Refrigerator has pulled all of their music from Spotify. Refrigerator physical recordings are available at finer record stores & direct from Grapefruit distribution. Both physical & digital recordings are available from the wonderful Midheaven. Buy independent, stay independent.
This Bamboo Dart Press special project is a book comprised of essays, photographs, a making of the album vignette, and a mini graphic novella based on the Spanish revolutionary Durruti but is also much more than that. This work a unique look into the creative process minus the navel gazing where the CD and book are in fact of one piece. David Lester & Wendy Atkinson of Horde of Two discuss their new album and book, I Knew I Was A Rebel Then below.
WENDY: We typically create music by improvising together. For our first album we improvised while watching film noir, the tension and moody visuals acted as our conductor.
DAVID: I’ve always been fascinated with creating a longer piece of linked music. Very different from my punk rock origins. But still retaining a political edge. The increasing lurch of the world towards tyranny led me to think of anti-fascist movements and individuals. The Spanish revolutionary and anti-fascist Durruti came to mind and I figured structuring a piece around his life would give the music a narrative shape. Luckily Wendy was game to attempt this project.
WENDY: For this album, in the rainy spring, we packed up our recording gear and booked a cabin at a deserted resort on Mayne Island. In preparation, David created an 8-part musical sketch for us to improvise around.
DAVID: Both of us have a long interest in the power of social justice and the arts. Me with my duo Mecca Normal and my political graphic novels and Wendy with her long-running performance series Beyond Words that presented artists tackling social issues.
WENDY: Our interests coalesced to create a piece to represent Durutti’s fight against fascism. A fight that seems particularly relevant now.
DAVID: The Durruti piece takes up half the album, but equally important are the other songs which demonstrate our pleasure in improvising and our humour, particularly in “If I Can’t Dance” where we spontaneously break out into laughter. Wendy, do you remember why we started laughing?
WENDY: We were playing around making vocal sounds and then you yawned, which made me laugh and then we both started laughing. This was the last song we recorded for the album, just before Dennis at Shrimper contacted us.
DAVID: Dennis at Shrimper partnered with Mark Givens at Pelekinesis to form the Bamboo Dart Press imprint and they proposed the book/CD idea. We wanted the text to reveal the roundabout, up/down convoluted process that is often the nature of how creative projects unfold.
WENDY: We incorporated a short story I wrote that explored the uncertain nature of triumph and defeat. These themes permeate this project. For example, Durutti didn’t live to see the end of fascism in Spain.
DAVID: Activism and creativity can have immediate results but may often encounter setbacks over a long-term body of work.
WENDY: The illustrations in the book came from a graphic novel that David is working on. Combining my short story and David’s art mirrors our musical collaboration by intertwining visual art and text.
DAVID: Our intention was to metaphorically link all the aspects of this project. Each element complements the others to express the theme of triumph/defeat.
WENDY: David and I have different musical styles but they balance each other. When we improvise, we just hit play on the 4-track recorder and let it run so we captured all the great moments as well as the ‘less great’ ones!
DAVID: The project started with improvisation but the rest of the album was carefully constructed. Mixing was an intense process as Wendy stitched the sections together seamlessly. She beautifully crafted the work.
WENDY: We would listen to the recording together and talk about the changes. We both overdubbed many tracks and I would remix it and send David the new version. Lots of back and forthing!
DAVID: But we reached consensus on every element of the recording. Our aim was to capture the musical dynamic between us, allowing an alchemy of raw, energetic guitar and melodic bass.
WENDY: I feel that the music evocatively conveys the story of a time when people rose up against tyranny. The short sample of Durutti’s voice adds a poignancy to the piece. Given the state of the world, we hope his life and the music are inspiring.
Brayer’s hometown heeds the arrival in this interview with The Claremont Courier.
Taken from his first record in nearly two decades, here is a video for Patrick Brayer’s “Standing There”. The song from his “Cabbage and Kings: an Inland Shrimpire Anthology” record is available for presale from Revolver, Grapefruit and finer independent record stores and will be sitting in them sweaty little bins come January 21 of ’22. The video offers a brief history of Brayer via photos of him and images that he shot over the last fifty years. My favorite is the young long haired country boy playing an outdoor event in 1973. Wait a minute, that’s him then. Here he is now.
Wendy Atkinson has issued three stunning solo records. Her bass playing is the perfect marriage to David Lester’s (Mecca Normal) inimitable guitar style which on their band Horde of Two’s first record Guitar and Bass Actions delivered on the promise of what the duo could do together musically. Their abstract instrumental landscapes can surprisingly veer into hooky terra firma territory, and just as quickly explode into a Glenn Gould Morricone melodrama score.
