Dylan Wall: An Interview

Dylan Wall plays artlessly with his tuna, his long and peeling index finger poking and prodding the bleeding lump. The ghost of a smile dances around his withered lips. A sore weeps quietly on the side of his neck. The silence is deafening. With one eye still on his meaty fish, he casts the other up to me (how does he do this!?) “ummm … yeah … so this place is so great, I come here all the time … you know, when I’m in town. This tuna’s a new one for me though, it’s a bit … you know”. He smacks his lips and they make a dry sucking sound. It’s disturbing.

Wall, lead singer of Emperor Shapes, is sat opposite me in London’s Pudendia, a fashionable fusion restaurant that serves the sort of preposterous towers of food that sickeningly skinny men like Wall would mainline if you only looked away for five seconds. It was his choice to come here. How could I say no? It’ll cripple me with expenses but at least it means I’ve secured an interview with this frustrating elbow of a man. As I watch his tuna lying stinking in a pool of exquisite death, I suddenly realise I haven’t said anything for almost ages. I look back up at him and, as if to emphasize our silence, a flake of skin detaches itself from his chin and floats down onto his dish. I swear I can hear it land with a plip onto his tuna. He doesn’t seem to notice.

“So Dylan” I say, spluttering out my words in a rain of phlegm, hoping to direct some towards the tuna which is now irritating me tremendously, “Emperor Shapes have a new album out, And The Blood Fell Like Rain O’er Fields and Gardens. How about a few words on that?”

“Oh yeah, man. I’m really happy with it. Me and the band have been working on it for like, four years. The whole thing’s kind of borne out of where we were writing it. You see, we decided to write it on this farm, like way out in the country, like properly isolated you know? The nearest convenience store was like, twenty minutes’ walk away. The idea was to keep it as a working farm, but the thing about farming is that it’s like, really hard, you know. I mean, it literally never stops. All year round. You get up at dawn then work until night time. There’s hardly any time to write and record an album. That’s why it took us so long. We’d rehearse and write at night but we’d all be so tired that we’d be falling asleep. Viv the drummer actually collapsed during the recording of the track Polyphonic Spectroscope. You can hear her clattering into her drum kit about halfway through. I wanted to re-record it but Simon the producer wouldn’t let us as he was on milking duty in the morning and one of the cows had an inflamed udder.”

I nod along to this little story but Wall catches me slightly unawares when he stops so abruptly. Although, as is abundantly clear, he’s not the sort of man to be bothered by conversational gaps, I  pursue the role of interviewer regardless, my mouth forming words almost by instinct, “I think you can hear it in the playing, you being tired I mean. It’s of a uniformly low standard throughout the album really. I’m sure you’d be the first to admit that …”

“Oh totally, man, yeah. It’s appalling. And it’s not just the playing either, the lyrics and the songs are extremely poor too. As I say, what with the farming, there really was no time to concentrate on any of the necessary processes for writing or recording music. But you know what? After only four years we produced something. I think that’s testament to our determination in the face of almost overwhelming odds. And the fact that it was largely our own decision to inflict these odds upon ourselves only adds to that, as I’m sure you’d agree.”

A shard of salted lamb caramel catches in my throat and I croak out a noise which I hope Wall doesn’t take for agreement. I scan his face to check but he just stares impassively back at me. Eager to change the subject I spit out a question too banal to repeat here. Wall nevertheless gives an answer, perhaps out of some misplaced loyalty to this tired interview format.

“So the first music I ever got into was just stuff my parents would play around the house, mainly musique concrete. It was basically just the commercial stuff but I still loved it. I remember my parents would invite their friends over and we’d all dance to Schaeffer’s Intermezzo or Henry’s Danse Electromatic. It was crazy, I was only four years old but I knew all those songs off by heart. It was around that time too that I started building my own instruments. I was making them with anything I could find lying around, like bones and crazy shit, breezeblocks, whatever. I used to wire up crickets and get them to chirp in time. Sure, the stuff I was recording around then was basically just bad imitations of Schaeffer’s tunes but it got me started you know? I've probably got some of those instruments still lying around in my parents’ cabin. Most of the crickets would probably be dead now though ...”

