Partying down in Noise Country... Jungian babblefish (babel fish?)... the old man and the C#...

Corbie is Afraid of the Bear - the White Cascade - Goodbye, Titan - Dec. 11th @ Treetown (Raleigh)

It's getting cold soon.

Very cold, and there's a threat and a promise of heavy snows.

Heavy snows that snap branches. Images in my mind of ice storms that snapped Asheville into a strangely quiet still life, light refracting on iced-over branches like shards on the floor of a bombed-out cathedral. A strange, whispering sound, the wind through the pines in a strange way that I can only describe as an audible silence. So vivid, even four years after I left that town, and now every time there is a call for winter weather I picture the pure and cold land as it existed, as I walked in it and let the sharp and sacred air penetrate my very synapses, cleanse every hangover from my system, even the memory of the sensation. Echoes of Jim Carroll... I just want to be pure...

And the morning and the evening and the next day. Survival, and I'm immortal for now, but for how long? I've tested a lot of shaky bridges by running across them, clapping myself on the back in congratulations as mad water rushes by a hundred feet beneath. Dreams of unlikely landscapes, dreams of sinister weather. In my dreams I'm forever surrounded by tornadoes, dozens of them at a time, and I'm always driving when I see them. Sometimes they catch me and throw me through the air. Sometimes I just watch as they meander idiotically before suddenly turning and rushing my way. In my dreams I'm forever in these irrational mountain landscapes, following a high road that tends not to have a rail, coming across rivers swollen to rabid flood, rapids that could destroy houses. What does this all mean? What alien worlds am I visiting in my sleep... and why the constant danger? Just this week I had a dream that I was riding in a car with my uncle Tommy up this steep mountain road, straight up an illogically high mountain, and there was no guardrail and then a straight drop down a sheer cliff and across the valley the other mountains were stark and beautiful and none were even remotely as tall as ours. We would be riding bikes down this monster, and that terrified me (in the dream). I could picture myself going over the side, easily, and my teeth were chattering with the anxiety.

I'm always in motion, I'm always headed up some mountain but I'm never interested in the summit. Just the exploration of a new landscape.

But peril, peril is in the nature of everything I do. It's not a death wish at all, it's about getting the most out of life, but sometimes it makes me tired. It's the fine art of running on empty.

***

I got to Treetown, Nik and Jesse's fine showhouse, pretty close to 8:00. I sat down and talked to my friends and it was a good time until a girl I hadn't met before called me old. Naturally, she was butting into a conversation that had nothing to do with her and, naturally, she immediately congratulated herself on the cleverness of her statement.

"God, you're old!" was the clever statement.

28 is old? To who, first graders?

***

The White Cascade got started a little after 8:30. I've never heard them play with this kind of dynamics, Treetown was one of their best shows yet. The only thing missing were the vocals (no PA, vox run through a keyboard amp & indiscernable). Don't misunderstand me, I missed the vocals. I've seen the White Cascade enough to where I was hearing the vocal parts in my head and that helped.

Instrumentally, they were tight. This energy reminded me of their energy at Sadlack's, about a year ago, when we played together outside on a 20+/- fahrenheit day and the White Cascade, who had just changed their name from Mute (remember those days?) played a set matching the frozen weather to a degree.

In fact, that show came up in conversation a lot. Maybe because it's getting cold, maybe that's why, but the polar bear show was one for the record books.

I have this new pair of earplugs and they did the trick. I got to keep all the essential frequencies, but I also got to keep my hearing. Win/win!

The White Cascade's new stuff is really awesome. They're consistently coming into their own, evolving past their individual influences into a creature beyond. The drumming on the new stuff makes me think of the Cure for some reason, and I don't know what it is because it doesn't sound like Boris Williams' playing. There's definitely a lot of the '80s in the new stuff, the emotional post-punk stuff, and when you inject guitar work that is a collection of cascading drones and straight-up, motherfucking POWERFULLLLLLL BASSSSSSSSSLINES you end up with something that is not quite the sum of its influences, but rather the derivative of its own potential. I'm talking prime numbers, see, and the prime number that is the White Cascade somehow multiplies without gaining factors.

***

Set break... PBR... Matt, from my journalism class, arrived... we'd had our final a few hours earlier and he was sporting an enormous bottle of red wine and an oblivion wish... hell, we all get that sometimes... he looked like a man whose hangover would have a hangover the next day... so we both drank from the wine and the floor was still shaking with the persistence of resonance...

***

Goodbye, Titan played this one right on the heels of an oddity of a show down in Wilmington. It was a benefit, a show that happened for all the right reasons, but I understand that it was also a drunken bikerfest and that the other bands on the bill were playing AC/DC covers. Gross. So, we all had ourselves a seat and the natural forces took control and almost everyone felt it. In fact, I'm watching "Planet Earth" to try and regain some of the elemental energy.

Elemental - it's a big word for me. It's what a lot of my favorite bands sound and feel like, so here's what the latest Goodbye, Titan show was like.


A small crack forms in the surface of a glacier. The line grows slowly over the course of several hours. With a titanic shudder an iceberg thunders into the sea, throwing frigid water hundreds of feet into the air.


Wild dogs on the African savannah watch a frightened impala swimming awkwardly in a lake, where it jumped in a desperate gamble to escape predation. The dogs know it will come out, or drown.


The outer gases of an ancient star fall suddenly inwards and the extreme outer shell rockets outwards, the inner planets fold under the intense heat and pressure. The outer planets have their gaseous shells torn away and their dense cores are scoured without mercy.


A solitary polar bear sleeps beneath 15 feet of packed snow as 4 months of Arctic winter gives way to a slow dawn. The bear's head emerges and it blinks in the reflected sunlight.

***

The drunk girl who took me for an 800-year-old talked through their entire set (somehow talking over Goodbye, Titan at some points) had passed out, by the grace of some deity, by the end of their set. I set up, most of the people left, and I started playing.

***

This was my first solo show in quite a while, and my first in this direction. I brought all my amps (on top of that, I borrowed Allen's amp) and played these really spacey, minimalist songs. I build most of them around a single melodic line, a single riff, which I explore for 6 or 7 minutes. I brought a bunch of tools and used them to play guitar (coping saw, chisel, screwdrivers, etc). Here are a few things I learned...

*PATIENCE. I fucked up a bit on the first song (which I've since named "One Less Friend") because I wasn't patient enough with it. I messed up the rhythm loop because I forgot to count, I didn't take my time in establishing the build. It sounded good, but it could have been better.

*I need to do more than just make noise. For my second song I picked up the Spruce Bringsteen guitar and just started beating all hell out of it with power tools. It was kind of a mess, but at least it looked cool.

*It's ok to turn on a few distortions. When I play these songs at home I unleash serious waves of noise, which feels really good. I didn't do as much of that at the show.

I'm glad I did this. It was a learning experience and the music faithful sat and listened and appeared to enjoy themselves. I played for about 15 minutes and was going to quit after "Theme for a Tundra Ghost," but they made me not quit, so I played a solo version of "Protohuman." I rearranged the song a bit and took some liberties with the phrasing, expanded the melody some, and it felt really good. It was the high point of my short set, I think.

***

Beyond that there isn't much to say. I packed my gear and the party began dispersing, a few cats hung out but mainly people were headed out. I took a few PBRs for the road yeah, this should get me home and headed back to Pittsboro.

Do I even need to mention that I waited until I got home to drink them? What kind of a monster do you take me for?