Dried roses #2: Daisy Rickman, Raphael Rogiński
In which I recommend a live show that wasn't recorded.
Dried roses is my weekly(?) round-up of the music I've enjoyed and/or had some thoughts about, with half of this week's edition dedicated to a live show you really should've just been there for.
Got stuck in several rainstorms, saw Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds for the first time, and attended a Zoom funeral. It's been quite a melancholic week to say the least, and while I think about David Berman almost daily throughout the year, 'tis now the season where his words and his music feel especially all-encompassing, and my parasocial grief for his passing comes back to the fore. Almost all of his albums came out in the fall, and listening to 'The Wild Kindness', it always seemed to me that the rainy season, the season of dying, was the moment for him to renew his lease on life. Writing this on the first sunny (but cold) Sunday after days of rain, looking out at the already yellow-ish trees alongside Leidens Nieuwe Rijn, I get it. I feel I've come alive again. The delusive stasis over summer is over, it is time to shed the leaves, time for renewal.
"Grass grows in the ice box. The year ends in the next room. It is autumn and my camouflage is dying. Instead of time there will be lateness, and let forever be delayed."
Bonnie "Prince" Billy @ End of the Road
I saw Bonnie "Prince" Billy open his set at End of the Road Festival, our first of the weekend, with this song, and I couldn't believe it. It was a perfect start to what I can confidently say is one of the best live shows I have ever seen. Just two guys with acoustic guitars, songs and aphorisms that could last you a lifetime.
Like 'The Wild Kindness', many of Will Oldham's songs that night dealt with what dies and what goes on forever; with knowing your children are likely to outlive you, knowing the Earth will outlive us, no matter how hard we're trying to take it down with us. It wouldn't be the last time that weekend, we'd compare a live show to church (Jess Williamson was another), but this one in particular made me ponder the afterlife – not the kind where I leave the Earth and live on elsewhere forever, but perhaps a steadfast belief, despite our rampant ecocide, that life on this planet will go on, long after I've gone.
At some point, Oldham led us into a tricky but ultimately euphoric singalong of a song called 'In the Wilderness'. I tried to recall it to the best of my ability when hiking in the Highlands: "In the wildernessss… we could buiiiiiiiillddddd…. an im-per-ma-nent dwelliiiiiing." Perhaps it's only fitting that the only recording of the song I could find is a shaky one-minute video from a show he did with broeder Dieleman.
The song that closed out the set, 'This Is Far From Over', especially struck a chord – a song that both recognizes the dire state of our planet and spurs on its listeners to persevere and keep looking up ahead: "Be sure to teach your kids to swim and navigate by stars above. The fate of landlocked life is grim, when you ignore our will to love." From our impermanent dwelling, something will survive.
Daisy Rickman - Donsya A'n Loryow
Young Cornish folk singer Daisy Rickman dedicated her most recent album, Howl, to her grandmother, her 'Signpost To The Stars'. Her first (soon to be reissued) album Donsya A'n Loryow (2022), roughly translating to 'dance of the moons', was dedicated to "the moon, the stars, the sea and the land and spirit of West Penwith, Cornwall, UK". Like many of her peers in the blossoming British folk scene, Rickman manages to return some eerie, ancient mystique to the landscape surrounding her. Her association with zine / record label / etc. Weird Walk makes total sense. They, too, "fan the faint embers of magic that still smoulder in the grate", rambling, seeking remnants of ancient spirituality, and reclaiming the notoriously enclosed rural areas of England. It's hard not to imagine yourself crossing (or trespassing) the Cornish moors when listening to Donsya A'n Loryow (equal parts Ben Jansch and Robbie Basho), and perhaps stumbling upon some long-forgotten clan in the process. It's no wonder Rickman has professed her love for the folk horror classic The Wicker Man on numerous occasions, including a haunting cover of 'Willow's Song'.
Wildflowers
Kris Kristofferson - 'The Pilgrim, Chapter 33'. Last Thursday I heard Nick Cave sing about "Kris Kristofferson kicking a can" – and this week he did, at the age of 88. There is so much of the outlaw country legend I am yet to discover, but I'll take any chance I get to recommend the perfect lyric that is 'The Pilgrim, Chapter 33'. I know no better version than the one Kristofferson sings on a couch next to Harry Dean Stanton, in the documentary Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction (which I think is on Netflix, but here's a shitty clip).
Tomin - Flores para Verene / Cantos para Caramina. Well, here's a litmus test for any subscribed jazz aficionados. See how many of the clarinet-and-trumpet tributes to jazz legends (e.g. Mingus, Dolphy) you can recognize on the impressionistic first half of Flores para Verene / Cantos para Caramina. It's a remarkably cohesive listen, given that it was recorded over four years, with no intention of it becoming an album. It's followed by something of an addendum, 'songs for Caramina', Tomin's older sister, which emulates Satie and Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou on a delightfully dinky electric keyboard. International Anthem's putting out Tomin's official debut album, A Willed and Conscious Balance, in a few weeks.
Raphael Rogiński - Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes. Here's another jazz tribute, on which the compositions of Coltrane are rendered almost unrecognizable by the ruminative Polish solo guitarist. They're there though, somewhere. It seems, as Philip Sherburne wrote in his Pitchfork review, that Rogiński's connection to the source material is a spiritual one, much more so than a strictly musical one. On the album (originally released in 2015, now reissued) Rogiński takes a famous Langston Hughes poem on the African-American experience and the memory of slavery, and imbues it with Jewish mysticism. (Sherburne does a pretty good job explaining why that's not as extractive as it sounds.) True to the lineal tradition of folk music, this is about as profound and personal as one can interpret 'someone else's' songs.