[MUSIC PLAYING]
A hill of tombstones from which the owls have flown.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The chisel chipping in finds names the wind can't blow away.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
It breaks the heart that stone holds what time let go,
but stones are the time left that names can be in.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Nothing though, not stone nor light lasts.
Like the place I keep the love of you in,
and this, though nothing can write it down,
and nothing keep it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is KCSU Stanford, and I'm Robert Harrison for entitled
opinions inserting some verses from AR Ammon's poem
tombstones into this drum solo, which I'm going to start fading
out now.
I've never opened a show with a percussion solo before,
but today's episode follows the sound of a different drummer
and where we go from here is anybody's guess.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I'm joined today by the person who performed that drum solo.
His name is Alex Nielsen, a Scottish musician and composer.
And without further ado, I'd like to welcome him
to the program, Alex Nielsen.
Thanks for joining us today on entitled opinions.
Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here.
To tell our listeners a little about you,
you're the founding member of the UK band Trembling Bells,
which recorded some six albums before you went on
to make four solo albums under the band named Alex Rex.
And you're just about to have a live release of a limited
edition cassette of 50 called Memory Speak,
available exclusively from Rex Bandcamp as of December 10.
You're the songwriter of all the tracks on all of those 10 albums,
and that's a lot of songs for one person to write in 10 years,
and you're far from done yet.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Let me also mention that you and I know each other
through entitled opinions.
You've been listening to us for a few years now.
And I've even played one of your songs, a handful of hair,
on a show I did not too long ago, called On Separation.
Last year, I agreed to write the liner notes
for an Alex Rex album that came out this past summer
with the title Paradise.
Fast forward a little.
I got an email from you over the summer, in which you said
you really enjoyed my lockdown podcasts, reciting
Jimmy Hendrix and Jethro Tal lyrics.
And you wondered whether I would consider reciting some
of your lyrics, which you would then apply
to abstracted versions of their corresponding songs.
I was impressed enough by your lyrics to accept.
And during today's show, we're going
to hear some samples of that cross-pollination.
But first, I'd like to ask you about your craft
or southern art in general.
In my liner notes to your new CD, I call Paradise
an album of existential folk rock in an orific register.
I had my reasons for invoking Orpheus.
You declare somewhere, and I quote you here,
songwriters should be like antique poets,
setting their bulletins of devotion to the singing body
of the lyre, only when they are moved by the muses.
This is not a lofty privilege, but a basic responsibility.
End quote.
I have this image of you composing your songs
with a lyre or some other stringed instrument.
But in fact, the only instrument you actually
play is drums.
So my first question for you is, do the muses
reach you through your drums or by some other means?
Hi, Robert.
Well, thanks for that.
Yeah, the muses do reach me through my drums.
I'm very committed to drumming, and I
have been absorbed for 20 years or so.
But I don't really compose via the drums.
That largely happens in my head in a kind of beef heart
ear.
I want this to sound like a butterfly,
howling at a glass, tear-rope moon kind of way,
like quite an abstract form of composition.
But you're drumming is quite fundamental
to my appreciation of music and its quite an intuitive approach.
And yes, not very dignified way to make a living just kind
of hitting things with-- hitting services with sticks.
But it's certainly quite well over the years.
Fair enough.
There's a lot we could say by way of speculation
about the relation between percussion and lyricism.
I, for one, think that rhythm and cadence
are the most important elements of lyrics
than of maybe even a poetry in general.
But we'll leave that aside here for the moment.
Let me ask you about the antique poets
you refer to in that statement of yours
about the singing body of the lyre.
I take it that you mean ancient Greek and Roman poets.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
I mean, I'm very motivated by, I guess, tragedy,
kind of Greek tragedy.
Over the years, I guess, I've dits my tones.
It's kind of e-scless and suffocities and these things.
And I guess I was particularly interested.
Maybe in my email correspondence with you,
perhaps referring to the poet, Sappho, and poets
of that era that used poems were intended to be sung.
And trying to invest the craft of songwriting
with something slightly more kind of poetry
clearly engaged as well as it's kind of interesting to me
in that kind of preponderance, see for tragedy,
and faithless, thick love, I guess.
That's interesting that you would find the ancient poets
more liberating than the freewheeling beat poets
who were not bound by any conventional poetic forms.