Wall trails off and looks through me. He seems lost in reverie as he delicately excavates his ear with his fish knife. I prompt him – “So then at college you got into the tape loop scene right?”

“Yeah, yeah. It was really big at my college. We’d be up for days cutting and splicing. There were a lot of drugs around of course – crab apples, two-bit theatemines, benzideath. They helped us keep the energy levels up you know but they took their toll in the end. I completely lost control of my arm for a week and a bit. It was like, totally independent. It used to make phone calls to Methodist preachers without me knowing. Of course it could only wave down the phone so it wasn’t too much trouble. I made friends with Peter Onions too. He now records under the name Chocolate Haircut of course. He was crazy. He was picking up all these alien broadcasts on these little receivers he’d make. He’d transmit back, talking to the aliens about his favourite types of Japanese tea and how to scavenge furniture and things. I think the aliens stopped responding after a while though…”

“Great” I say, hoping to impose a sham of finality on the interview, “so I suppose you’ve got a lot of ideas in the pipeline, touring perhaps, or maybe thinking about a new album?”

“No, not really” he says as he gets up to leave. His chin is flaking badly now, leaving a snowstorm swirling over the table. I cover my mouth as I wave him goodbye. He grabs what remains of his tuna with his translucent fingers and lurches towards the exit. I watch him leave. His scarf catches in the door and unravels itself from his shoulders, but he is oblivious as he wobbles onto the pavement. I would say he was inscrutable, but I’m not entirely sure what it means.

Backstreet Abortions: Ketamine Coma EP

Cards on the table (and all over the floor following last night’s curry and poker), I don’t know who this band are. I have never heard of them. I found this EP in a skip, and have decided to review it. Maybe I am still drunk. But Jesus, try and look this band up, go on, they’re not even on the internet. How cool is that? (said in a high-pitched voice). Sure, many artists talk of being ‘post-internet’, but who really goes the whole way? (Rhetorical question. And anyway, the answer is Backstreet Abortions. (fuck I’m drunk!)). You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if this EP had been left in a skip in Salford as some sort of marketing scheme directed at their potential fans (actually, thinking about it, I would be mildly surprised - that would be a totally unsustainable business model).

I haven’t got much to say about the actual music (this will become clear in the next paragraph) so I will just waste some words writing about the boring artwork. And it really is boring. Seriously, snoozeville (so drunk). The front cover features what I assume to be the band (four men, beards, wispy nightsocks) posing in front of a wall. A WALL MADE OF BRICKS. There was no apparent irony here, which leads me to two conclusions: 1) there is no irony 2) there is so much irony that it is blinding, like not seeing the forest of irony for all the trees of irony. I’m pretty sure 1) is correct. On the inner sleeve the band pose against the same wall four more times. In one shot what I assume to be the guitarist holds what I assume to be a fox.. This confuses the irony issue. On the back cover is a picture of a dead bat, the leathery shit all covered in sparkles. The issue of irony is now so confused, my only recourse is to drink heavily and vigorously.   

So what do Backstreet Abortions sound like? Well, what don’t they sound like? (again, rhetorical question. The answer is everything). That’s right, everything. Seriously, dudes, narrow yourselves down. Imagine a rigid python in a storm. Try and be like the python - firm, erect, and only snapping at the tastiest music nuggets. Because at the moment, it’s not Ketamine that would give me a coma, or even the industrial quantities of alcohol, it’s this EP. (Actually Ketamine would also give me a coma).

Tender as a Ghost: The Blunt Diaries

In 2001 I was leafing through the detritus in a bucket chucked under a table in one of those emporiums that literally (not literally) groan with the weight of a thousand unwanted memories. It would be fair to say that my life had taken a turn for the worse a month or so before that time and I was dealing with a lot (A LOT!) of unresolved issues, most of them to do with my would-be wife and a series of incidents of mistaken identity in lifts. My life was in the gutter, yes. And gutters stink. (I often wonder why this came as such a surprise to me). Having my head jammed in that bucket as I lay suppurating under a table, forcing ghostly tears out of vestigial eye-ducts, actually represented a significant improvement in my day-to-day activities at that time, and in retrospect it was a turning point so significant in my life, that it has taken me over ten years to realise it.

