BLOG: A Whisper Growing: Dear Astronaut and the Darkening Landscape

in Desperation and Noise: Brad Nelson Staff Blogs by Brad Nelson — April 18, 2009 at 12:20 pm | 3 comments

DEAR ASTRONAUT: “THE DARK FOREST”

This fucking night. Starless. Consumptive.

Its presence suffocates the trees, which crowd together as orphaned familiars for warmth. To search for similar reflections of desperation in each others’ leafy eyes.

I have built a fire here.

I am burning everything.

These simple human pleasures, thirsty for absolution—they drink in the heat. They are most alive in a nucleus of flame. I can feel my clothes, my tent, my food take on new shape, screaming with delight in the hot blue funk of transformation.

But I have let you live.

I have let the grass give way to your obsolete shape. I had left you playing Dear Astronaut songs until Jeb Ebben’s howl invaded me. Until I had to burn the connective tissue, for all connections are temporary and it is best to sever them while you retain the faintest grip of control. Until I had to split the night with fire.

DEAR ASTRONAUT: “A WHISPER GROWING” (LIVE AT THE BORG WARD)

Dear Astronaut: an independent Milwaukee band whose furtive noise may only be echoed in the empty wells of the future. History is written by those self-important enough to consider themselves winners. The rest are cemented over.

Dear Astronaut sing among the lost and buried.

“(We) started in about 2004 when I decided that I would start writing songs on an acoustic guitar, this beat up old classical guitar,” guitarist and lead vocalist/pariah Ebben says. “It was just a terrible, terrible guitar. It did not hold tune. But I started writing songs on it.”

Ebben has since tossed the early cassettes born from this guitar.

“The first couple of tapes that were put out were really terrible, so bad in fact that I don’t have copies of them anymore,” he says.

Then Ebben, native of Park Falls, Wisconsin, moved to Milwaukee and, with bassist Frank Knaebe and drummer/guitarist Scott Emmerich in tow, recorded several primal impulses in his living room—folk soaked in its own doomed, screaming viscera. Rotting.

They called it Songs from the Closet of Light and Swords, released in 2006.

TRAPPED IN THE CLOSET

DEAR ASTRONAUT: “DEVIL TOOK MY WOMAN”

“Devil Took My Woman”—an inversion of Skip James’ “Got” (“got” can imply inadvertent acquisition, “took” is fairly straightforward) or a surreal examination of James’ “best friend,” or a translation of his rambling wild geese—tells of a man’s disappeared love, disappeared by a horned beast who has forced her listen “to rock and roll” and to “eat mescaline,” among other perceived indecencies:

In the place where the sun don’t shine
The trees were gray and dead
The devil and that girl of mine
Made themselves a bed
On gravel and broken glass
They danced under the moon
Her skin turned pale and her hair fell out
She ate from tarnished spoons

There is little journalistic evidence for this imagery, unless our narrator has been observing these dark acts from afar, doing little to stop them, making him no better than the devil. Moreover, it is only halfway through the song that he resolves to fish out a sword and rescue his girl from bald druggy oblivion.

Here, the music escalates. What was previously only Ebben’s mad acoustic strumming is now burgeoned by electric strings mimicking ascent, picking up speed and shattering on impact. The narrator’s fictive vision, too, shatters. Only now does his own world, walled-off by ever-growing grass, seem so insular that all outside apparitions take on an air of evil, no matter their actual intent:

And the devil was no demon at all
Though he may have been a prince.
I didn’t know what else to do
So I just let her go
Returned to that green valley
Where the grass did grow and grow

Similar furies linger beneath what-once-seemed solid images in many of Ebben’s songs. For instance, in “All the Birds in the Sky,” also from Light and Swords, two lovers revel in their sickness for each other, ignorant of the unnamed horrors down the line:

And all of the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea
Could not have changed the way that we felt
When we got back to town we were told the horrible news

It comes on like an inside joke. The malicious context that curled the pages previous made manifest. The feeling of being suddenly firebombed by life.

That the song ends there, that the news is never expanded on, leaving the weight ambiguous, makes all imaginations of the future swell with awful pounds.

“I really like the idea of trying to tell a story as briefly as possible… like photographs or pieces of a whole,” Ebben says. “And maybe you’re not going to see the whole ever.”

