Where the Rivers are Infinite
“The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.”― Chinua Achebe
This week my label Birdman Records is celebrating the release of the debut record from art rock band Infinite River. Comprised of a core group of Detroit music veterans Joey Mazzola, from Sponge and The Detroit Cobras, Gretchen Gonzales, from Slumber Party and Universal Eyes, and His Name Is Alive’s Warren Defever, the band started weaving electric space sounds during the pandemic…starting to play out live as the world reopened. If you have heard the names before in this newsletter, they are the drone behind Ethan Daniel Davidson in another Birdman Records group The Seedsmen To The World.
Prequel is all about the drone…the album consisting of a set of six instrumentals with Defever and Gonzales setting the spaced-out stage for Mazzola’s guitar exploration wizardry (he really is a gentle force). I first hearing the songs in an early misty morning in the forested house north of Detroit where the band has its recording studio. The songs of Prequel come in slowly, swell like an ocean (check out the flowing cover by artist Livia Cocchi that perfectly catches the mood), grow and sway with Davidson’s quiet buzzing and strumming, a perfect complement to Defever’s mystical tanpura meditations.
It is the ambient state that Infinite River create that attract me to their sound…the laid-back grooves that could easily fit inside the soundtracks of Jóhann Jóhannsson, the large scale rituals of Hermann Nitsch, and the dark corners of the long-ago Terrastock festivals where the greatest psychedelic purveyors of the day sold their musical wares. Sparks’ drummer Steve Nistor adds heartbeats and pulses to a few of the tracks, pushing the music gently—tribally— like blood through the veins. The six untitled tracks that make up Prequel are a perfect backdrop for the rainy days that just keep coming.
The band just returned from London, where they celebrated the record release with a few shows. You can check out the record on bandcamp and any other of your favorite streaming services. But I must say, it sounds best on vinyl, where the analog coloring adds just a little extra warmth….
60 Years Ago Today: Alcatraz Prison Closes
Frank Weatherman was the last prisoner to be transported off of the island before prison guard Jim Albright (interviewed 5 years ago) locked up the facility for good. Weatherman, a convicted gun smuggler, eventually found freedom and had a family, dying in Utah in 1999.
Punk Wild Man David Johansen Focus of New Documentary Co-Directed by Martin Scorsese
Scorsese’s love affair with music…and great taste…have resulted in several phenomenal productions over the years. I am truly excited for this one. Someone NEEDED to tell the story of the New York Doll David Johansen; just from the trailer, this doc looks great.
Pres Biden will be presenting these medals along with the National Humanities Medals whose recipients include Amy Tan, Colson Whitehead and Bryan Stevenson (a complete list is here).
ARTS CONTRIBUTED $1 TRILLION TO US ECONOMY IN 2021
The arts world at large is on the rebound…but still needs to be supported: “This annual report from the NEA and BEA underscores that arts and culture are an essential part of the American economy. It is similarly apparent, however, that the sector still faces tremendous hardships due to Covid-19”
A Photographer’s Unsettling Experiments with “Cursed” Images
Patricia Voulgaris’ photography is on beautiful display within this article…haunting. “Voulgaris’s photography is rooted in a genuine fascination with the supernatural—nineteenth-century spirit photography, mediums, unexplained events…”
The Art Of Drowning
By: Billy Collins
I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.
After falling off a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages of an album of photographs-
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.
How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph?
Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash?
Your whole existence going off in your face
in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography-
nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.
Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance
here, some bolt of truth forking across the water,
an ultimate Light before all the lights go out,
dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage.
But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish,
a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.
The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all
as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,
leaving behind what you have already forgotten,
the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.