Here's what happened (this bit is quite long and is not really about anything, certainly very little relating to the album in the title of this post. If you want to know more about that, there's a couple of sentences at the end. I wouldn't take them out of context though. This means therefore that you either read this long-winded and tedious exposition of something that is of probably little interest to you in the vain hope it might improve your understanding of a collection of hastily written words about an album no one is frankly going to listen to, or you go do something else (drink port, rinse your elbows, practise that new knot, for example)):

With my head in that bucket I inhaled deeply, aiming to numb the panic attack I think I was having, and as I did so I felt the fetid dust tickle inside my sinuses and experienced a feeling I hadn't had since childhood. My childhood. I'm not sure what the feeling was, or even if it has a name. Probably not. Suffice to say, the panic receded and was replaced in my mind-hole with images. Images of things. Calm things. Clowns, velvet razors, anagrams on Sunday afternoons, crêpe . I'm not sure how long I lay there. If you told me a week I wouldn't be surprised. Equally, if you told me just a few seconds I wouldn't be surprised either. I really don't know is my point. After however long it was, I extracted my head feeling pleased I'd resisted the urge to walk away still wearing the bucket like a pointless helmet.

I looked at the bucket then reached into it with my arm and hand and extracted what I assumed had been the cause of my Proustian reverie. It was a small bundle. All string was all over  it and around it and hanging off it. I bit through the string, my strong youthful teeth tearing the ancient fibres apart, and spat out the remains wildly (in retrospect I'm not sure why I did this). I found I was holding in my hand a collection of prints. Hazy, undefined, momentous, transient … these were words I'd use to describe the images, although I'm not sure how I'd use them all in one sentence. Call it intuition, call it the instinctive workings of an enormous and febrile intellect, call it what you will, but I knew I held in my hands something of astonishing cultural import(ance). I emerged from under the table in a state of liquid ecstasy (quite literally (not literally)), my hands and feet and other extremities all out of  control in a spasmodic and frankly delightful manner. I threw some coins at the man (both tiny and ursine) and staggered home.

There is a book to be written about how, after months of painstaking and largely fruitless research, I began to stumble on the smallest clues as to the origin of these prints, and how I eventually pieced together the narrative surrounding their creation. If I had an advance from a publisher and a lot of time I might write this book. I have neither however, so will sum it up in a short sentence: I had found the last known works of the forgotten photographer and visionary Linda Blunt. Ten years later of course, the work of Linda Blunt is studied in every university in the land, ‘Bluntian’ is a recognised aesthetic, and exhibitions have opened in major cities across the world showing Blunt’s work (who can forget at the Mori gallery in Tokyo how the exhumed and animated corpse of Linda Blunt was used to welcome visitors. It was truly hilarious).

Although Blunt went unrecognised and unloved during her lifetime, eventually dying cold, naked, and penniless (I assume) sometime during the seventies, her place in the great pantheon of imitable artists is now assured. She is the spiritual godmother to movements such as distinguished pre-representationalism, Kajagooism, and depressed colonism, and her influence across fashion, music, art, geography, french and literature can only be overstated if you try reasonably hard. She means many things to many people, but she means something quite extraordinary to me. Her works tell me of all the possibilities of what it means to be a human. In my dreams she speaks to me, her words coming down a spidery silver filament from the heavens. They are what make me get up in the morning. They make me question and the they give me answers. They guide me and they heal me.

I don’t need fame and accolades – some people choose to recognise my part in the Linda Blunt story, others don’t. It is up to them. I used to think all that mattered was that I had Linda Blunt’s work, and that no one could take that away from me. I used to think that, that is, until I listened to The Blunt Diaries by Tender as a Ghost. The shock and disgust I felt as I listened to this album was indescribable. It was like having my heart ripped out (does this count as a description? In which case, maybe it was describable). How dare these little turds trample over everything that is holy and sacred? I’m guessing one of them studied Blunt at college, roped in some friends, flung random instruments at them and decided that was enough work needed to record an album. Linda Blunt’s diaries can be used for many things, but I suggest in future people think long and hard about shouting them over the cacophonous wailings of maladjusted foetoids. Did it make me sick? Perhaps, but what’s it called when you start throwing up pieces of internal organ?