On their second release, I Knew I Was a Rebel Then Due out on January 21st on Bamboo Dart Press (and available for preorder here) the two split the CD and the book in two, with half of each offering a suite on the Spanish revolutionary Buenaventura Durutti. The book features writings and illustrations to accompany the musical suite of Horde of Two by Lester. The second half of the book and the CD features songs unrelated to the Durutti compositions. Photography, a history on this project, and fiction by Atkinson that explodes the idea of what a record is or what a book is mark the second half of the book. We are thrilled to be issuing this unique work as our second Bamboo Dart Press special project following last years deluxe issue of Refrigerator’s So Long to Farewell whose deluxe colored vinyl edition of the LP featured an Exclusive Bamboo Dart Press put together by the band as well as a bonus CD (a few copies remain, see link).
Patrick Brayer’s new CD Cabbage and Kings: An Inland Shrimpire Anthology is out January 21st. Here is the lead off track with a video created by Brayer. Holy, holy.
Patrick Brayer birthed a haunted concoction of stripped down lowest of high country music in the 1970’s in the Inland Empire. Maybe not quite country, nor confessional west coast, but a unique thing that he does with his jazz vocal phrasing, odd shifts in time in his playing and unique high bar lyrics. His first LP was issued in 1979 and included his signature tune “Cold Feelings” (also the name of the record). Twenty years later his second record was issued by Ben Harper on Ben’s short lived record label. A slight large hand past twenty years from that CD, the world will be graced with the third commercially available record by Brayer.
Brayer is well known in songwriting circles, his work has been covered by those with deep ears like John Doe, Alison Krauss, Alan Jackson and Robert Plant among others. Check out Plant doing his version of Brayer’s track The Boy Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn
Patrick has been one of my favorite lyricists, players & singers for years and it is a dream project to be issuing what I think is his finest record yet on January 21 of next year. More on all of that soon. In the interim, as in the poetic missives that arrive from Patrick with a recently developed older photo, here is an incredible shot of Patrick with Bill Monroe taken in 1973.
Tim Hatch is a writer that came by poetry in the last decade. His poetry is descriptive without being ornate, but that is not to say that Hatch’s love of language and ability to turn a phrase is simple. Maybe simple like the truth. In his first book of published poetry, Hatch offers the flip side of his book on Pelekinesis, My Bariatric Year. That book chronicled Tim’s weight loss surgery delving into not only self image, but self evaluation. His new book Wild Embrace is in inward looking book that peers into his formative years, and experiences of loss that shaped him.
The interview below serves as a wonderful introduction to Tim Hatch. Wild Embrace is a watermark work and Bamboo Dart Press is honored to be issuing books of this depth on our imprint.
The poems of Wild Embrace paint a portrait of your life. Was this collection written within a specific time frame? Edited together from years of writing to form a whole? The earliest poems in this book were written in late 2012 and I had zero intention of them being seen by anyone. I had no intention of making any kind of serious attempt at poetry, but I was in a creative writing program and there were two required poetry classes, so I took them both at the same time to try and get them out of the way as fast as possible. About three weeks later, poetry had its hooks into me. The newest poem in this collection (“Lake Sabrina, 1973”) was written in late 2020, just as Covid was really starting to take people from me, and the helplessness called me back to early childhood. A large part of this collection was my MFA thesis, but several of the poems in there didn’t survive to this version. Anything that was cut was cut because it didn’t serve the overall tone. Or because it sucked. Your childhood home is a huge character in this book, it takes on the personality of your father and your father’s set of beliefs. You being at Lake Sabrina, or out under the stars, or anywhere but home serves as a chance for the reader to also take a breath. The poem “Reunion” takes place on a gentle Sunday morning and is a nice break towards the middle of the book. I appreciated your considering the reader in these poems, giving me a moment out of those more difficult memories, but perhaps you were not thinking of the reader at all?
I was thinking very specifically of the reader! Damn near everything in this book has been read, in varying forms, in front of audiences at countless poetry readings over the last nine years. I’ve spent a lot of time sitting in those same audiences, listening to featured readers, and on a few occasions, I’ve really wanted a change in tone. Pretty early on I made the decision to follow the really heavy stuff with something a little more lighthearted, and the audience response is wildly different (and better, in my opinion). Just as your home takes on anamorphic characteristics, nature stands in for your father, for you, in a number of these poems; bears clawing at you from a table of scattered silverware, a plucked fish out of water dying are intertwined with factual and violent examples of concrete abuse in your childhood.