Right?
Well, I think as much as anything with poets such as like
Ovid and Katellus that I came to,
it was almost like an unfulfilled promise
of what beatwriting was suggested to me
that the beats had this synchronably liberated style
that was quite had this kind of internal momentum,
which was very compelling, but reading like Ovid, for example,
that's almost like the unfulfilled promise of the beats
to my mind.
It has much more of a liberated, lyrical self,
eviscerating kind of quality to it that I find really compelling.
And you say that even despite the fact
that you have a kind of free verse in the beat poets
that you don't have where you in classical poets
like Ovid and Katellus, you have,
I don't wanna call them rigid poetic forms,
but they are poetic forms that are much more contained
and regulated.
And it's not, it's not true.
It's perhaps true.
But perhaps it has the kind of liberation of, for example,
like 12 bar blues or something,
where the kind of strictures, when the form becomes kind of walked
and elasticated, even slightly, perhaps because it does
have this template, it seems all the more remarkable
and all the more innovative.
- And you mentioned the word tragic a few times in tragedy.
And I gather that that is something that speaks to you
directly among the antique poets and Escalus,
Sophocles and others, and that there is a great deal
of tragic elements to your own lyrics, especially in the more
recent years after a personal tragedy that you underwent
with the death of your younger brother or sudden death
or rather, I would imagine a shock of a death for you
that also coincided with a breakup in a relationship
that has left many traces in the last few albums
that you've recorded, right?
- Yeah, that's definitely fair to say.
I mean, I guess just going back to the tragedy
and we were referring to it, one thing that I found very
motivating and creatively compelling about them
is the sense that the protagonist built into his kind
of unique quality or his greatness, if you might call it that,
is on downfall.
The very thing that seems to propel him or her out,
sorry, to be a remarkable, you know,
your pockle individual is also written into that
as their own destruction.
So I have to find that like a very compelling idea.
And so yeah, it's kind of giving a poetic voice
to self defeat is something which I find very interesting.
And yeah, I guess as you just mentioned in my own personal life,
I had a very kind of life-shattering event,
which was a sudden death of my younger brother
and the reverberations of that were just so profound
and something I'm still kind of coming to terms with now
and experiencing different ways all the time.
But as a kind of songwriter,
for better or worse, the way that I dealt with it,
the time we've done the very day was to start writing.
I guess I've never experienced anything.
I'm not really like that before and just in order to try to process it,
at all, make any kind of sense of it.
I was writing immediately and to see it from the seeds of that
came some ideas.
Well, it came a number of albums.
I mean, a handful of albums, I would say, you know,
in the wake of that in the wake.
Yeah, I'm actually thinking about bumping off my other brother
to fish it for the next time.
Yeah.
In classical tragedy, the gods have a lot to do
with the self-defeat of the tragic hero.
They're always standing by, as you know, to strike down the mortal
in his moment of hubris when he overreaches or transgresses a certain limit.
Yeah, that's what's interesting about the tragic hero
and about human beings in general.
Most of us, whether we intend to or not,
are always overstepping one limit or another and overreach
in one way or another.
And maybe that's what human guilt is all about,
understood not in the Christian sense, but in this Greek sense,
tragic sense of stepping out of bounds and finding that the
foundation is given way and that you're kind of suspended it
over in a biz.
And getting back to you now, I find a lot of this kind of primordial
guilt coming through in your lyrics, or at least the more recent lyrics
of your new album, Paradise, as well as the previous one of yours
and dramata, where you do a lot of self-interrogation and
self-recrimination and going even so far as articulating
moments of self-loathing.
It's a real descent into dark corners and recesses of a self
that has really been yanked out of his comfort, their own.
Yeah, I mean, I'm very kind of honored by that.
There's insights, I mean, that does kind of the thing I'm
striving towards, or at least when I see other examples of that
cinema and literature and just daily life, they're the things that
most draw me, that a personality kind of push towards crisis point
and kind of reporting back from that, has always been something that
I find particularly motivating, or if it's kind of given a poetic voice.
It's motivating and at the same time, I think that I would have to say it
might be therapeutic. In your case, as you said, that the
you know, the tragedy provoked you into a period of intense creativity,
of writing, songwriting. And if you want to invoke your
authority and distinction between working through
and acting out a trauma, I think it's fair to say that you have
done a heroic job of working through the trauma rather than
acting it out, you know?
