mill:liminal by murmer

*Into the mill. Mill:liminal is the audio accompaniment to the 2018 film The Mill, recorded at the Räpina Paper Factory in Estonia.*

MILL:LIMINAL IS NOT AN EASY RECORD to peg, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting or enjoyable. In fact, it’s among the more haunting, thought-provoking, and meditative recordings I have heard in some time. Released this year by Murmer, the handle of sound artist Patrick Tubin McGinley, it is the sonic accompaniment to a 35-minute film made with Daniel Edward Allen in 2018 called The Mill. To record The Mill, McGinley and Allen descended on the Räpina Paberivabrik, a paper mill in southeast Estonia that has been producing paper continuously since the 1730s. Here, the old mill’s creaks, whirs, rattles and hums are arranged into drone-like compositions distilled into seven, hypnotic tracks. McGinley reports that he was inspired to record the mill after having been a customer. Räpina produced the packaging for earlier releases, and he was drawn in by its mesmeric sounds.

McGinley’s approach to recording is very cinema verite. His sound recorders are the shaky hand holding the camera, giving you a first-person look — or in this case, listen — at what’s happening. The sounds for mill:liminal were recorded mostly with a Sennheisier MKH 30/40 boomed microphone rig connected to an SD744T hard disc portable field recorder. Additional sounds were recorded with self-constructed contact microphones and some with DPA 4060 miniature omnidirectional microphones. So what can sound like sound captured raw is actually the product of some serious technological sophistication and deep processing.

The result is unsettling, for mill:liminal sounds like consciousness melting off the slate of time. In some moments, the low and steady growl of the paper mill machinery takes on monastic tones, as if a monastery of Tibetan monks were assembled for prayer in the mountains.

It’s not hard to find parallels in McGinley’s work, but it does lead one to unexpected places. Is a man in a plaid shirt with a microphone in hand, poised to capture sounds in the field, not unlike Alan Lomax, with his field recordings of world music? McGinley does agree with that.

“I have long-standing thoughts about the world of field recording and experimental music being considered as folk music,” he says. “It’s music that has grown out of a community outside of academic circles, a sort of voice of a population.” Interestingly, he has noted that the mill, in its own way, is a living entity, as people play limited roles in maintaining its processes.

There are also sonic links to the experiments of minimalist composer La Monte Young and his Dream Syndicate. One can see how the hum of a paper mill aligns with Young’s tunings that matched the environmental sounds around him, most famously his reliance on a refrigerator’s 60-cycle electrical hum, which he considered as a foundational drone for his music. Young called the 60-cycle hum the “drone of Western civilization,” but as mill:liminal reminds us, these folk songs of machinery are all around us. If listened to, they can be a thing of beauty.

mill:liminal is available now as a digital download and will be available soon as a cd packaged in paper from the Räpina Paberivabrik. In addition to undertaking field recordings of creepy paper mills, Murmer also produces a regular weekly radio show called Framework Radio. Other recordings are available on Bandcamp.

ezra gold

I WAS SITTING in a brightly lit cafe somewhere in a northern city when Ezra Gold walked in. In a room full of laconic blondes, he was refreshingly Jewish. Dark hair, one of those ancient philosophical faces that always looks like it’s posing a penetrating question, when in reality, he was probably just looking for some decent coffee, maybe a scoop of ice cream. Ezra looked mostly the same. But he had acquired some wealth. He was dressed in some high-end red-pink zoot suit. He had a joyful countenance. He said, “Hey there, buddy. Good to see you!”

He had two daughters with him, both around 10 years old. They held on to his tailored pant legs; he ordered them both some ice cream. Before he left, he invited me to visit him in America. “You should come back to America, man,” said Ezra Gold. And like that, he was gone.

I hadn’t seen Ezra since we had lived on the same floor in college. I had maintained no contact with him. He was a ghost from the past, but a welcome one. I took him up on his offer, and soon I was hiking down a dirt road somewhere along the mid-Atlantic. The roads curved up into the mountains, the foothills of the Appalachians, and there was a rocky peninsula, surrounded by blue water. Here some tired fishermen sat, tossing their lines into the waters, watching them dance. “Do you know where Ezra Gold lives?” I asked one of them. He was a lonely old hobo type with a few gold teeth, and he pointed toward those hills over yonder.

