Subverting Failure and Success: On Chris Forsyth and Koen Holtkamp’s The Island
By Garrett Karrberg, November 12, 2015
Chris Forsyth and Koen Holtkamp, The Island, Trouble In Mind 2015
Back in 2012, I came across an article/interview in Baltimore's City Paper about Chris Forsyth's performance piece “Never Meant to Change the World,” a newly crafted guitar score to accompany Robert Frank's Rolling Stones documentary Cocksucker Blues. A portion of this, appropriately titled “The First 10 Minutes of Cocksucker Blues,” can be found on Forsyth's 2012 album Kenzo Deluxe. In the article, Forsyth makes a head-scratching claim: “The Stones—there's a big idea that failed.” The author, Lee Gardner, immediately follows up with an obvious question: “Arguably the most successful rock 'n' roll band in the history of popular music failed?” In Forsyth's analysis of the Stones’s trajectory, the band failed to live up to expectations as a dangerous threat to the status quo. The revolutionary potential of their music and their image failed to materialize, overshadowed by their excess and decadence.
This simple yet powerful observation speaks to the disconnect between commercial success and artistic success and how easily the binary of failure/success can break apart when subjected to new perspectives. No matter how much we might love some of the Stones’s music, we are left with a failure to live up to potential, to fulfill the possibility of a powerful idea. Interestingly, Frank's film itself failed to reach much of an audience—the Stones were unhappy with what they saw of themselves and famously blocked its commercial release. Though many saw the documentary in bootleg form, it could not be screened without the presence of Frank himself.
For the past seven years, I have been working toward my PhD in history. The past five of those have been spent researching and writing a dissertation on the First Anglo-Afghan War, which lasted from 1839-42 and is often represented as a failure of disastrous proportions for the early Victorian British Empire. An uprising in late 1841 drove the British force (which consisted of 4,500 troops, both British and Indian, and 12,000 camp followers, including wives, children, and servants) to retreat from Kabul. Almost the entire retreating force was killed or taken prisoner throughout January 1842. As I delved into these events, Chris Forsyth's subversion of the traditional notions of failure and success hovered at the edges of my writing as something not typically relevant to the world of academia and yet totally essential to it.
In looking at how Britons represented the disastrous retreat of 1841-42, it was clear that the meaning of “failure” was constantly shifting, with important political stakes. Drawing upon British-produced colonial knowledge of Afghans as inherently treacherous and bloodthirsty, British writers were able to change the discourse from a story of imperial and military failure to one about the failings of the Afghans themselves. For many within Britain, this was not an instance of traditional military defeat, an example of cracks emerging within an invincible British Empire, or a tale of Afghan resistance successfully driving out a foreign invader. Rather, British writers had succeeded in crafting a narrative that highlighted the catastrophic loss of life on the British side by choosing words like “butchery” and “murder” over “failure” and “defeat,” while simultaneously preserving the image of a successfully expanding British Empire and civilization. Furthermore, in response to the news of the retreat, the British sent in an officially titled Army of Retribution to rescue the prisoners and redeem British honor. The resulting killing, burning, looting, and environmental devastation committed by this force was surprisingly (or perhaps not, considering the longer history of imperial violence) narrated as a success story.
Initiated by Forsyth's comments and thinking about imperial failure on a daily basis because of the path I was on, I began to see attempts to use and even theorize the concept of “failure” everywhere I looked. The common trope of the “failed state” as justification for military intervention raised the question of whether we could view alternative political and social formations more positively, as something other than failed attempts at Western-style nation-states. A repeat viewing of Chris Marker's brilliant film A Grin Without a Cat (1977), which remains an essential critique of power, made me think deeply about the failure of the revolutionary movements of the 1960s (of which the Rolling Stones were just a small part) and how subsequent generations handle historical memory. I witnessed debates about economic crises and poverty: are they the result of distinct, fixable failures within the capitalist system or the lifeblood of capitalism itself, destined to fail certain segments of the population?
This new conception of failure even began to guide my thinking about my own personal life as I embarked on a leave of absence from grad school without finishing my dissertation. It was only after my second year on the job market that I realized I did not want the type of life offered by a tenure-track teaching job, the primary reward for so many years of hard work and low pay in graduate school. Did abandoning the possibility of a tenure-track job seven years in, without finishing what I started, for a minimum-wage job in a record store make me a failure? Or did I succeed in getting out, however late, and approaching something closer to happiness? Honestly, thinking more deeply about the failure/success binary in this way made the decision significantly less painful. While I am unable to pinpoint the reasons why people find inquiry into failure and failed ideas so compelling, it is a hopeful indication of critical thinking occurring at multiple registers within realms as diverse as politics, history, economics, and art. Thinking of the Rolling Stones as a failure, despite their mounds of money and handful of rock gems, opens up new avenues of possibility for artistic evaluation, political action, and self-reflection.