I mean, I've done my first share of acting out.
Don't be fooled by that, but I have also tried to take
responsibility for the emotional fall out of the experiences and
yeah, try to process them in a meaningful way. And I guess I was in
therapy for a couple of years and yeah, just trying to
re-aclimatize to this new reality of a sudden personal tragedy and
take some responsibility for my own emotions as I
say. Yeah, and that can be a very painful
experience and one that involves a lot of
recognition and self-criticism. Again, I feel as if that's good
fuel for writing. And I also attended, I probably shouldn't really be
saying this because it's supposed to be anonymous
groups. I attended various kind of, you know, drug and alcohol
of anonymous groups and not necessarily because
I needed them in a meaningful way, but the tendency towards
catharsis. Yeah, catharsis and kind of emotional vulnerability and
nakedness is something which I just find incredibly valuable in my life
and say around the people's testimonies.
Yeah, we're incredibly inspiring to me. And yeah, I guess as I say,
you know, people have been to the brink and reported back from it is
something which I find very enabling and
tries to diffuse my own writing. And do you? Well, let's give our listeners a
sense of what your lyrics are like. And I mentioned that you asked me to
recite the lyrics to some of the songs and that you kind of reconfigured them.
We're now, it's not a singing voice, it's my own reciting voice.
And the first one you sent me of that, I was, I thought it was
really very beautifully done. And I circulated it amongst some friends and
and family members and everyone that was as universal consensus
that, you know, this is great. If you did another seven or eight of them that
they, you know, a number of people said they would buy that album right away.
So we have three. And I think that we might have time to go through
all three of them. I'd like to start with one that is, is called
master. And after we give it a listen, maybe we can discuss it a little bit.
So, thanks.
Master, I know I've fallen short of expectation.
But since you rescinded your empire of cruel gestures,
it's lonely in the bunker of my skull where I'm
writing out this note for you.
Master, I know these aren't the things you like to hear.
But I really tried my best for you, my master.
Taking on your causes as my own,
carrying your sandwich boards.
Master, my face is pressed against your broken window.
I'm a bed sheet ghost in your abandoned ballroom.
Dancing to your, their a mine alone.
Is that what I came here for?
Master, I know these aren't the things you like to hear.
But it's really been a war.
My shadow laughs behind my back master.
Still, my family send their best to you.
[Music]
So Alex, when you sent me that song, I
and a few other people hearing it for the first time were convinced that it was
an address to God somehow. A God in an age after the death of God or he wanders or some kind of
we're post divine God. And then you indicate that it's not exactly what you had in mind,
that the word "master" is inspired in fact by Emily Dickinson and her that those three remarkable
highly enigmatic master letters that she wrote is set to indeed the case.
Yeah, I was very intrigued by that as a as a kind of trunched to her biography on reading about her
life, you know, her strange kind of enigmatic life. And yeah, I just thought it was an incredibly
powerful and evocative address that she referred to this lover perhaps as master. And I always wanted
to adopt that as a songwriting, a way to hang a song around in this kind of epistori address,
almost from an emotional, masticist to his remote kind of dominatrix,
in what emotion we're speaking of course. So yeah, that was the kind of narrative device almost
for the song. And then, you know, thank you so much for lending your extraordinary voice to it.
It's a great honor for me to to hear that and to kind of take it seriously, you know,
I guess in many ways it's just been incubated in my own mind and then to kind of hear it reflected
back at me like this is a great honor. So thank you. Well, yeah, it's it's bizarre even for me
because I don't know why there are some lyrics that it's very exceptional, but they seem to
speak from within a space that is real is the wrong word, but that there's it seems to be in touch
with some kind of deep source of of the soul and it can take any forms of expression, but I certainly
heard this kind of orific descent into some depths of grief and pain and what have you
and the way in which the liar that accompanies you on that metaphorically speaking in this case
because it's not the drums as I said, but that the that it that it resounds in the hollow body of a
of an instrument that is actually giving a sound from from that underworld in which or
or fierce descent. So yeah, well, you nailed it. Again, that's very flattering to hear. I mean, I'm very
proud of this song, you know, I feel as if it has this pitch of almost emotional of a seticism or
something. It has a kind of austerity to it, which I which I quite like. Yeah, I mean, I'm quite
proud of it as I say. So the second one I'm going to play it now is called the uses of trauma and
here again, I think that the tragedies that we've referred to and alluded to earlier in our
conversation come through quite clearly in this track.