UP IN THE ATTIC

DEAR ASTRONAUT: “ST. CROIX #2″

The fire uncovers my sleeping bag, exhuming it angrily into the air. You would tell me I should have thought this through more.

Memories return like pigeons. He was dead and you were crying. I pulled weeds from the soft ground, who in their last moments had sought to wring a permanent mark in the black earth. I was their failure.

They were everywhere—sad, coiled husks that once lunged for the very thrill of existence, that in order to do so fed themselves with the spinal fluid of their less ambitious brothers. And when I turned to see the greatest lot of them gathered at your feet, I wondered if they secretly wished to pull you into the earth. If you would let them.

As I have let Attic Songs pull me in. As Ebben strums lonely on his acoustic, its insides fundamentally empty, just softened wood and space, I am fingering a blade of grass, imagining its thick roots. Thinking of all the living matter writhing underground, wondering if the deadness above is the nature of anything so permanently open casket as the world.

Attic Songs is mostly Ebben on his own, communicating through sepia tones and the dispersed necks of broken bottles—reconstructing memories from genuine mental wreckage. The reconstruction goes poorly on “Recurring Nightmare Blues,” where within the construct every turned corner is pregnant with horrors and every bridge traveled is a bloody tongue:

I was walking down
That long and lonely road
When the policeman
Brought me a rose.
I said “I don’t think
I can accept your gift.”
So he shot me down
In a hail of bullets.

It is an existence of pure turmoil and antagonism—the narrator twice shot down and his soul posthumously abused by authority.

Things are decidedly more peaceful if still strained for hope in “St. Croix #2,” where Ebben attempts reach through the camera noise and drag tangible feelings from long-passed and isolated moments of joy. His drawl, usually shaken by terrors, is wistful here, accompanied for the only time on the record by a disembodied female voice. Both feeling as dead stars must when they look at their old photographs. Sadly observing a past brilliance that is difficult to recall in the present darkness.

There’s an ache in my heart
Tracing all the lines
Trying to get back to the start…
Here’s the town where I live
There’s our old tire swing
Ghosts of my brother and I
Lost somewhere up on that hill
Falling into the void

Or white sheets exploding between your fingers like remnants of a crushed orchid. The hospital bearing down, its unmarked whiteness making all foreign bodies seem more worn and browned in comparison. All the lines in our mouth corners taking darker weight, like Monet’s accidents.

Ebben cannot leave me here, shuffling through the exploded parts, trying to piece together a single unmarred moment in the fiery hush. So the music, as though following a necessary impulse identical to mine, shifts, expands, feels its heart rate increase slightly, for what must now be said is far too important to let stumble out of that previous speed, no, for even if it stumbles now, it must stumble with purpose, it must fall and feel the pavement’s velocity:

Rivers will swell as our bodies will fill
With the joyous sounds of laughter
And all we can do when the water returns
Is never forget what we’re after

“I’ll get a line in my head,” Ebben says of his lyric writing process. “And this is the way I’d write when I wrote poetry or fiction, is I’d sort of get the first line in my head and it’d just sort of grow. By the time I would finally get to write it down, I either forgot it completely so I wrote something different, or else I just let it continue growing.”

We have grown and swelled to the breaking point. To the point where when joy is tended within a space we must remain cognizant of its ability to be snuffed out forever. Attic Songs is the tending.

The Dark Forest is the snuffing out.

A TREE DIES IN VALHALLA

I put the fire out. Its purpose had been served. My clothes, my tent, my food—all were now a black vision of themselves.

The only visible bodies now are the silhouettes of dark trees. Mountains distorted by fog and sky. The yawning mouth of hell.

I stumble toward a hillside. It regards me with disinterest, giving way to my wretched stomp. As I walk, my nerves feel nothing but noise—the muffled panic of drifting blindly through foreign terrain, everything oppressed by shadow, every shadow teeming with untapped howls.

The mouth swallowing.

I kneel. I dig. You have left me this way. Wanting nothing more than to be buried.

Ebben’s words briefly penetrate the noise, reminding me of how Dear Astronaut evolved. How what was once a mere observer of horrors could suddenly emulate them, allowing them to echo internally, eternally.

“As we wrote as a band more, the songs got more interesting,” Ebben says. “More sort of ramshackle as well.”

