my friends in religious knives let me remix one of the tracks from their recent ecstatic peace LP The Door, probably not realizing what they were getting themselves into, as in my gem hunter aka billy withers aka 1/2 of glacial lakes guise I transmorgified their shambolic urban demonism into a shadowy yet mellow dubbed-out shoreline jam. RK often pledge the debt of their hoary, submerged sound to the charms of Brooklyn squalor, I say, well Fort Tilden's in Brooklyn too. Or, as Debord 'n' friends always said: under the paving stones, the beach!
props to maya religious knives for this, who describes this 1980 reggae classic thusly: "Shit is fucking intense, some of my all time favorite jams—black + psychedelic, and perfect for springy Friday."
why is this record a classic? because it's really slow. The whole thing. It sounds like the twinklers nodding off while piloting a codeine-fuelled submarine to the underwater world of Zion, schools of incandescent laser fish passing the portal. Highlights include: pretty much every song, but especially "Since I Threw the Comb Away," which is up there with "I'm Not Ashamed" by Culture as great reggae testimonials to the proud militancy of having huge, unshorn shit-logs for hair.
There are two kinds of ethics - there are the guidelines and principles that accompany you throughout day, and form the implicit horizon for judging acts of right and wrong: for example, no matter how much you might want to stick a letter opener into the meaty neck of the crowd control manager at the New Jersey hotel casino where you're staying, not because of the tumultuous scene that would ensue, or because of a belief in the absolute sanctity of life, (a principle which is usually easy to uphold but on shaky ground when it comes to New Jersey hotel casino managers), you refrain because it would certainly mean that your friends would be cheated of a long night of slowly losing all their money at organized gambling. The other kind of ethics is the kind that finds its prime 20th-century formulation in Heidegger's Being and Time: the ethics of the call. The injunction which strikes you like lightning, out of nowhere, seemingly sent from no one, but which you have the utmost existential duty to follow. The call has a number of religious/missionary overtones. Sometimes you spend years waiting on the other end of the line, waiting for the phone to ring, to hear the call. Our friends in Religious Knives were recently disturbed to their ethical cores to hear of the near-disastrous lack of face-melting that is currently scourging the West Coast, and have organized a tour in hopes of remedying this. Faces are going around, running errands, hanging around in shopping malls, paying money to see movies starring Gena Davis, and all the while they remain tragically un-melted. See RK on these dates and support their efforts to sonically force flesh to deliquesce from the skull.
3.15.08 - Monstersorri House - Seattle, Washington*
3.16.08 - The Artistery - Portland, Oregon* 3.17.08 - House Show - Arcata, California* 3.18.08 - Luna’s Cafe - Sacramento, California* 3.19.08 - The Hemlock Tavern - San Francisco, California* 3.20.08 - The Terminal - Oakland, California 3.21.08 - The Smell - Los Angeles, California 3.22.08 - Echo Curio - Los Angeles, California
AC would like to inaugurate a new AC feature in which we profile a band, quote Proust and Goethe, and with said band's consent offer up a new track of theirs and simultaneously offer up a very exclusive remix of the same track by Weekend Prince. AC is honored to focus here on Religious Knives. RK's new album, It's After Dark, is recently out on Troubleman Limited. They are founded in Brooklyn and tour and play often, recently opening for Thurston Moore at the Knitting Factory. They are closely tied to the community surrounding the yearly noise-rock heavy No Fun Fest, for which Maya Miller, RK's keyboardist, often pens images of slithering, malodorous trolls with floating potato feet.
Extra creative time is spent maintaining Heavy Tapes,a cassette-only distributor of underground experimental/noise recordings, HEAVY TAPES and producing visual representations of microcosms of melting, bleeding faces and spewing, gross things. MAYA E MILLER
Drawing for the inaugural issue of Showpaper, promoter Todd P's new venture which contains information on many all-age shows in Brooklyn, primarily of the Williamsburg-Bushwick loft circuit.
We feel the name Religious Knives is appropriate as their music sounds like monks slinking around in the dark waiting to stab each other, in chiaroscuro. RK has expressed to me their profound interest in 'downer psych', a neologism which well distinguishes their particular brand of chemical jam from other strands. For example, downer psych indicates you might be listening to Gary Higgins, but you are most likely not listening to Parson Sound.
