SOUNDTRACK: FILASTINE-“Btalla” and “Dance of the Garbagemen.” (Field Recordings, April 4, 2012).
When I first saw the title of this Field Recording, [Filastine And The Cathedral Of Junk], I assumed it was going to be all found sounds. So I was surpirsed that there was so much electronic music.
“Btalla” starts with some electronic drums and noises and Grey Filastine playing the hand drum–a very nice organic component. Its also surprising that the other musician is a cellist. She is almost lost in the din, but you can hear her slow notes throughout the piece–until he starts manipulating her sounds in very cool ways.
He’d say he was a radical before he’d say he was a musician — a laptop artist with a love of grit and noise. Grey Filastine, once based in Seattle but now a nomad loosely based in Barcelona, is a creative soul. He seems to also love a good party, a beat and a shopping cart wired for sound.
For the second piece, “Dance of the Garbagemen.”, it’s just him manipulating sounds and then using a shopping cart for added percussion.
With that in mind, we asked Filastine to perform at a junkyard in Austin — not just any junkyard, either, but a place called “The Cathedral of Junk.” It’s a home for more than 60 tons of unwanted consumer has-been items, transformed into art installations by Vince Hannemann.
With a song title like that and the location he’s in, it feels like something of a lost opportunity that he doesn’t use a lot more junk. But it is fun to see him make music from and amid refuse (and art).
[READ: November 15, 2017] “Riddle”
This was yet another story that I felt was just kind of a big, What? There’s a lot of action, but the story seems to stay in the mind of the protagonist who has other things to think about.
The whole story is told in this haze of confusion: “I must have been renting a place on H Street.” “I was an architect.” He talks about the area being slowly abandoned and his upstairs neighbor walking up a rickety outdoor staircase. But all of these details seem irrelevant to the story.
He says he went drinking and came out of the bar only to see a “crippled old cowboy” walking the street. He had seen the man before and he thought there weren’t many people like him left in town. But then he heard a young boy, an urchin call out Hey Jack! They seemed to experience pure joy talking to each other. The narrator was quite taken with it.
Then he explains that the boy is probably middle aged by now, so all o this happened decades ago.
He says his head was clear when he drove home that night. But on the empty road up ahead he saw a car turned over. He stopped to help the two victims and while he was in the bushes looking for something they said was lost, they stole his car.
He says he was ten miles from his house on a little-traveled road. And yet then a car approached. How likely is that? The woman driving picked him up , they made small talk, she drove him home, they had sex (!) and she left.
The next day the police knocked on his door. They say his car was used in an incident. He says it was stolen. The cop asks why he didn’t report it (reasonable question). And then he asks the cop about the old cowboy–the one thing he cant seem to get off his mind.
What?
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