And eventually interesting and ramshackle enough to forge a space in which comets of thought may explode and incur casualties. It is impossible to say where this echoed darkness originated, one can only trust Ebben’s word of its natural arc, but it is not comforting to know that something that feeds so heavily off the human psyche came into being through natural causes.

“I started playing with this guy Frank Knaebe,” Ebben says. “He’s also in a wonderful sort of apocalyptic folk band called Partisan. And my good friend Scott Emmerich who used to be a guitarist in a hardcore band, a crust band called Legion of Doom, and he started playing the drums, so everything sort of just came together. We started playing together a lot. We recorded an album kind of right off the bat and it’s The Dark Forest.”

The Dark Forest is probably the first folk-doom-black metal record, I don’t know, there may be antecedents, but if I had them they would be burning anyway, they wouldn’t matter in all this storm and din. The chords are all oil-thick, a murk of endless depth, but they sound as though they were recorded through something thin, high and lonesome, like a box of rain.

Here Ebben’s gone mad on mountaintops and he’s come back down to tell us of what he saw. And worse, what he did not see at all. The whole affair like Black Sabbath walled off in the wood, reading William Blake from the hills of dying meadows, their brains hissing from drugs and scenery.

And the title track with its opening thump like beating the inside of a skull until broken, the exploding guitar-and-cymbal chaos like all the colors that emerge when even the faintest light shines on cracked bone—this is the kind of music whose predatory shrieks freeze your nervous system, for it is easier to be devoured alive while disconnected from your all-too-feeling components.

Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging until my limbs go limp from fatigue. Unearthing rotting roots.

And The Dark Forest would be enough to give violent birth to this scene I’ve made were the record just the sound of human life thrashed in jet engines.

But no.

Your father’s fingers were thick and short
And calloused on the tips
Your father’s lips were thin and dark
And spiders fell from them!

“The Dark Forest, the songs on that, are part of a song cycle which I think at this point is never going to be completely realized,” says Ebben. “Originally when I just was playing by myself it was going to be a full length called Dandelions… and it’s sort of this song cycle about a couple… basically their relationship is falling apart. It’s falling apart particularly because of drugs and this shared history of terrible, traumatic things having happened.”

It is the kind of trauma born of fathers shaking cameras in their thick hands, the flash burning the memory in. The kind that causes us to drift toward a bliss both forced and needled. The kind that will blister any positive threads to others.

Our hands will adhere to each other but they will sweat a growing resentment. And I will feed my shadows with false contentment so as to keep them wall-bound.

“I would say in a lot of ways ‘The Spider’ is sort of key to all that, the centerpiece to the trauma of psychological terror,” says Ebben. “When it comes down to it I would say The Dark Forest and the Dandelions songs are about, above all else, emotional and sexual violence… trying to figure out these subjects as they relate to my own life and the lives of people I know and just sort of trying to wrap my head around something that’s completely un-fucking-fathomable, how people do these things to each other.”

At least half of “The Spider” is dedicated to breaking down. Once Ebben indicates the perch from which spiders descend, all instruments fall into chaos, lost in the black space between upturned photographs. Pictures of a trusted figure’s sickness.

All acting as ankle weights by the time we reach “The Black Lake.”

DEAR ASTRONAUT: “THE BLACK LAKE”

I went to the lake
I was thinking of you
And the way your limbs fell
And the way we’re all just animals.

These limbs are dead, numb, gone pale green like sea water, for someone saw a vision of disconnection so ultimate and sweet that nothing else could possibly live up to it, so everything within had to drown itself, had to contract and let once-warm connective vessels blissfully ice over.

You have this and I wish you well. All I have is this hole I’ve dug, which is now body-sized. I slide in and let the dirt cascade from above.

I hear the new record, Escape from Rainbow Mountain (release date undetermined), in the distance and it is all space colonized by darkness, mountains staking out new territory translated to expansive metal fury. Guitars set to war. It is lovely enough to make even self-made elaborate death traps irrelevant.

I hear the deathless rush of “A Whisper Growing.” I feel warmth return to my fingers despite being surrounded by cold earth. I try to scream my way back out.

My mouth is full of dirt.

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Author: BradNelson

Brad Nelson is the Arts & Entertainment editor for Insight Magazine.

 

 

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