ALIVE IN ST. LOUIS
2020, 62 minutes, Video
A commission for Issue Project Room’s Isolated Field Recordings Series
Music recorded on the run, upon my return to a home I no longer know. St. Louis, my cage for 18 years, a place I instantly longed to leave after first visiting Manhattan at age 9. And now forced back after a couple decades by a cocktail of crises, coronavirus coupled with a broken boiler and burst pipe that wrecked my Brooklyn home, hard drives, and gear. Heartbreak in a time of global wreckage. Construction halted, options diminished, bags packed, an exhausted family and a sedated cat that fled 16 hours by car into the Midwest to requarantine and recalibrate. But for how long? Home school, sketchy virtual employment, suburban seclusion, too much time to sink and stew. In the absence of almost everything, the best stress relief is plucking strings, hitting keys, and making sounds to replace the negativity sparking in my synapses and shooting out my mouth. I may not make music to live, but these days I live to make music.
Alive in St. Louis contains a selection of songs, sounds and noises produced with a guitar, keyboard and electricity, largely captured on Iphone and mostly made alone. Featuring intermittent appearances from family and the radio, insistent reminders of where I am, and how/why I came to be anywhere at all. Even in isolation, I retain my constant collaborator, Zazie, age 7, co-member in the “couch rock” band The New Restaurants, whose tracks you will immediately recognize by their distinctive vocalese. One track includes my oldest friend, Josh Weinstein, playing double bass, recorded together at a safe distance apart in his backyard.
This is a CD. It happens to be presented as a live stream, and is delivered in the form of a video, but trust me, it’s a CD. The images you will see do not make it a video, a CD-Rom, or a laserdisc. They are the liner notes that come in the jewel pack. Your bluetooth enabled laptop, tablet and phone are not smart screens with speakers. They are CD players. You are not at home. This music is being played on the CD player in your car. You are at the wheel, listening and gazing out the window at passing billboards. Maybe you are the passenger noticing that at times the music syncs up with the landscape and everything feels as if somehow it was meant to go together. Keep in mind that this may not be a CD you listen to from start to end, what with all the pit stops along the way to wherever it is you are headed."