Sarah Dougher :: the Ground Below
If you’ve just met that sort-of-special someone and you’re looking for that perfect song that says “I care, but not too much” or “I like you and tentatively hope you like me (but I rather doubt it)” or “We all know that love is a lie, but I am experiencing intense biochemical reactions around you that indicate a certain physical compatibility that may prove fruitful to explore would you be so inclined,” then you are not looking for the Ground Below. This song is not for pussyfooting around. It’s for that moment, usually around 3 am, when you realize that there’s hours left before light and you have nothing to fill them but desire for someone who’s not there. Saying “you’re my world” won’t work because that’s a dumb cliché. Luckily, Sarah Dougher found a way to say exactly that minus the dumb:
Every sky your eye
every star you are
every word I know
and the ground below.
It’s naked. It’s over the top. It’s also the truth, and you can’t take it back. Give it only to someone you can’t describe with qualifiers. I did, because it said the words I wanted to but couldn’t find and it said them clear as day.
I’m looking at the mix I put it on now, with its hand-painted cover and painstaking tiny writing. After years spent in two cars and four houses in states separated by a thousand miles, the case is so scratched that it’s nearly opaque. It’s one of hundreds we have, yet when I asked for it my husband instantly knew where it was. I knew he would. It’s why I gave it to him.
I love you, Hiram. Happy anniversary.
the Ground Below
Sarah Dougher (homepage)
Selda Bağcan :: Bülbül
When Selda Bağcan was a physics student in Ankara in the late 1960s, she and her friends listened to every psychedelia and folk record pouring out of the US and Europe that they could get their hands on. Soon she began recording. Because of the gulf of time and language between us I don’t know how, but I imagine late nights, friends, wine and smoke, and borrowed gear. The resulting songs have a political urgency and sound borrowed from the records she was devouring, but deepened by something completely new: her country’s own political and musical history, her guitar, and her beautiful, singular voice.
In 1971, her last year at school, she released her first 45. It sold nearly a million copies, and suddenly she was no longer a student recording furtively with friends, but a professional musician. She released five more 45s that year, now considered classics in Turkey. That same year, the military usurped the government with a coup by memorandum. Prominent leftist leaders like Deniz Gezmiş were murdered in increasing numbers. Selda Bağcan became the voice of that year until she was known only as Selda, the mother of Turkish protest-folk music and revolutionary left-wing progressive politics.
Since then, Selda has endured censorship and imprisonment. She’s been unable to travel freely or perform. Yet there are still her records, which have slowly trickled into the outside world. The barriers of time and politics and language melt away at the sound of her voice. Bülbül is a song named for a bird, and the voice that sings it moves with the same effortless beauty and freedom. But it’s still a song sung inside a cage.
Bülbül
Selda Bağcan (myspace page)
Sincere thanks to my friend Emre Akyüz for help with Turkish history and translation, and for giving me so much of Selda’s music.
Namelessnumberheadman :: Animal Kingdom
All namlessnumberheadman records are heartbreakingly good. They break my heart with their shameless beauty and grace and they further break my heart because they are one of my bands. You have a few yourself, I’m sure. The bands you love like old friends, the bands you press on friends and strangers and anyone who will listen, the bands you cannot for the life of you believe that people aren’t showering with the love and adulation that should rightfully be theirs. I lived in Kansas for years but never saw them play and I feel like such a chump because of it. I saw a bunch of other damn bands that namelessnumberheadman keeps getting inexplicably compared to by lazy damn people who characterize midwest music like Mark Leyner once did its freeways: corn corn Stuckey’s corn corn Stuckey’s. And God knows I saw many a deadly dull band while this one was writing and playing some of the most original and inspiring music around, a perfect form of electronica-flavored orchestral pop. What the hell was I thinking?
Speaking of regrets, few bands voice them better. Wires Reply is a record that aches, and Animal Kingdom, despite its tense rhythms and lovely rising choruses, still sounds exactly like mourning for something precious long gone. The arrangement and playing is impeccable, but Andew Sallee’s voice is my favorite instrument. It’s so light and pure, so expressive and yearning. I could listen to him sing anything, but I’m glad he sings this:
Spider legs, cicada wings, and pulsing wet worms
Fingernails and petrified leaves’ veins
Cull the settled, well-spent parts
Tape the box to slow further decay
That’s a whole life laid to rest in a couple of lines. Animal Kingdom, along with so much of the rest of namelessnumberheadman’s catalog, proves conclusively that is possible to be both spare and lush at once, and modest and ambitious — and to carefully wring the best out of such contradictions. Listen to the song, and please seek out and listen to the rest of what this band has created. (I had the hardest time picking just one song from this record to give you, and once you hear it you’ll sympathize.) Soon enough, you’ll be another voice in the wilderness begging everyone you know to just listen to this band, already.
Animal Kingdom
namelessnumberheadman (myspace)