Ian Mathers’ I Didn’t Wanna End the Dream: Trying to focus on 2019 (but not just 2019)
Saying I didn’t find myself able to pay as much attention to new music in 2019 as I normally do is true, but lacks some context; I see from my notes that I still managed to get through 70 new releases so far this year (and I’ve got a solid 30 more downloaded that I will be giving at least one listen to between now and early 2020), which still places me somewhere towards the extreme upper percentile (really, if you sought out and listened to five new records in 2019, I bet you’re above the global or even continental average). And honestly it’s not sheer bulk that has me feeling like I slightly neglected 2019 in 2019; I’ve had years where I’ve heard less and felt passionately caught up in the moment, and I’m sure I could have listened to twice as much and still felt the same. No, it’s that 2019 was the first year maybe a decade and a half where I actually allowed myself (and it very much had to be “allowed”) to pay half as much attention to old music as I did to new.
Before I get to that, though, let me emphasize that this doesn’t mean that what I found to love in 2019 I loved any less; some years a single record announces itself as some sort of emblematic favorite strongly, some years it’s more a gestalt, but I’d put my feelings about this year’s top three against any recent years’, easily. I certainly didn’t expect Hatchie’s Keepsake to top the list when I first got it (even when I had this reaction to one of the early singles, a song that I wouldn’t even necessarily say is my favorite on the record!), but it got there the old-fashioned way; I simply couldn’t stop playing it, coming back to it between other records, getting various songs stuck in my head, etc. It’s a record I loved passionately and thoughtlessly enough that I couldn’t find the words to articulate it here at greater length than a Dust entry. If it feels a bit less tightly connected to current events than my dual 2018 favorites (Low’s Double Negative and Leverage Models’ Whites) did, that just speaks again to the multitude of ways we all connect with art. I’ll let most of my 2019 list stand on its own, except to note that the rest of my top three had at least an oblique relationship to that notion of currency, with the dark fables of Picastro’s Exit certainly being harrowing enough to soundtrack the news (particularly a song like “A Trench,” which like most Picastro songs instantly sounded like some dark old folk song I’d known since I was a kid the first time I played it) and Hot Chip’s ebulliently humane A Bath Full of Ecstasy being written in the spirit of providing a positive ideal to strive for, even while we’re (on both sides of the Atlantic) being buried under a mountain of shit.
But even in that context, I don’t think my sudden attention to my archives was in the spirit of retreat or refuge; I can honestly say it started on a pure whim, with a friend mentioning how much they preferred the non-album version of The Wrens’ great “This Boy Is Exhausted,” a version that I can now tell you is from the Drive Thru Records 1999 compilation You’ll Never Eat Fast Food Again. This comment reminded me that I have that alternate version (and he’s right, it rips), but that I had no idea where it comes from. And something, somewhere, snapped. See, although I’ve been through multiple computers since I first had my own in the late 90s, and I’ve always been able to transfer all the music I’ve had on it (sometimes through crazily baroque methods) to my new machine, other things have changed a lot. It used to be I kept a ton of CDs but (since both the process was lengthy, hard drive space was at a premium, and internet speeds were painfully slow) I’d usually rip the four or five songs I most wanted to keep around. And any time I was keeping less than basically a full album of songs I’d erase most of the metadata (this now seems insane to me, but I think my mind at the time just wanted all those songs to display in alphabetical order and this seemed the easiest way to get, at the time, WinAmp to co-operate). Well, I got rid of 9/10ths of my CD collection at least five years ago, most of the music I get now whether promos or bought by me come as files, and I’ve got about 100 gigs of hard drive space free and a good, cheap internet connection.
Somehow this combined with a momentary impulse to clean up and properly file my Wrens MP3s and turned into a massive sorting/deletion/reclamation project, complete with a spreadsheet in Google Docs to keep track of what I was keeping and a still to me surprising sense of satisfaction whenever I could justify spending an afternoon or evening just listening to, sorting and often deleting material, some of which hadn’t been played or looked at in 10+ years. Building a new library of stuff I still actually care about, and of course all the little fringe benefits (the little shocks of rediscovery, moments of outright nostalgia, even just the feeling of tidying up); it’s been the most edifying thing I’ve done in a while, and feels somewhere between self-indulgent and the best thing I could be doing for myself.