This leads me to The Island, the new record by the above-mentioned Forsyth and Koen Holtkamp, the Brooklyn-based electronic musician who makes up half of the drone duo Mountains. Forsyth previously played with the experimental, genre-blurring Peeesseye and more recently with the Solar Motel Band, whose last album Intensity Ghost was a blend of instrumental classic rock with psychedelic jamming and one of the most exciting albums of 2014. But significant commercial success and popularity have eluded Forsyth and his new band, at least beyond the east coast. Their last two shows in Minneapolis were absolutely thrilling, but only for myself and the approximately twenty other people who attended. Forsyth and Holtkamp previously worked together on the late 2011 album Early Astral, which consisted of two slow-burning and mind-bending seventeen-minute tracks. The Island revisits the spirit of experimentation and improvisation explored on Early Astral, but sounds more structured, fully-formed, and energized.
Each of The Island's four tracks is a separate statement, but what makes the album great is the way they all combine to create a cohesive whole. This is particularly impressive considering the spontaneous nature of the album's creation, which arose out of a brief escape to the Jersey Shore. And yet, as Trouble in Mind Records points out in their description of The Island, the music is undeniably driven by “the rhythm and motion of the water.” The album opens with “Sun Blind,” the most distinct and most challenging of the four tracks, which builds into a swirl of screeching guitars, synths, and echoing beats that vary in intensity over its five minutes. The guitar first cuts in jarringly just before the two-minute mark, disappears, simmers, reappears, transforms, and finally flows seamlessly into the acoustic strumming of “Long Beach Idyll.” That strumming persists throughout the song, but it is paired with a signature Forsyth electric guitar part, harmonics, and some subtle synth work by Holtkamp. Its beauty is exemplary of the way Forsyth and Holtkamp's collaboration amounts to more than instrumental music of the background variety. These are songs, with enough twists and turns to keep things interesting and hold your attention.
Side B kicks off with “Alternator,” which possesses a force that harkens back to certain moments of “Sun Blind” and sets them apart from the other two tracks on the album. But it is a similar essence rather than sound that binds them—whereas “Sun Blind” is jarring in its experimentation, “Alternator” is both trance-inducing and listener-friendly. The album closes with the almost ten-minute long “Cosmic Richard,” which is both a highlight and a culmination. It recalls the twinkling, or perhaps watery, synth sounds and beating rhythms of the previous three tracks. Again, Forsyth adds layers of guitar lines that command your attention. Finally, a beautiful desert blues-influenced guitar part joins the others that have become familiar throughout the duration of the album and something new is born.
I don't claim to know what Chris Forsyth and Koen Holtkamp want to get out of their music, either individually or collaboratively. I don't know what their career goals are and where they perceive their albums on a spectrum of failure and success. Or the Rolling Stones for that matter. But for me, the The Island is a success. It is music done right, where songwriting, creative risks, and individuality trump image and marketing. Most importantly, it sounds good to my ears. It is not an album destined for a stream or two, or cherry-picked for a Spotify playlist, but one that I will pull out for repeated listens in the years to come. The entire album, and the intricacy of “Cosmic Richard” in particular, points to more exciting collaborations between Forsyth and Holtkamp in the future.
In contrast to Forsyth and the other hard-working musicians I would place in the “success” column, no matter how many records they sell or people they play to, there are so many bands out there, especially in the Internet age, that can succeed in gaining recognition almost instantaneously. Some may even navigate an unpredictable market and publicize themselves well enough to earn a living making music, and I would never begrudge anyone for that alone. But I think we need a broader reevaluation of what “making it” in the music world means. I think an analysis of failure, and inversely, success, spans intellectual registers and can open up valuable avenues of critique in art, as well as politics, historical memory, and economic well-being. As for myself, I'm not sure I'm finished sweating over whether my retreat from academia is a failure. I can say this for sure: I had a meaningful conversation with a customer in the store recently about The Island and it felt good.
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Garrett Karrberg was born in New Jersey, has lived in DC, London, and Edinburgh, and now works at the Electric Fetus record store in Minneapolis. He is also a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota, where he has taught classes in the History and Global Studies departments. He may or may not finish his degree.