Yeah. I think a lot of what I’m attempting there, with the nature thing anyway, is to show either an unwillingness to call out my father or an inability to acknowledge it. I’ve never written about this before, partially because I haven’t figured out how to yet, but it wasn’t until I was 36 that I was able to acknowledge I’d been abused. I literally spent my entire adult life prior to that saying things like, “I don’t want to say I was abused, I think that’s an insult to people who’ve been through actual abuse, but…” and then I’d go on to describe something horrific that I’d been through and the people I was talking to had no idea how to respond to that (which in hindsight should’ve been a bit of a clue that maybe I actually had been abused?). For the record, the moment everything changed for me was while driving home one night, alone in my truck, and I put in the new Mountain Goats CD and the third track came on (“This Year”), and by the time it was over, I had to pull off the freeway because I wasn’t able to see through the tears. There was just something about the refrain of “I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me” that took me back to my senior year of high school and honestly not knowing if I could make it to graduation without killing either my father or myself. Somehow I did make it to graduation, and I locked that feeling deep, deep down and forgot about it until hearing that lyric. It was like getting hit in the face with a board. The next day I happened to have a therapy session scheduled and it was in there that I first said the words, “I’m a child abuse survivor,” and I will never forget the look of relief on my therapist’s face. So anyway, I think a lot of my poems have a built-in sensibility that whether it’s in the moment, or years after the fact, the truth is sometimes a little too similar to looking directly into the sun. But then, sometimes you have to call a thing out for what it is.
We are bedside with you attending to a friend in hospice, and casket side with you at another’s funeral. These both read to me of the ultimate in caretaking, of doing work that was far beyond that of your father to do. I have read the book a dozen times, and each read reveals a larger picture of what you are trying to communicate. The pacing, stylistic jumps and subject matter. Was the process of editing the book arduous? Easy? Definitely not easy. Poetry is weird, for me at least, in that I can open up a poem from however many years ago, and as soon as I begin reading it, revision brain kicks in. And sometimes I give in to it, and other times I have to force myself to stop and just accept that I wouldn’t have written the thing any differently back in 2015. There’s a poem in this book called “Endless Stories,” and the only reason I’m certain it’s called that is because I just physically walked into my office and picked up the hardcopy of the book and confirmed the title. That poem has changed so many times since it was first written. It’s a walk through the house I grew up in, but it’s a fictional me, and there used to be a fictional daughter (who I removed, because whatever I was attempting to do with her just felt false after a while), and in the first draft of the poem I was starting on the front porch and eventually I decided to start in the kitchen and end on the porch, and in yet another draft I was revisiting some of the rooms several times, and literally the last few stanzas of the poem, as it appears in this book, only just got written a few months ago. So there’s a whole process of revision that happens at the individual poem level, and sometimes that goes on for months or even years. Organizing the poems into the order they’re presented in the book was comparatively simple, and my guiding principle was very similar to what I was saying earlier about taking the audience into consideration. And none of it was arduous. Revision might be banging your head against a wall but good lord, is it rewarding. Revision is frustration and delight and it’s where damn near all the art of writing takes place. The poem Ms.Guthrie chronicles a teacher that spotlights you. It is a gorgeous ode to a strong woman and authority figure that questioned authority. Your four part poem to her in this book is a lovingly rendered thank you note, fully formed in just a few pages that makes her come alive to the reader. Is she an amalgam of teachers? Did she influence you to teach?
First, thank you. Second, she is a very real person who taught at Sierra Vista Elementary School in the 70s and 80s. She had her own library, several stacks of books, in her classroom and I made an attempt to read through all of them. It was her class that introduced me to Greek Mythology, which I mention in the poem, and it was she who taught me that our leaders are our employees and that we have the right / duty / obligation to question them. In the third fucking grade she taught me this. She was a glorious explosion of a woman, and the person I describe in the poem, and in this response, is an amalgam of all my memories of her, because there’s no way an actual person could live up to all this. She’s almost certainly no longer with us, but if I had any way of reaching her family, I could spend an entire weekend telling them how important she was to me. She influenced me to be who I am today as much as any member of my family (and, in some cases, more). Teaching college is very different from teaching grade school, but whatever similarities there may be, I’m certain I can trace some of my approaches to it back to her.
Tim Hatch’s Wild Embrace is an autobiographical collection of poems that explore themes of abuse and fragility. The weight of the language and craftsmanship that Hatch employs to tell his stories in poem form is uniquely a voice his own. Honed over decades of writing, his is the ability to pare back the unnecessary and surprise the reader with twists in his poems – limbs on a trunk unexpectedly pruned here, allowed to grow wildly there. The book is available for preorder now and available at finer independent bookstores and wherever else you may shop on November 10th.
