200 Words: KYLE EYRE CLYD
(In 200 Words, we highlight a new record we like a lot, via a 200-word review by Marc Masters and 200 words (or so) from the artist about whatever they choose.)
KYLE EYRE CLYD – Pale Dawn Creeps LP (Halatern, Etc.)
In an essay included inside Pale Dawn Creeps, Kyle Eyre Clyd asks that you “open each listening ritual by taking a minute to reflect on Dawn and Dusk…As paradoxical unities, Dawn and Dusk represent that fixed identity known as flux: neither this nor that, nor this and that, nor one, nor contradiction, nor all.” She also titles one side of the LP “Dawn” and the other “Dusk”. The suggestion seems to be: take her work as resolving opposites, encompassing contradictions. See it as sound that explores the indeterminacy of unity, the fluidity of the concrete.
Viewed through that prism, Pale Dawn Creeps shines. Field recordings mesh with instrumental elements to create a space between abstraction and music. The sounds can be bracingly literal, as when “Peter’s Swine” offers nothing but pigs squealing. But that feels like music, much as less-representational passages feel like real-world events. In molding the natural, Pale Dawn Creps recalls Vanessa Rosetto’s masterful Whole Stories (both were, coincidentally, recorded in New Orleans). But where that album turned the camera on itself, Clyd’s work is murkier. It makes me want to shine a flashlight in its corners, but I imagine pulling the curtain might only reveal deeper shades.
– Marc Masters
Kyle Eyre Clyd on Pale Dawn Creeps
The French Quarter: A Guide
Upon arrival to a new city, a traveller recalls the story that preceded it. Myth, like a phantom, or double, follows the tourist throughout his stay, competing with the streets themselves for affection. The “spitting images” of cities, like sheep clones, share DNA with their parent cells, though cities always maintain a life of their own. Wise vacationers absorb place as phantom: the French Quarter offers many ghost tours. Otherwise, vacation regresses into life and his stalking turns to crime. (New Orleans’ many convicts and transplants will confirm this.)
The French Quarter boasts an impressive spitting image, customarily, consumed as spit. Cajun cuisine, properly tempered, is the consistency of spit—a tradition which began when the first cook on Royal spat into a tourist’s soup. It’s said that Quarter saliva is unlike any other. This fine butter muslin is viscous, sour, sharp, and anxious. It is the spit of poverty (gingivitis) and of jouissance (a stomach devouring itself.) On Bourbon, expect to pay $5 for spit delivered directly into the palm, $10 from the back of the throat, and $15 onto fingers. You’ll find it is hardly priced by quantity. (Such is the logic of spit under capitalism.)
Pale Dawn Creeps is out now on Halatern, Etc. Buy it here.