Mind you, I’ve got a lot of music and I’ve been trying to prioritize this project below things like the people in my life, my day job, and writing here and elsewhere (which is rarely focused on that older material I’ve been processing, but is often informed by what I’ve been getting out of the work), so after eight months I’m… still working on the end of the Cs. Which means I’ve gone through literally everything starting with C that was already in my iTunes library, and have since moved on to the Unsorted pile I generated through that process, which holds both everything in the library I realized needed more time/listening before I made a decision (including things I downloaded as I went, because you do this and you realize it’s insane you somehow only have one Curtis Mayfield song, for example), and then all the other stuff starting with C that was sitting in a few directories that somehow didn’t make it into iTunes before. As I noted on Twitter at the time, C was a particularly rich haul in this respect not least because my love for Coil and the relatively messy state of their discography had at one point led me to say fuck it and accept another fan’s offer of their complete works (and even that wound up being not quite it… keeping a twitter thread of all the random little things that have come up during this process was a surprisingly good part, too). Those particular embarrassments of riches I’m still going through during my spare time, which led to November being a month where, except for stuff I was writing about, pretty much only Coil and Carly Rae Jepson got played in our apartment (my wife, with a saintly patience that comes naturally to neither of us, minded neither).
It even feels a bit weird to discuss this still-ongoing project just in the context of 2019. Aside from some early goings where the thrill of just getting stuff put away properly was overwhelming, I’ve mostly been able to keep it as something I’m working on but after other things, which means it’s definitely going to be a years-long endeavor (to say nothing about how newly obtained material will get integrated in, as it comes), but maybe the major thing it’s done is abated the slowly but steadily rising background panic I only now realize I’d been feeling over the past decade or so, as all the new listening I keep doing (which I love and wouldn’t trade for anything; every year it gives me so many new things I love and that matter to me) was out of whack with the near total neglect I had for everything once it fell off the treadmill of the new. I felt stuck on that treadmill; now it feels, to torture this metaphor, like I still spend a good amount of time on the treadmill but also get off every so often and, I don’t know, lift weights or something. If anything, it’s made me more eager to hear new things when I carve out time for them. My teenage self, always worrying whether I’d still feel the same way about music once I hit my (late) 30s would be thrilled to hear the answer to possibly incipient burnout is not “stop listening” but rather “listen even more, but differently.”
Ian Mathers
Albums:
Hatchie - Keepsake
Picastro - Exit
Hot Chip - A Bath Full of Ecstasy
Blanck Mass - Animated Violence Mild
Sunwatchers - Illegal Moves
Clinic - Wheeltappers & Shunters
Wand - Laughing Matter
Ladytron - Ladytron
Aarktica - Mareación
Boy Harsher - Careful
Nakhane - You Will Not Die
Lambchop - This (is what I wanted to tell you)
loscil - Equivalents
Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society - Mandatory Reality
Sigrid - Sucker Punch
Julia Kent - Temporal
Pelican - Nighttime Stories
Rafael Anton Irisarri - Solastalgia
Beth Gibbons & Krzysztof Penderecki - Symphony of Sorrowful Songs
Toronto’s Picastro have lasted for over 20 years now, and while their sound has shifted over the years, for the last decade or so Dusted’s Ben Donnelly’s description of their music as “rhythmically sparse, acoustic without being woodsy” has been an apt one. In 2019 they’ve just released Exit, their sixth LP, which sees the band’s Liz Hysen writing songs for a number of other vocalists, of which Dusted’s Ian Mathers said, “The authorial voice present on past albums sounds just as strongly through other throats as through Hysen’s own, and the songs are as strong as ever.” Here Hysen gives us a list of ten that have been on her mind, whether recently or for years.
Townes Van Zandt—“You Are Not Needed Now”
I have a hard time getting into singers, they all seem to be about ego these days and do a lot of showing without any telling. Townes Van Zandt is more like a diviner, this one really gets me.
Sibylle Baier—“Tonight”
Germaine [Liu] from Picastro made a connection between me and Sybille Baier once and I actually think its pretty spot on. She doesn't use a lot of flourishes and it feels very intimate. It makes you want to sit down and stop everything and not many people make me want to do that!
This Kind of Punishment—A Beard of Bees
This band gets overlooked all the time but this album also really got me, its super catchy but interesting compositionally, all the things I look for in a record. Flying Nun just rules.
Leadbelly—“Governor O.K. Allen”
Where would any of us be without Leadbelly? The melody and his style of singing are reminiscent of his other "hits" but I hadn't heard this song until recently and it made me want to crawl into the stereo.