I began as a joke quickly turned bitter. I weathered the storm
by becoming the weather. No news is no news, no better, no better. I wrote them down on my arm, the uses of trauma.
I walked to the mountain, looking for answers. The mountain was weeping. My mother, the mountain,
frozen in the morning, shaking and all, silently mouthing the uses of trauma. A terrible bird with black and gold feathers, galaxies or
as eyes, moon and forever, it all fades to black with here that I'll sing to you, the uses of trauma.
I emerged from the mountain, chained to a tiger, famished of life, nourished a night or frowning at all.
That's the way it is brother. A gaggle of shadows toutails on each other, and I can't touch the sides, and I can't see the bottom of the
windows are flaking and cracked with all the things I've forgotten.
The guard dog is laughing, his brain is a spider, he's whispering my name in a frenzy and moving towards him.
And I too, the mountain, my head in the water, keeping it safe for all the uses of trauma.
Shape for me baby, sing to me lover, it's the kindness that kills you. Just ask my brother, so shape for me baby and cling to me lover, it's the kindness that kills you. Just ask my...
Those are very beautiful background vocals in the uses of trauma there.
Who is it of singing that? That's a friend Jiloh Sullivan who does music under the name Jilorian, she's a very remarkable and beautiful
musician. My compliments to her, and the lyrics obviously again, the uses of trauma, I think it goes back to what I was saying about trauma being put to some good use, but the idea that you can turn trauma into art, into poetry, into the music.
There are these uses of trauma, I don't know what you would do without it actually.
Yeah, well personal crisis is to me what that feels worth the words with, or catalogs worth the trip, Barry.
Very good. So is there anything about the uses of trauma that you want to comment on or should we move on to it next track?
I guess the second sentence in which I wrote it would seem quite completely come to mind. I think I entered St. Pancras' train station London, and it all just came to me in one kind of organic gosh.
I think by the time I entered the train station, it started to just come to me, and by the time I walked through the other side of the train station, I'd written it.
What do you mean by written it? Do you mean literally you wrote it down the lyrics on a piece of paper, or that it was written in your mind, that you heard it in your mind?
I guess the combination of those things, I kind of received it almost kind of unedited on answering the train station.
I don't know if you know the building, it's this incredible Gothic revivalist building in central London.
At the time I stayed quite close by there, near the British Library.
The way that the song is kind of in tone, it almost feels like an abstract kind of diary entry or something.
I think I was just trying to kind of evoke that feeling, this kind of diaristic, fragmented, almost kind of splintered, psychological, trying to come to terms with certain impact of a trauma.
Well, you know the traditional conventional term for that is inspiration, so you clearly were seized by the gods.
That's the older way of thinking about it.
Or by the nymphs, I referred in your regard to nymph fold up the nymphs out of it for the moment.
So, the last one I'm going to play, Alex, is one that has been recorded but hasn't been released, just called Bramley Fall Woods.
Is it Bramley Fall Woods or Bramley Woods Fall?
Well, Bramley Fall Woods is actually a park area just anywhere I grew up in Leeds in the north of England.
So that's the name of the park, Bramley Fall Woods.
And I guess just the juxtaposition of words is quite strange.
Something that I would have forgotten to do then, when I guess my younger brother lived and died on a canal boat in the area of the woods and worked in a pub deck called the Abbey.
So, yeah, it's just the kind of looking at the event of his life and his death through different vantage points.
That's very helpful actually because I did not know until now that Bramley Fall Woods was near the place where your brother died.
Because your brother's presence is very intense in this song for sure.
And in the lyrics, yeah.
It's raining as alias in the heart of the wood.
The good looked down, the good looked down, the good looked down, the good looked down, with a mouthful of blood.
I'm still doing the things that I did at 19, but more doggedly, more desperately, more joylessly, more chellously.
More fearful clinging to the dream.
I carried this damn piano home away up the street.
Then you came along and tingled fucking out of leaves.
But I miss you most of all my brother.
Especially when Brown and Woods fall.
