Robert Millis / Wica Intina—split tape cassette (Melliphonic)
Robert Millis/Wica Intina Split Tape by Robert Millis/Wica Intina
A year ago Sublime Frequencies published The Indian Talking Machine, a gorgeously produced collection of sights and sounds that Robert Millis unearthed during his research into the early years of India’s recording industry. This year Millis shares a limited-run cassette with Wica Intina, a young singer-songwriter from Cookeville Tennessee. “It’s a mighty long way down rock and roll,” Ian Hunter once sang. “You look like a star but you’re still on the dole.” Millis’ financial details aren’t public knowledge, but he’s been around long enough to know that the distance between the peak and the ground is shorter than it looks, and the time it takes to traverse that distance is a mere blink in a long lifetime.
So let’s not measure his success in terms of adulation and glitz, right? Doing so would likely get in the way of appreciating the charms of this humble document. Millis’ side kicks off with an artifact of his adventures in India. Apparently his way of winding down from interviewing 78 collectors of the southern hemisphere was to go back to the hotel and write a bleak ballad in English. Under such circumstances, his main instruments are voice and guitars; you won’t hear many of the field recordings or 78 captures he’s used with Climax Golden Twins. But you will hear some sounds from an old friend, Matt Shoemaker, who passed unexpectedly in 2017. Shoemaker’s piano and Millis’ electric guitar and beatbox seem to creep around each other, doing their best to catch one another unawares on the instrumental “Elusion.” Millis sounds bluer without him, mulling over the lure and wages of sin. The vibe overall is much more late night and lonely than the already Cage-ian (Nick, not John) bitterness of Millis’ last LP, The Lonesome High.
With Millis, strangeness always lurks around the edges, even when he plays it straight. Wica Intina, on the side, can register that strange times are happening around him, but he does not evoke them. He strives to sound wise beyond his 24 years. Maybe it’s just a genetic gift, or maybe he grew up listening to a much older person’s record collection; the one non-original is a cover of Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” He sounds like a mid-20th Century troubadour trying to figure out how to drift to Greenwich Village or Nashville, but stuck in a town where the trucks don’t stop and the object of his affection has already moved on, leaving him to sing his blues into the cassette deck.
