big wheels – kinda cool!! And I can still hear Richard's crazed laughter when he did it, even though I haven't seen the film since 1951. He was a swell guy, Richard; I met him once, but the sound of his name was a little bit too German for me! Such great movies! Come to think of it, my life has never been this dramatic. Quite the opposite, really. The stroke was just bad luck, the doctor had said, and of course, the alcohol and the cigarettes didn't help! Well, then, time for my exercise… I mutter and unlock the brakes. I roll towards the staircase and try to convince myself that I'm actually gonna do it! But then, all this seems so ridiculous, pretentious and vain! Real torture in a wheelchair is not to end it, but to sit it out and wait, wait for Capt. Death to finally find you, helpless, sweating and full of piss! I roll back to my bedroom and turn on the TV. What was I thinking? I mumble, as I pour myself an indecently large glass of scotch. I lean back into my comfy, wheeled prison and grab the remote control: Well then, let's find ourselves some sports! We can do porn later! (and the wheel of fate, turns round and round… Track 7. Myrta [5:27] Michael Frei does not back off from hard subjects. He even excels in them; he is drawn to them. It’s unusual, and a relief, I think. I recall when Dylan began relating feelings like anger, hate and disgust in his songs. That was new then. It cleared the air, the poetic and musical air. Frei, with some question marks left unstraightened, talks about a child’s death, an infant’s death, right after birth. First I thought it might have to do with an abortion, and then about a miscarriage. I don’t think, after listening a few times, that’s it’s about abortion. It could be a miscarriage that the poet ponders, but I think it’s the story of an infant born and dying the same day. It seems to be a very personal account – which I can relate to deeply, since I lost a child once, this way; my first child, called Isak. This song is about another such child, called Myrta. Or is this song a general account, of the masses of nameless children that succumb to starvation and illness every day around the world, because of our greed, because of the Masters of War, because of those demons of society that people like Ulrike Meinhof set out to liberate us from? In the end, I believe the song is a personal account, widened to encompass all the suffering small ones of our planet, the way Christ once expressed it, in The King James’ translation. ”Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” The tune starts tenderly with a dry piano trickling slowly in a repetitious figure with lots of air. The narrator speaks in a hushed, all but whispering mode, close to the microphone; a story of loss, of pain, of love, far beyond the conceivable – that kind of loss and pain that we all have to suffer, sooner or later. Glass harp audio reaches like rays of light through these painful stanzas, almost bringing tears to my eyes as I listen, formulating these words. The narrator switches from speech to song and back, sounding a bit like the aged Tom Waits at times. This singer balances on a thin line between the devastating and the pretentious, but he never falls off: he lands on both feet at the end of the account, his honesty and honor untarnished. A very touching song, which can be seen as a personal account as well as a universal song of love and pain. Track 8. L’Appalissade [3:51] Sound source “bird loop” seems interesting enough! That’s what Roger Duperrex provides on L’Appalissade. Once again the lyrics are whimsical à la Sam Wisternoff. A sample from Frei’s verses: “I yearn for you, I’m concerned for you”, “I fall for you, appalled by you” etcetera. A miniature of a love song; a lightweight piece in amongst the heavy-duty stuff. The piano is playful, light-hearted, trilling, like a rivulet in spring. The bird loop embellishes the soundscape.
Track 9. Les corps subtils (Coronary Coroner) [6:29] This piece is highly interesting, for a number of reasons. At the point when I hadn’t even listened to it, but read the text, I thought it was made up, written by Michael Frei, but then it seemed to me that the entire text (quite long to be the basis of one tune on this CD) was a recorded account, as it is explained: “Transcript of original recording made in February 2008, at Hillsboro Public Library, on a dictaphone. Voice of William J. Pratt used by permission.” However, as I started listening, I heard a voice that spoke in a strangely faked American – or some kind of English - accent, by someone who obviously doesn’t have English as his first language. And where the hell is Hillsboro? Why interview a coroner in a library and not in the morgue? I’m pretty sure now that William F. Pratt is a made-up identity. I believe Michael Frei is the author of the text. Another aspect that shows that the interview is bogus (the right of any fictional writer!) is the fluent passage of words, without a single flaw, a single hum or cough or any extraneous insertions. This never happens in real life. This is a text written with the intent of making it sound like spontaneous speech, and therefore the author has thrown in a number of “you know” and “I guess”, hehe, but then they recorded the text under controlled studio circumstances, albeit with a low-fi sound, to make it actually sound as if the account was recorded on a dictaphone! The desire of the writer and the narrator to make this sound like spoken colloquial language when it obviously isn’t, makes the talk sound severely strange, even alien, like it was spoken by that human Valentine Michael Smith born on Mars and then brought to Earth in Robert A. Heinlein’s famous sci-fi novel from 1961; Stranger In A Strange Land. This spoken account of a coroner’s reflections on his professional life as a… yes, coroner, for sure is a strange document in a strange language… but we like it! Its double strangeness makes it even more desirable – to me, at least… and the ramblings about what makes suicide and murder possible are viable issues. Towards the end of the act, the coroner delivers these quite wonderful lines: “I'm hovering over those bodies, like the vulture, like the gravedigger that I am, wondering if, one day, in any mysterious way, one of them will speak to me… But hey, I figure, as long as they're not talking, at least, they're telling the truth, I guess…” The soundscape provided for this dry, grey, thin and sharp “dictaphone” voice is a scraping ambience with slowly winding electric guitars and the infrasound of trucks gearing up or backing up to loading ramps or something. Hemlock Smith & Les Poissons Autistes have succeeded in shaping a sounding environment that comes across as a real live documentary soundscape, with the exception of the excessively applied heavy trucks. Fun! Bogus and fun! But hey – I just noticed something right now, which may change all I’ve said about this piece. It says on MySpace that the text is a “transcript” of an original recording. That would explain the strangeness and also the fluency. That would allow Michael Frei to tidy up the text, omitting all extraneous, involuntary sounds etcetera, and it also would explain why the narrator speaks in such a strange, non-American accent. You decide! I don’t know what this really is! On the information leaflet for reviewers is says, contradictory, that this really is “the voice of William J. Pratt”… Finally bogus anyway, then? (Humphrey Bogus?) Track 10. The Space Between Us [7:06] The final and concluding track on this tantalizing and startling new, impossible-to-brand CD from Everestrecords begins in mystical, spacey, velvety swoops of a synthesizer – (reminiscent of a lot of the content on California label Cold Blue Music) – and continues in lyrical fingerings up and down the piano keyboard, the vocals delivered in absentminded introversion: the web of screeching guitars in the distance a mirage down a highway that runs empty into the future.
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