I kept walking into the hills. It was autumn now; delicious golden leaves blanketed the landscape. Dug into the hills, I could see the brick bones of an old factory, its chimneys still intact, its roof and workers long gone. Eventually I came to a small town and found the building I had been searching for, a kind of orange cream-colored tall apartment tower.

This was where Ezra Gold lived.

“Hey, buddy, glad you made it,” he said, welcoming me in. “Can I get you anything?” He went to the kitchenette and made two coffees. I looked around his home. In the other room, I could see his daughters stretched out on a couch, both absorbed in the glow of the internet. There were piles of clothes on the floor, his bed looked as if it hadn’t been made in weeks. A blue-gray light filled the room with melancholy. That’s when I realized that Ezra Gold’s wife had also left him. He had been deserted, marooned, jettisoned, discarded, abandoned. But he set out two cups on the table as if nothing was amiss. “So,” said Ezra. “What have you been up to?”

the klimt robbery

LINDA AND HER HUSBAND stole Gustav Klimt’s paintings from an exhibition in Helsinki. They decided they would show the Austrian symbolist painter’s artwork to the public, but only at extortionate fees. Just one viewing of one Gustav Klimt painting would cost around €10,000.

“But that’s not fair,” I told Linda. “Gustav Klimt’s work should be freely available to the public. Every man, woman, and child deserves to see The Kiss and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I for free, if not for a small, but meaningful donation to a museum. It’s the only right thing to do.”

Linda was not listening. “We stole the Klimt paintings to enrich ourselves,” she said. “Besides, they are such masterworks that the public should be willing to pay their entire life savings just to appreciate Klimt’s golden phase for a few moments. If you want gold, you should pay gold.”

I tried to find Linda’s husband, a conductor named Siim, to convince him of this art theft travesty, but he was too busy moving the Klimt paintings from their getaway van into a secret warehouse. They were long past middle age. Wasn’t Linda 60? Her hair was still chestnut, with streaks of gray, and she was in incredible shape. I threatened to report her to the art police.

“You will do no such thing,” she said. Then, with an unbuttoning of a button and the unzipping of a zipper, she became quite persuasive. “You will not turn us over to the police for stealing Gustav Klimt’s paintings,” Linda said while licking me. “And I won’t stop licking you until you change your mind. Oh, you are yummy,” she said, looking up. “Well,” I said. “You might be right.”

grand opening

SHE CAME TO the grand opening of the spa hotel. This was a glamorous event and many years in the making. It was catered by the finest cafes and confectioners in town, and there were long tables full of food and drink, with local and national politicians elbowing their way to the kool-aid, while the rest of us tried to make sense of the architecture. They said there were 300 rooms in these futuristic cylinders. It was designed to be a convention magnet. One can imagine the various agencies and associations that, after spending years on the same circuit, would warm to the idea of a waterfront getaway in this one-and-only middle of nowhere.

She was also there with one of her girlfriends. She was visibly with child, though not yet full term, and she told me that I was the father. I quickly accepted my fate, began to talk to her about future plans. She was a shapely young woman with brown hair, common features. I think she worked at Swedbank. “I don’t have much money,” I told her, “But I’m sure we can manage.”

She was grateful, of course, that I intended to play a real role in our child’s life. But as I socialized in the gray light of the spa hotel, something began to bother me. Because as willing as I was to accept responsibility for her child, I couldn’t remember ever being with her. When had that happened? There were so many women. They were half the world, if not more. It was hard to keep track of them all. Surely I might remember a few fleeting seconds of lovemaking.

“Don’t you remember last year,” a friend reminded me at the reception. “When you went on a spree?” Ah, yes, the glorious spree. Truth be told, it had never really ended. Still, how could it be that I was about to become a father, but I couldn’t remember the woman? At the food tables, I saw her again. I said, “I’m terribly sorry, but I am not sure if I am the father of your child. I don’t even know your name or who you are.” “My name is Reet,” she said while rubbing her hands over her protruding belly. “But you are definitely the father. There can be no other.”

