roof

THERE I WAS, dancing with the Alexandrov Ensemble in my living room, when the wind blew the roof off the house. This was the premier song and dance ensemble of the Soviet army. They were used to doing prisyadki, or Cossack squat kicks. They knew how to do povzunets. But once I put the needle on the vinyl of Off the Wall, they were totally baffled as how to perform to “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.” “Good American music,” I told them. “But how do American soldiers dance to this style of music?” one of the dancers asked. His name was Boris.

Then the wind blew the roof off the house and the soldiers all fled into the street. The house was a single-story bungalow, the type that’s popular in California and other earthquake-prone places. The roof came off intact, hovered in the air. My family members gathered around to observe the sight of a roof being lifted into the air by a spectral, unseen force, then tossed on its side. It wasn’t even that windy. It was like watching the Titanic issue its final deep groan.

How was I ever going to fix that? That was my first thought. In other parts of the house, a table was arrayed with a family meal. Cousins were still seated around, passing buckets of fried chicken. They were unfazed by the loss of the roof. From our side of the house, we could see the roof pitch to one side, then float into some black powerlines. The roof looked like a UFO.

Another gust of wind pushed the roof back toward the house and then across the side yard. Down it came, out by the mailbox, still mostly in one piece, though wooden shingles had started to break off on the sides. Just then, a neighbor boy arrived home from school. The bus had let him off on the street. “Come quick,” I shouted to him. “Maybe we can weigh it down with some rocks!”

All this time, Off the Wall had continued to play on the house speakers. Now it was “Rock with You.” “You fool!” my wife cried out from inside the house. She was cradling our newborn in her arms. She said, “You really think some rocks can stop it from levitating?”

She was right. The wind began its ominous rustling. There was something precise and focused about it. Again, the roof went sailing into the air. Like a zeppelin, it righted itself and began to smoothly float away across a blue sky. “Well,” I sighed and told the boy. “There goes our roof.”

die frau aus estland

WHEN I OPENED THE DOOR, it was just there, a fat letter full of yellowed pages lying in the corridor, written over in thick, black cursive. Her letter. Where had she even been? She had invited me to a party, which was to be held at an old farm out in the country. The roof of the house was thatched with reeds. When I arrived, I noticed that the gate to the yard was uneven.

I stooped down and began to run my fingers through the black earth. I found a hand shovel and began to dig. I pulled up all kinds of curiosities, silver brooches, spoons, plates, and coins. Some were from the Viking age, others from the rule of Queen Christina. I set these finds alongside the gate, padded the dirt back into place. To think of how long these items had slept.

Later, she turned up. She was wearing a white dress with a lace corset. Her chestnut curls were styled in an elegant coiffure. “I’ve seen all of your movies,” I gushed. She just watched me with big saucers of blue eyes. “I’m not really the greatest actress,” she said. “But here I am. Things do happen in life.” The young woman had appeared in several films in the German-speaking countries. The Germans, Austrians and Swiss all knew about die Frau aus Estland, and she had legions of lonely, middle-aged male fans. Certainly, some women fantasized about her.

Around the swimming pool, a hip hop concert began. Mike D was there. He began to rap the words to “Body Movin’.” There was something soothing about those old words. I knew them all, I began to sing along. All this time, die Frau aus Estland stood beside me, watching me with a kind of fascinated silence. She looked like an aristocrat from Versailles. The last time I had seen her had been at the Coldplay concert in the winter, when she offered me solace from hijinks and insanity. That was the day I met Keith Moon. She reached out and touched my arm with her finger. “I’m always here, you know,” said die Frau aus Estland. “I’ve always been here.”

motown

THE AUDITORIUM hadn’t changed. The murals of the indigenous hunter-gatherers were still on the walls, paintings of the early colonists cutting ice from the bay. It was a school concert. For many years of my life, the seasons had been measured in school concerts. Christmas songs at Christmas, songs of springtime in spring. Musicals, Broadway, pop songs. Do you remember when we sang “Penny Lane”? And how Mr. Asunción played the stirring solo on his trumpet?

The auditorium was full of teenagers in white shirts. It was a Motown retrospective. They were doing “Dancing in the Streets” as they came down the aisles. I knew that the back of the auditorium connected to a secret hallway that led to the music classroom. I followed the singers down the aisle and disappeared into the darkness behind the sleepy American flag.

The secret hallway also hadn’t changed. It was full of boxes of equipment that were used for theatre arts productions. Costumes, scenic designs. We had once stood here, silently sweating in our concert clothes, waiting for the cue to go out on stage. There was a cool air in the hallway, I could hear them all singing. It was “Build Me Up Buttercup” by The Foundations.

And then I saw them. Two silver metal towers, modeled on the one in France. They had been used and reused in any number of plays. I took both of them with me, one under each arm. Somehow, I was able to carry both out the door into the school yard. I was able to get them by the crowds of applauding parents. In front of the school, I saw Brynhild’s dog first, then she came walking after him. She looked as she usually did, white, freckly, grotesque. She said, “Well, hello there. How does it feel to be a thief? Don’t you feel any shame?” She laughed when she said it. Brynhild’s weary laugh. She lay in the grass and toyed with some flowers, touching them. She was completely out of context here. The thing is that I didn’t feel ashamed at all. Theft came quite naturally to me. It was as if the old silver towers had always belonged to me.

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, an engineer named Roger, 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 light brown, with streaks of gray, and she was in incredible shape. I threatened to report her to the 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. “Oh,” 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.”