I want to talk specifically about a track from It's After Dark that attracted me to remix it because I am attracted to songs like it for remix. This is the song called Adam. Many other songs on the album are of a more clamorous New Zealand noise-rock character, or a Psychic Ills track whose inebriated state has taken a queasy, stumbling turn and is about to fall sideways into some plastic trash bags. Adam is more restrained and downer, as if once you, while unpleasantly drunk, have fallen sideways into some trash bags, you decide that for the time being you are better off there, exposed to the night air and whooshing traffic sounds and your head in some old food, and you close your eyes and wait for sleep.
Here is what Mike Bernstein from Religious Knives has said to me about Adam.
"It's part of the song cycle on "It's After Dark" that deals with the brightest part of a summer day in the city, and it reflects the experience of the desire to bury yourself back in the ground only moments after you've managed to escape burial into freedom. The lyrics are collaborative and the song is meant to be hopeful and mournful at the same time."
I can't help but notice that the title says it's after dark, while there is a song cycle dealing with the 'brightest part' of the day.
The movements of escape and burial that Mike talks about are endemic to August in the city. One August, upon hearing me opine the loss of a girlfriend to another, an old British grifter who was my roommate, a rumpled struggling writer and proud chaser of foreign ass all at the same time, told me not to worry, "Everything falls apart in August. Nothing lasts. Wars get started." In Adam I think you can hear that paradoxical state of an urban August, after you have been set free for so long by the endless sunshine you no longer have anywhere to go, and you wander streets in the dark and in the stultifying soggy windless air and wait for the cold to come and bury you again.
In a passage from Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel also calls up some sounds of summer:
"I had stretched out on my bed, with a book, in my room which sheltered, trembingly, its transparent and fragile coolness from the afternoon sun, behind the almost closed blinds through which a glimmer of daylight had nevertheless managed to push its yellow wings, remaining motionless between the wood and the glass, in a corner, poised like a butterfly. It was hardly light enough to read, and the sensation of the light's splendor was given me only by the noise of Camus...hammering dusty crates; resounding in the sonorous atmosphere that is peculiar to hot weather, they seemed to spark off scarlet stars; and also by the flies executing their little concert, the chamber music of summer: evocative not in the manner of a human tune that, heard perchance during the summer, afterwards reminds you of it but connected to summer by a more necessary link: born from beautiful days, resurrecting only when the return, containing some of their essence, it does not only awaken their image in our memory; it guarantees their return, their actual, persistent, unmediated presence."
"The hammering of dusty crates, resounding in the sonorous atmosphere peculiar to hot weather" could describe a lot of RK's percussion, particularly 'Adam's' echoey thumps. The flies that incarnate summer retain in RK's case the aura of death and corporeal decay, their chamber music becomes a doom drone. Doom music is so often associated with winter, ice and cold, can there be a summer doom, or summer noir? Would "On the Beach" by Neil Young qualify?
In his writings on the morphology of clouds, Goethe makes a useful contribution to our understanding of Downer Psych. Regarding the metaphorical significance of cloud movements, he says: "redemption is a gentle heavenward urge, and the downward pull of earthly activity, our active destiny of earthly woe." 'Adam' is the sound of windless August, when the clouds are pulled from the sky and their watery weight surrounds us, encasing us in 'earthly woe.'
Elsewhere in speaking to his assistant Eckermann Goethe goes on a very spaced-out tangent regarding humidity and the breath of the earth:
"I imagine the earth with its circle of vapors like a great living being which inhales and exhales eternally. If the earth inhales, it draws to it the circle of vapors which approaches its surface and thickens into clouds and rain. I call this state the aqueous affirmation; if it lasted beyond the prescribed time, it would drown the earth. But the earth does not permit that; it exhales again and sends back up the vapors of water which spread into all the spaces of the high atmosphere and thin out to such an extent that not only does the brilliance of the sun cross through them, but that the eternal night of infinite space, seen through them, is colored with a brilliant blue tint. I call this second state of the atmosphere the aqueous negation."
The humid swamp of earthly woe is also the planet's inward breath. Adam, in some alley of the cosmic ghetto, lies on the ground and dreams of the end of summer, and with it the casting of water vapor out in space, and its thousand crystalline reflections.