“No, I’m not,” I said. That “no, I’m not” didn’t seem to move the needle. If she said I was, maybe I was. I couldn’t remember everything. Not knowing what to do, I went to the upper level, where there was a panoramic view of the sea. It was blue and wide, so close you could almost touch its whitecaps. That great heavy sea, the way it sloshed about, washing time and worry away. I glanced down the coast and could see a young couple walking along the water’s edge, with two or three children. They were all wearing sunglasses and striped t-shirts. I could hear the voices of the children and the pleasing meditative rhythm of the vast sea outside of the glass.

vlnd burger

HEADING INTO the Baltic Station Market, I encountered a whole troupe of Krishna devotees. They were milling around outside in tan jackets, smoking clove cigarettes, talking of love and better days. They stood in lines through the doorway, up the stairs, winding around the kiosks, smoothie machines, and pancake huts. Dark mustaches, long hair, sun-kissed women in polka-dot dresses, and what a commotion. Lots of om krishnaya yama and shanti shanti shanti.

Fortunately, all of these George Harrison wannabes were not in line for VLND Burger. The way to my dinner was clear. Or was it? Did I have enough time? If I missed the train back to Viljandi, I would have to stay the night in Tallinn. If I stayed the night in Tallinn, I would have to go to her house, beg for a bed, hat in hand, though I had no hat and it was sticky August.

“Welcome to VLND Burger, what can I get you?” came a reticent attempt at American-style customer service. I scanned the menu. Various burgers, doubles, singles, fries in all constellations and denominations. Loaded, unloaded. “Loaded fries?” I whispered, surveying the print. In the back, a fry cook was clanging a basket. More eats were coming off the press.

If I missed my train, I would have to go to her house. Then we would make love and everything would be turned over again. The story would be torn open again, as she had once put it. She’d hug me in the morning, and I’d already have one foot out the door. What was it that made me run? What was I running from? “Excuse me,” I asked the staff. “But do you happen to know what time it is? My phone died and I need to catch the last train south.” A wrist was raised like clockwork, the young woman at the counter said, “It’s 6:42 pm, sir. Would you like to order?”

Then the fry cook intervened. “No, it isn’t,” said he. “It’s half past nine.” “No, it isn’t,” I told the fry cook. “I mean, that’s impossible. When I came into Baltic Station Market, it was 7:30. I was supposed to be on the 8 o’clock train back to Viljandi. Excuse me, madame,” I said, approaching an older woman in a fur coat who was walking a small dog. “But would you happen to know the real time?” “Yes,” she said, looking at a small silver watch. “It’s 3:30 am. On the nose!” She continued along her way. I couldn’t tell if I had missed my train or if the train hadn’t come yet. I ordered some crispy fries anyway, something tasty to munch on, something to pass the time.

algún día by tomás del real

“ALGÚN DÍA” by Chilean singer songwriter Tomás del Real is easily one of his most accessible and enjoyable songs. Instantly satisfying, the lead single off his forthcoming album Jakobsoni, is three-and-a-half minutes long and finds del Real expressing all his strengths: gentle, playful melodies, deft guitar work, and that almost half-whispered conversational singing style of his, as if he was confiding in you his most important feelings and thoughts on a walk at night.

The image of the typewriter in the video for the single evokes the literary tradition in pop music and is apt. Think of stories about Bob Dylan and The Band’s The Basement Tapes, where the lyrics were composed line by line on a typewriter in the house they shared, or even The Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” or “Eleanor Rigby.” While sounding almost nothing like McCartney, it could be said that del Real has similar sentiments, a fondness for novelistic writing, atmospherics that make a song glow at its edges, finding inspiration in the everyday.

Though the song glides along as easily as a ghost, del Real said that it even challenged him to play it. “It has this very complex fingerpicking that I heard in my head at first, but couldn’t figure out,” he says. “It took months for it to become natural.” The lyrics also emerged over time and the whole composition came together during a week of self-imposed exile in Berlin.

“I was able to take a break and finish up four of the songs on the new album,” del Real recalls.

“Algún día” reflects on existential themes of life and death, the temporary and timeless.

Algún día de erosión / Nuestras almas se evaporarán / Al encontrar otra forma en vez de despertar / Quizá, me han de contar

Which translates in English to something like

One day, through erosion / Our souls will evaporate / Finding another way instead of waking / Perhaps, they will tell me.

