#Kelp Lunacy Advanced Plagiarism Society

[dustedmagazine]

Karl Blau — Live from the Void (Perpetual Doom/Dear Life)

Photo by Lou Crisitello

Live From The Void by Karl Blau

Karl Blau made a pandemic record before the pandemic even started. Always an iconoclast when it comes to getting music out — he once committed to releasing an album a month for subscribers via his Kelp Lunacy Advanced Plagiarism Society series — Blau made a live album by himself late in 2019 on an empty stage somewhere. He used the most minimal of tools, voice and acoustic guitar mostly with only a few modest overdubs, and let the music do its thing. The result is a charming, oddball collection of off-kilter songs, string scratches, false notes and goof-ups included. The songs scramble and ramble and jumble up in enthusiastic knots. They are clever, in an offhand, working class sort of way, and fanciful but grounded. You feel that you’re in the room with Blau, just the two of you, in the splash zone of his sharp, stinging songcraft.

Blau has collaborated with a number of other left coast songwriters who do more with less, most notably Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum and Laura Veirs. He was recovering from a year of touring and getting ready to record with Tucker Martin when he bashed out this album in an undisclosed location. From the found sounds (birds, water, geese), it sounds like it was somewhere in the country, but it makes no difference. Blau has been on the road so long that he can likely plug in anywhere and let rip a set of gleeful, joyful zingers.

The disc opens in a brief skiffle, bird cries and tape hiss obscuring Blau’s porch blues improvisations, then bursts into life with the blues-y, folk-y “Blues as My Name,” a scramble of easy singing and hard, percussive strumming. “Blue as my name, drunk with wonder again,” Blau croons, as his fingers fly and hammer on strings, and there is a giddiness in it that’s undeniable. “Stuck Inside Port Townsend (With a Pete Townshend Solo LP),” is, as the title suggests, a Dylan homage, which also borrows a bit of the melody from “After the Goldrush.” But the lyrics are sharp (“It was a reggae buffet, and you thought I was gay, and the words were out of range”) and the harmonica solo is plaintive and not too long.

Blau tries out a couple of songs he intended for his next album, the wry, playful “Little Pink Maggots” and “Walk in Philadelphia,” which, even in this very stripped down form, haunts lightly, hoveringly, with doubled falsettos that hang in the air. A cover of Little Wing’s “Paradise” is laid back and funny, and what, indeed, can you say about paradise that everybody doesn’t know? It ends by imagining a mangled postcard blurred by spilled suntan lotion that ends up reading, “I wash you war hair, I guess.”

The best song, though, is “Sand,” which kicks even in this modest, acoustic setting. Its lyrics rhyme and scan easily, underlining a twitchy rhythm with pattern of the words. And the words themselves sit at a place where the absurd and the profound cross paths in a very interesting way, as for instance, “In the breast pocket of my best coat/I keep one feather, one bone and one note/the bone is for health and the feather’s for luck/the note is a picture of a canvas back duck.”

Live from the Void isn’t a long album, and in the extensive catalogue of Karl Blau’s work, it is maybe even not a very significant one. But it does tell a story about how music changed in 2020, how shared experiences happened at a distance and how musicians and their audiences connected in empty rooms. For that reason, and for the stubbornly cheerful way that this music rings out despite everything, it’s worth checking out.

Jennifer Kelly

[karlblau-blog]

Thanks Geneviève!