Nina Simone—“Strange Fruit”
I hadn't heard this song in a long time and it totally rocked me recently. She is a technically proficient musician but can really give it when she sings, you feel the truth. All of it is good though.
Luciano Cilio—Dialoghi del Presente
I think I listened to this record non-stop for like a week when I first heard it, a friend of mine made me a copy and I bought a few more as presents. I mimicked traces of the vocal layering on a couple of Picastro songs.
Exuma—Exuma
I was reminded of this album recently, its sort of joyous and sad at the same time. No one sounds like this, its kind of a timeless record.
Elfin Saddle—“Kiboho”
It was something I read from Emi from Elfin Saddle that reminded me of this. I could go on and on about them but they are such a special band that needs more attention. We played shows with them and I was blown away by Jordan's kindness and their creativity as whole.
Diamanda Galás—“Iron Lady”
I hadn't heard of Phil Ochs before I heard this song and was totally taken in by it. Her covers are always the best but I remember this one the most.
Yoko Ono—“Midsummer New York”
I usually have trouble with 70's production but this album sounds so current, even now, I got into right away. Like Alice Coltrane, she was so ahead of her time, a big one for me.
Picastro "Exit" by Sleeping Giant Glossolalia/SGG Records
Although Picastro’s lineup, instrumentation and sound have shifted over time since they started just over 20 years ago, the Toronto band’s voice has stayed strong and consistent. At any given time, whether Picastro is currently constituted towards the more abrasive or pastoral end of their personal spectrum, whether it’s a few people or a larger ensemble, whether it’s acoustics or electronics (or both), Picastro (and more specifically mainstay Liz Hysen) have kept the same gloriously dark, compellingly rich tone, even through the kind of gaps you tend to get with long-running bands that mostly fly under the radar. With the band’s lineup over the past few years stable and among the best Picastro has ever been, it’s perhaps inevitable that the often restless Hysen would take that stronger structure and try out an experiment she’s been considering for years: mostly removing her own voice from the equation in favor of others.
Most of the vocalists on Exit's eight songs are men, which was a deliberate choice; in order to make crystal clear how many Picastro songs are narratives, not autobiography, Hysen often pointedly sings from the male perspective and has talked about finding the idea of writing for male vocalists interesting. That might not be clear from the beginning, though; Great Lake Swimmers’ Tony Dekker has not only sung with the band before (see “Mountain/Relief” from 2014’s You) but here on “Mirror Age” he seems almost to be making an effort to sound like Hysen. If you’re familiar with Picastro’s work the result is bewitchingly off. Elsewhere the change is more apparent, whether it’s Dekker himself (the only repeat vocalist) on “I Spy,” Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart shivering through the beginning of “Blue Neck,” or Big Blood/Cerebus Shoal’s Caleb Mulkerin warbling over the stomping, sawing, beeping “A Trench.” When Hysen does take the lead once, on the downcast, swirling “To Know” it both fits neatly with all the other voices folded into Picastro’s sound here, and as a stark reminder of why her presence as singer is so key to the band.
Throughout it all, the instrumental part of the current Picastro lineup — Hysen on acoustic guitar and sometimes piano, Nick Storring on cello, Matthew Ramolo on synthesizers, and Germaine Liu on drums — gives the many voices on Exit a strong, stable base to work from. It’s often Hysen and Storring taking up the more straightforward, driving part of the melody, allowing Liu to provide color and accents (although the latter is perfectly comfortable with a more conventional timekeeping role when needed) and Ramolo to both layer sounds and sometimes to almost twist and distort the songs through his interventions. At their strongest, as on the stretches of the closing “This Be My Fortune” where they take over from Marker Starling’s Christopher Cummings, or in their Petra Glynt-aided deconstruction/crawling exorcism of Sonic Youth’s “(She’s in a) Bad Mood,” they provide ample evidence that they don’t need any voices to be compelling.
All of which makes Hysen’s successful experiment here so interesting. None of the guests here, whether well known in their own right or not, stick out the way outsiders, especially singers, sometimes do. Picastro has always been a broad tent, but here it proves even more accommodating than listeners may have guessed. The authorial voice present on past albums sounds just as strongly through other throats as through Hysen’s own, and the songs are as strong as ever. Whether this opens up a cast of characters for future use or not, the result is another intriguing album from Picastro.