Finding another way instead of waking;

“I think time and the ephemerality of things is a topic that’s on my mind quite often,” he says. “I was searching for the most vulnerable aspects of myself while writing this song, the real spots, for something valuable.”

The single was recorded in Viljandi, Estonia, where del Real has lived for the past few years and produced with Javier Barría, who added the synths and other instrumentation. “Algún día” was mixed and mastered by del Real’s long-time collaborator Jorge Fortune in Chile. It is available on all streaming platforms, including Spotify, as of 31 July. The new album Jakobsoni will follow soon. It will be the fourth record del Real has put out in Estonia, following 2022’s collaboration with Lee Taul Don’t Chase the Lizard, 2023’s Principios de Declaración and 2024’s Notas Rotas. Despite this prolific output, del Real says that he battles writer’s block all the time, even with “Algún día”.

“This one has been like cold brew,” he says. “Drip by drip. It took a while, but it came out right.”

red

IN THOSE OLD STORIES of postwar golden age New York, much of the intelligentsia was same-sex oriented, and it was not unknown for up-and-coming writers to submit to the advances of a powerful editor or publisher, so long as they got a book deal in the end. This was not playing out in my mind as I was invited to spend the night at Nelson’s house uptown, but it became evident that evening when, after showing me to my room, the friendly publisher decided to invite himself into bed with me. “Aha,” he said, “Now we can get down to business.” The sensation of a sinewy male monkey body brought on states of revulsion, gloom, despair.

I ran away, naturally. In my pajamas. Can you imagine me, fleeing like that on West 81st Street?

I wandered for some time like that, through the city. I wandered through other cities. I admired the commotion, the jackhammers, the cranes. Glass doors that sensed your presence and opened before you. Sandy depressions that were becoming parking garages. Eventually I fell in love again, this time with my friend’s wife, who had long sumptuous red hair. It was a lion’s mane of crimson. You should have seen how it spread across the white linen sheets, how the red of her hair flowed into the texture of a red blanket. She was a 1930s pre-Code Venus.

But I could never tell her I loved her. I could only say something like, “My favorite color is red.”

“My favorite color is red.” It wasn’t really. But I would whisper it in her ear, beneath her thick hair, at any number of dull dinner parties in Tallinn’s Old Town, while her husband was getting a refilled martini or gin and tonic. He worked at SEB and liked to talk about mortgages and interest rates. She was neurotic and dangerous enough to keep me interested. I was hooked.

One day we were driving away from a boutique hotel. Miss Red was at the wheel. It was a cool, autumn day, the leaves were turning orange and purple. A group of kindergartners began crossing the street, but she was so tormented by the fact that she had again betrayed her husband, that she almost ran the kids over. Before she mowed down the children, I grabbed the wheel, took control of the vehicle, pressed on her leg to slow the car. I reached out of the window, waved a frightened boy across the street. The little boy gave a stunned and shocked look. He was wearing a sweater and bowtie. The boy’s look said it all. “The adults are maniacs.”

ticket

IT WASN’T THAT I didn’t have a ticket. It was that I had the wrong ticket, or a ticket that had been purchased for a different journey. It was a ticket north. But I was lost somewhere in the city. This is how I found myself a scofflaw in the Stockholm T-bana, the underground metro, hiding out from the dreaded Storstockholms Lokaltrafik inspectors, in their blue uniforms. On the run from the law, on the lam so to speak. I hid out in a cave in the metro that was inhabited by other scofflaws and dissident thinkers. Difficult characters who had never purchased a metro ticket in their lives. But a matronly inspector found me and dragged me out by my feet.

“You have to pay the fine!” she said. “But I had a ticket,” I yelped. “It was just the wrong ticket.”

The wrong ticket. During the dragging, one of my upper teeth came loose. I could see it fall out and plink on the train platform, like a 5 kronor coin. I retrieved my tooth, tried to fit it back into place, and slipped past the SL ticket inspector to make an escape. But the tooth was still crooked. It would never settle on its own, it would never look like a legitimate tooth.

I had to find a Swedish dentist, one who could properly reinstall it, as it were. I found one in Södermalm, a pleasant, middle-aged blonde dentist in a pastel blue shirt, who said she could do it and it would be subsidized by the state. It would all be covered by the Allmänt tandvårdsbidrag. But first I would have to take off my clothes. “Is that because you don’t want to soil my clothes with spurting blood?” I asked. “No,” said the dentist. “Now, strip for me!”

