Notes on not seeing clearly
In which we welcome Christians...
One of my favorite things about running Philip K. Discs is the opportunity for glimpses in my friends’ creative processes. It took me years to figure out how to write and make music and art in my own voice, for a variety of reasons. So I’ve always been incredibly grateful for artists who offer a fair amount of transparency into what that process looks like for them. There is both a mechanical aspect of art-making that doesn’t always get accounted for (showing up, doing the work, practicing your craft, etc.), but there are also the more intangible pieces, the inspiration that strikes out of that rote practice…and when an artist goes a step further to help elucidate that portion of the magic? Well friends, that’s a gift.
All of this is prologue to say that I’m really honored today to bring you some glimpses of these processes by way of my friend, Jeremy Stewart.
He’s musician, writer, and a Scholar-in-Residence at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. And he just so happens to be the leader of Christians, a noise/improv band, whose newest album I just released on PKD this week. The Irreversible Word is a companion piece to Christians’ 2024 release, S/Z (available via Fort Evil Fruit). It’s thoughtful, meditative, and noisy exploration of a key theme that keeps resurfacing across the entire runtime, like a thought or a feeling that pops up in the back of your mind that you can’t quite articulate yet, but it refuses to let you go.
Now normally when I help release a new album, I write up some descriptive, promotional info about it, hoping to catch the attention of anyone who’d be willing to take a listen and maybe write about it themselves, or pass it along to friends via word-of-mouth. And I’ve done that just a bit with The Irreversible Word, but I’m thrilled to say that Jeremy was generous enough to write a larger reflection himself about Christians’ creative process, and some of the key themes of this album. So for the rest of this post, I’m simply going to step out of the way and let him illuminate their art for you…
The Irreversible Word (titled after a quote from Roland Barthes' structural analysis of narrative codes) was recorded at Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie)'s dilapidated church studio in Anacortes, WA. This allowed Christians to take on the guise of a classic Pacific Northwest power trio, with Stewart joined by Stanley Jason Zappa on bass and drummer Nick Skrowaczewski (both of whom appeared on Fort Evil Fruit’s Golia / Shiroishi / Sikora / Skrowaczewski / Wedman / Zappa tape HelMel). The trio translates the sonic vocabulary of metal, blues, and punk into the musical language of free improvisation.
Recorded in the same sessions as Christians’ 2024 release S/Z (Fort Evil Fruit), The Irreversible Word thus can also function as a companion piece to the former album, which was described by Byron Coley in The Wire as “splendidly fiery… close to the ideal of what fusion can be.”
As with S/Z, The Irreversible Word circles obsessively around a theme from Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. In the process of putting together S/Z for release, Fort Evil Fruit’s Paul Condon surprised Stewart by asking “I wonder if the repetition of the Stravinsky theme is connected to having a Zappa in the band?” Mystified, Stewart replied that it was not, whereupon Paul produced a series of links to numerous places in which Frank Zappa, too, had quoted The Rite of Spring across the breadth of his recorded output. An enigmatic coincidence indeed.
In June 2023, on the Monday morning following Casse-Tete: A Festival of Experimental Music, I drove to Anacortes, Washington, to a studio called The Unknown. The day was a little cloudy and cool, unlike the fine weather we enjoyed for the festival. I drove the car Stanley Zappa gave me last winter, and in the passenger seat was the drummer Nick Skrowaczewski, all the way from Minneapolis. He had been playing Casse-Tete with Stanley (on saxophones) and Andrew Wedman (on electric piano) as Manzappaczewski. That was the night that Lori Goldston performed (which was wonderful), as did my free improvising metallic noise project, Christians. In fact, that night, I (on electric guitar) was joined not only by my regular drummer Justin Arding, but also by Nick and Stanley (on bass). Although Justin couldn’t make it to the session at The Unknown, Stanley and Nick made time to do just that. It’s a fine drive to Anacortes – easy and not too long. Stanley met us at the studio soon after we arrived, in a quiet residential neighbourhood, across the street from a cute little park with evergreens, flowers, and cobbled stone walls. There wasn't much gear to load in: just my trusty Framus guitar and a box of pedals. The studio is housed an old church, stuffed with beautiful instruments, recording equipment, and a fair bit of dusty old junk. The studio is owned by Phil Elverum (who is the songwriter and principal musician of Mt. Eerie and The Microphones), and operated by Nicholas Wilbur, a talented musician in his own right.
Our tempo was relaxed, but nevertheless, we got down to the business of setting up the equipment. I chose an old Sunn amp with a Fender cabinet; Stanley selected a vintage Fender bass and a giant Ampeg. Nick put together the drumkit from his breakables (cymbals and snare) and their shells and hardware. We were offered isolation rooms, but I wanted the sound of the band playing together in the big room, so that’s where we set up. We tested our sounds for a minute while the Sony 2” tape rolled, and then we went upstairs to the control room to listen to the sounds with Nicholas and talk about the plan. I told Stanley and Nick that the only thing I would rule out would be the sound of a rock band jamming, to which they instantly and heartily agreed. Of course, it went without saying; and I have played with Stanley many times over the years, but with Nick only twice before that day, including the Saturday night immediately preceding the session. We talked about 1 Corinthians 13:12, which I admit to being obsessed with. Videmus nunc per speculum in aegnigmate: tuc autem facie ad faciem. Nunc cognosco ex parte: tunc autem cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum. Now we see “in an enigma by means of a mirror,” very literally (and very mysteriously). Sometime, I’d like to share my sermon on that topic, but not today. In any case, we talked some more—Nick wanted to know, e.g., about how long I wanted each piece to be—and then we went back downstairs and played some music. Every piece found its way back to a theme I called “Blue Revelation.”
This is definitely the most fully-realized improvised music I’ve recorded, and I am so thrilled with the investments I made in genius collaborators, a great-sounding studio loaded with hallowed gear, and a thick layer of auditory frosting.
Jeremy was also kind enough to include this quote from S/Z, the book, as a sort of decoder for the themes being explored:
[...] the Z has encountered some pitfall. Z is the letter of mutilation: phonetically, Z stings like a chastising lash, an avenging insect; graphically, cast slantwise by the hand across the blank regularity of the page, amid the curves of the alphabet, like an oblique and illicit blade, it cuts, slashes, or, as we say in French, zebras; [...] this Z [...] is the letter of deviation [...]; [...] in its true sense--the wound of deficiency. Further, S and Z are in a relation of graphological inversion: the same letter seen from the other side of the mirror: [...] the slash (/) confronting the S [...] and the Z [...] is the slash of censure, the surface of the mirror, the wall of hallucination, the verge of antithesis, the abstraction of limit, the obliquity of the signifier, the index of the paradigm, hence of meaning.
Roland Barthes, S/Z
If this feels like you’re being thrown into the deep end of the pool, I think that’s partly the point. I love art that asks a lot of the receiver/observer and I’m grateful to Jeremy for providing us with some signposts for his band’s work along the way. Check out The Irreversible Word when you can. Make some time for it. And then spread the good word of the noise to the good people in your life…