[Music]
My tongue is a weapon, my tongue is a wand or a chadlock.
Abandonment deception depression.
Creation and a smooth snake in the floor.
I am the greatest artist I've ever fucking met.
I've got ulcers to prove, and the great lines laced with regret.
Because I miss you most of all my mother.
Especially when Brown and Woods fall.
[Music]
Especially when Brown and Woods fall.
[Music]
Well that musically is a very beautiful composition.
Alex, congratulations on that to you and your fellow musicians.
It sounds like a lot of people contributed to it.
Certainly the final realizer.
Yeah, I really have to give credit to Rory Hay,
particularly who is almost the kind of handmaid and to,
well they kind of midwife to a lot of the ideas as I say,
kind of come up with them my head and then he kind of delivers them into the world.
By interpreting my fairly abstracts, we're communicating them and makes them into these,
you know, sculpt them into these musical creations, so thanks to him.
Yes, well Rory Hay is a gather that he's essential to the whole project from many points of view.
He's also the one who takes care of a lot of the mixes, I know,
that he's the one that we owe this remixing of the original music with the,
the recitations now inserted into the...
He looks like, well he also has red hair kind of similar to me,
but he's about foot taller than me, so he kind of seems as if I'm his kind of ventriloquist dummy.
Much of our musical relationship and personal relationship, but also...
Yeah, well, feels a little bit like that.
Thank you Rory, we're grateful that he's done this.
So we have time, I think, for a track that you brought to my attention,
because I knew a baby Dee, but did not know the album that you do my attention to,
and especially this song where you're playing the drums on the recording called "I Am a Stick."
And I'd like our listeners to hear that track, but first, can you tell us something about baby Dee,
who she was and what her musical career is all about?
Yeah, I would like it to, and she is one of my great musical heroes.
We were fortunate enough to release albums on the same record label to "Mangel Records,"
so we kind of connected through that, and she has this incredibly kind of billowing, romantic style.
The music's quite hard to categorize in many ways.
She seems to have emerged on the same kind of underground kind of New York arts scene as Anthony and the Johnson's,
if that might give some kind of indication as to some of the tone of a music,
it has this kind of achingly romantic quality,
and her sense of rhythm is very intuitive and very sophisticated,
and it feels very sympathetic with my own, and I have told with her all over the world,
often just as a duo just her and I, and had many, you know,
long nights have dissolved together and shared a lot of each other with each other,
and yeah, she's one of my great friends and great musical heroes.
And I gather you were taken to be her son in a restaurant in Rome, is that right?
Yeah, we were performing in Rome, and we both did big fans of Italy,
and the great cuisine there, and had this incredible meal,
and then a fan of hers spotted us in the restaurant and said,
"Ah, bambino, bambino, as if I was baby's baby."
So that was that nickname stuck.
Well, I should mention that baby D is a transgender woman,
because I think that also helps contextualize the lyrics of the song that I'm going to play.
Why don't I read the lyrics in case they're a little bit difficult to understand?
I am a stick. In endless streams of play, you heal the wounds of my arising,
with that softening touch of skin where I leave off and you begin.
I am a stick and I am happy, like the bird, and like the bee,
I always thought you wanted me, because I was a tree.
But now I know you wanted me, because I am a stick.
It was nice in the dark, all covered up in bark,
and I was sad when they cut me from the tree,
but once the cutting was done, they laid me out in the sun.
How long am I? I am a stick and I am happy.
In endless streams of play, you heal the wounds of my arising,
with that softening touch of skin where I leave off and you begin.
I am a stick and I am happy.
Alex, I probably bear as mentioning before we play the track that
she, baby Dee was also a tree surgeon, is that correct?
Yeah, yes, she has a deep empathy for the plight of the stick and the tree I imagine.
Okay, here we go.
In endless streams of play,
In endless streams of play, you heal the wounds of my arising.
I am happy when I'm happy when I'm happy when I'm happy when I'm happy when I'm happy.
I am a stick and I am happy.
I am happy.
I am happy when I'm happy when I'm happy when I'm happy when I'm happy.
I like the bird and like the bee.
I always thought you wanted me because I was a stick.
I was a stick.
I am a stick.
I was a stick.
I am happy.
I was a stick.
[Music]
>> And here's the opportunity to continue this day.