I’m not sure where those hands of hers went during the dental surgery. Maybe I enjoyed it? Not long after that, I arrived back in Tallinn. I was walking up Niguliste Street on a cool summer evening. The Green House Cafe had opened up a new location there, and the windows were all open. Inside, the bustle of a warm kitchen, shadowy figures in aprons carried trays, the metallic clanging of the espresso machine. Ingredients were arrayed along the window, including a bowl of sweet almonds soaking in warm milk, likely destined for a pastry.

“Oh, it’s so nice to have all your teeth,” I said to myself. I took a sweet almond from the milk bowl. It dissolved on my tongue. When I looked up again, Mai was there. She was wearing her apron and peering at me with those huge eyes of hers. She climbed through the cafe window and soon we were kissing below the church. It felt good to feel the loving heft of Mai in her black shirt. “Are you really sure you want to do this?” I asked her. Mai looked back at me with that colorful baker’s hat on her head and said, “But I’m crawling on top of you. Of course I do.”

beds

THESE WERE planter beds and they were also single beds. Each measured 90 by 200 centimeters. The frames were made of white wood. They were arranged head to foot in a row, like sarcophagi in an ancient Egyptian tomb. Indeed, the room could have been discovered in the Valley of the Kings. All was dark, an impenetrable blackness that seemed painted on.

But it was night, and we were tired. We had missed the afternoon ship from Kasepää and we had no place else to stay. The beds were at a friend’s house. He had turned these single beds into small, productive gardens. Green plants sprouted from the rich, black soil. If you pulled back the earth, though, like a blanket, a perfectly fine bed could be discovered within. Crisp, linen sheets. Two fluffy pillows. All you had to do is pull back the topsoil and slide right in.

My friend Madis had experience with such beds. He was already tucked in, wearing one of those old-fashioned nightcaps. It was green, with a dangling pom-pom. He looked like Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, only a younger, sleepier, happier one. When I climbed into my planter bed, some of the plants fell onto the floor. The floor was as black as the room around it. “Don’t worry about that,” said Madis, yawning from his planter box bed. “I don’t think our old friend Holbrooke cares so much about the soil or plants. Let’s all just get some sleep.”

house

I WAS INVITED to her house. Or was I? Either way, I went there, out of curiosity, out of instinct. I assumed her husband was away. Would she have invited me over if he was there? What would that have been like, some conversation, tea, and potato salad? Maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe this had all taken place in my mind. Maybe there had never been an invitation.

It was an old wooden house, situated at the top of a hill. Shadowy, sheathed in long planks of dark wood. Built at the turn of the last century. The interior stairwell was also shady and dusty, but cool and not unpleasant. This is where she had been living. This was her zone. She came up and down these stairs every day now, and her children trailed her, or she went running after them. Sometimes her husband’s heavy, plodding strides could be heard in the creak of these steps as he returned from work. I ascended them gently, lightly. Soon I was at the top.

From my perch at the top of the steps, I could hear her feet on the floor. She had a soft and deliberate way of walking. She never hurried anywhere. Hers was the unhurried motherly life. They swept one way across the floor, then she returned from what she was doing. Was she waiting? I could see her in the summer light. She would stand in her kitchen looking at me.

Around their door were piles of toys and children’s clothing. Colorful rubber boots, raincoats dangling from hooks and nails. But were the children at home too? From somewhere in the house, I heard the sound of a little boy. He was talking to his mother or calling for her. Was it the same boy or someone else’s son. I crouched there in the darkness. I breathed quietly. I wasn’t sure about any of it. But hadn’t I been invited? Maybe she was waiting for me to knock.

From somewhere in the house, I heard the boom of a man’s low voice. Was it his? This I also couldn’t say. I didn’t want to find out. I fled down the stairs. Outside it was summer, that tired, drawn-out heat that sneaks in by mid-July. Some laborers were at work at a neighboring villa. They were keeping the grounds and watched as I ran along the crest of a fieldstone wall. They saw me leap. They saw me run off down the street, hail a passing car, get in, and drive away.