Hollydrift is not for everyone. Let's just get that out of the way up front, so those who are timid or easily put off can find something else with which to occupy their time. For those who have a streak of white lightning running through their spine, there is Hollydrift. It's not white noise; it's not pop music; it's doesn't even have verses and choruses. Waiting For The Tiller is a collage of sound; it is Hollydrift's summation of the post-industrial landscape of the newly born WWII generation. It is the sound of new machines slowly creeping across old fields, the sound of radio signals tentatively reaching for the stars and interacting with the wild swoop and ping of space noises. It creaks and whistles and moans like an ancient wind redolent with the oil stains of history, and it drones and hums with the electrified breath of radio transmitters. I'm in love, I think.
Equal parts Wilt, Coil, Scanner, Stone Glass Steel, and Meat Beat Manifesto (okay, that's a lie -- I'm just referencing "Intermission" from RUOK?), Waiting For The Tiller is an aural collage that is, as Mathias Anderson has said himself, a "smear" of sound. It has no beats and no discernable melodies you can tap your foot to. It is simply a wash of noise, an amalgamation of sound that moves past you, obscuring the sun and casting a shadow across your face. It is a collection of sounds which pool at night beneath your window and influence your dreams. It is static and wind, field recordings and intercepted transmissions, processed noises and raw audio. There will be sounds you find frustratingly familiar (like that drone which runs through most of "From An Old Horizon"), and there will be alien noises which sound like nothing you've ever heard before.
Hollydrift has put out a dark ambient radio transmission. You've dialed in to some tiny laboratory out of a dark wood and, for the duration of the hour that he transmits, time and space are compressed and elongated. There is a mighty centrifuge running in Hollydrift's studio and what we hear is the cream Anderson pulls from his whirling concoction of noise, voices, field recordings, and radio signals. It's an audio soup -- crackling with its own supercharged energy -- that gets poured into a funnel and blown like a mist of excited particles into the ether where your tiny radio becomes infected. Excellent.
Hollydrift
Parasomnic Records [2004]
I need a diagram for my family tree. I'm getting fathers and grandfathers confused. Usually the characters grow to populate a good deal of the active part of your head when you're working on a book, but I've been addled enough and distracted enough that they only occupy a tiny corner of my brain. In that corner, family trees are getting muddled. A key element of Grandpa's notebook hinges on a date that just doesn't work because Jack's Mom is Grandpa's daughter and not his wife. This isn't the Appalachian backwoods so there isn't any convoluted inter-marriage of families going on here. This is straight forward middle class breeding.
Even if Grandpa loves his daughter very much, he wouldn't base his crypto key on the day they met. And, if he does base it on the day he and his wife met, then it is possible he never told his daughter. Shit. It was all so simple yesterday.
I need a better key. I also need to consider if I'm making this too complicated. Grandpa's security on his notebook has to be simple enough that he can parse it in his head (it helps that he's a whiz at these sorts of things), but complicated enough that, without the key, it's difficult and pointless to try. Sort of a homemade version of a one time pad. The notebook is the MANUSCRIPT and it holds the key to deciphering the mysterious transmissions which have gotten everyone in an uproar. But it isn't just a written document; it has to be coded so that only the proper chaps can get to it. The bad guys took Grandpa away a long time ago. They never got the notebook.
So does it have to be coded? If it was hidden, isn't that enough?
Would Grandpa think it was enough?
Melissa took some pictures of the yard while I was gone. Renaissance Gardening was out yesterday to lay flagstones on the new walkways and scatter grass seed. In a few weeks, the kidney shape will be green and shortly after that, we'll be putting in some shrubs. It's is coming along and we'll have our noses buried in plant and shrub books over the next few days.
This last picture is the play area for Solomon, though we now realize that it may be a few years before he's actually old enough to want to play in a box full of pebbles.
The Art Institute of Chicago is open late on Thursday so I got my art fix. A couple of Turners, a Rembrandt, a Moreau, a few Chagalls: these are the things which make me happy.
My faithful guide this week, Travis, took me to the John Hancock observation deck this evening where we met up with Ryan. They suffered through my requisite touristy snapshots and then we wandered off to the basement where there is a delightful little Italian bistro with real fuckin' coffee and smooth gelato. A very nice way to round off the week.
The Goodman Theatre is non-stop 24-hours of entertainment. These four pictures were taken over the span of less than a minute.
I know how they keep the Cloud Gate clean. It happens at night, just before the park closes.
Somewhere in Chicago -- don't ask me where, I was lost -- there are giraffes guarding the residential streets.
More wandering around Chicago, seeing the wild and the still life.
The conspiracies are afoot, and I am not fleet enough. I'm in Chicago for the week and took a long perambulate around town this evening and shot some pictures. Since I can't seem to get a live FTP connection to the site, you'll just have to imagine them. And the night seems to have gotten away from me out here so I guess I should get to work on all that writing I was planning on doing and stop loafing about digesting dinner and watching Underworld.
Though, there was this great John Dee quote from my dinnertime reading that is too good not to remember:
"And for these and such like marvellous Acts and Feats, Naturally, Mathematically, and Mechanically wrought and contrived: ought any honest Student and Modest Christian Philosopher be counted & called a Conjurer?...Shall this man be condemned as a Companion of HellHounds, and a Caller, and Conjurer of wicked and damned Spirits?"
[From his "Mathematicall Praeface" to Euclid's Elements (1570)]
