SOUNDTRACK: NAP EYES-Whine of the Mystic 
(2015).
Nap Eyes opened for Alvvays and although we only caught half of their set, I really enjoyed it. Lead singer Nigel Chapman, had a kind of deadpan Lou Reed spoken delivery (with an extra affectation–perhaps something to do with being from Halifax?). The drums were thumping and spare and the guitar played a mixture of pretty melodies and squalling feedback.
The songs are pretty minimal musically. Bassist Josh Salter and drummer Seamus Dalton keep the rhythm steady with occasional grace notes from Salter. It’s really the work of guitarist Brad Loughead that stands out–in addition to Chapman’s lyrics of course.
A comment on the lyrics from the bandcamp site:
Throughout the record, workaday details punctuate (and puncture) cosmic concerns, as Nigel wrestles with air and angels, struggling (and often failing) to reconcile the Romantic rifts, both real and imagined, that define our lives: between chaos and order (or wilderness and paradise, as in “Tribal Thoughts”); solipsism and fellowship (“Dreaming Solo” vs. “Oh My Friends”); the anxiety of social (dis)orders both big and small (“The Night of the First Show”; “No Man Needs to Care”); and the various intersections and oppositions of religion, art, and science (“Dark Creedence” and “Make Something.”)
This first album (after several EPs with great song titles) pretty much plays that template right out of the gate–the guitars do squall with feedback,but it is kind of low on the mix–disturbing the silence but not overwhelming it.
“Dark Credence” is pretty much the same thing repeated for four minutes but the way it builds with more intense drumming and ever noisier guitar feedback is great. “Make Something” is a slower song that adds some interesting lead guitar notes as the song nears its end.
“Tribal Thoughts” is the first song that really stands out. It’s faster paced, with a spirited, plucked melody. Chapman is a bit more emotive and by the end the lead guitar has really taken off. There’s some interesting lyrics in this song too, imagine singing slowly in deadpan: “I hear the beat against the slow lines / The lines i wrote / I never write them down anymore / fuck iiiiiiiiiiiiiiitttttttttt
“Delirium and Persecution Paranoia” is a 7 minute drone of a song that really doesn’t change much. It makes you focus on the impenetrable words:
Round the inner core rocks / the outer core flows / but while the outer core cools / the inner core grows / the loaded sun sends out heat and light and deadly magnetic radiation / What you gonna do / the human race / when the solar wind through the magnetosphere is breaking / Most of us down here lying down for years / sleeping the night away / some of us try but never survive / stay up whole night and day // My friend once told me about a rare insomniac’s condition / sleeps not one minute a day but feels 20 minutes of pain and blurry vision.
And I just love the amusingly desperate end:
Oh baby, all I need is another second chance
Oh baby, all I need is another twenty-five second chance
Oh baby, all I need is another two-hundred and fifty-second chance
Oh baby, all I need is another two-hundred and fifty thousand second chance
“No Man Needs to Care” is a faster song with a nice circular guitar riff. What does no man need to care about? “No man needs to care about another man’s hair.”
“Dreaming Solo” slows things down again, and then there’s two shorter somewhat poppier (but still angsty) songs. “The Night of the First Show” is a delightful dark (lyrically) but perky (musically) take about what I gather was the first Nap Eyes show. “Oh My Friends” is another slow, short song. The short ones are so different from the droning quality of the longer ones. Like the album closer “No Fear of Hellfire,” another 7-minute song. It opens with ringing guitars and propulsive bass. “Sunday morning only comes around once, these days.” And the chorus: No feel of hellfire makes me feel good.”
[READ: November 15, 2017] “Chasing Waterfalls”
This is the second story I’ve read by Krasznahorkai (this Hungarian story was translated by John Batki).
Of his previous story I wrote:
This is the kind of story that makes me wonder why someone would write about the things they do. Not because it’s bad or not worth writing about, I just can’t imagine where the idea came from.
This was a challenging story for me to read because there are no paragraph breaks (and I love my paragraph breaks). It is just an endless stream of prose.
This one isn’t quite as out-of-thin-air, but it’s a pretty peculiar story nonetheless.
This is about a Hungarian man who has always planned to travel to see Angel Falls, or Victoria Falls, or Schaffhausen Falls. He loves waterfalls and he would tell anyone about them. The sound of the waterfalls was constantly in his ears. After fantasizing about them, he started hearing one–although he didn’t know which one.
He grew embarrassed to be talking about them so much.
His worked as a translator and he has been sent to many places around the world–but never to a place with waterfalls.
As the story settles down to a story, he finds himself in Shanghai. His job is as a simultaneous interpreter–which was the very thing that exhausted him the most. Business trips were particularly exhausting. Especially when they expected him to drink as much as everyone else.
He was very drunk and found himself by the Pudong River. And then he found himself sober in the middle of a busy intersection–Nine Dragon Crossing–not something a human being can be inside of.
He has an existential crisis of sorts and starts thinking about all various things.
And then in the second (of two very long) paragraphs, he is in his hotel drinking lots of Perrier .
He reaches a decision about waterfalls that was just as confusing as the rest of the story.
For ease of searching, I include: Laszlo Krasznahorkai
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