#arthur if it helps i can always put on some mitski

[ranna-alga]

Idk about you guys but I am an absolute sucker for stoic, strong, providing/protective, "macho-macho" male characters absolutely just breaking down when the going gets a bit too tough. Willing to shoulder any burden or battle scars if it means granting their loved ones' safety, but cracking when it gets too much, getting disheveled when things go wrong, when things are out of their control, when they've lost so much that they cannot hold it in anymore. They cannot continue being strong, at least just for now when they just need to decompress.

With that said, Arthur Morgan absolutely deserved to have a good cry. I'm upset he hasn't in the game, at least from what we have seen. Despite how strong and hardened this 36-year-old seasoned outlaw is, he is still a man - a good man at heart (at least in my canon as a High Honour truther).

There is no way he couldn’t have cried on the ship after watching his own father and mentee/lowkey-son-figure die right before his eyes. There is no way he couldn’t have cried when he failed his chance of running away with the love of his life whilst he still had the chance, and having to come to terms with the fact that the last memory she will hold of him will be him making another promise he couldn't keep + that the last piece of her he has left is her essentially writing him out of her life with no time or opportunity to explain. There is no way he couldn’t have cried when the fear of death/the fate that awaited him and his loved ones got too overwhelming for him. There is no way he couldn’t have cried when he started seeing both life and death differently after Sister Calderón's inspiring words in that train station.

He deserved to have a good cry. Arthur, a man living in the American 1890s where there was a certain expectation for men (outlaw or otherwise) to surpress any 'weak' emotion, finally admitting "I'm afraid" was one of the 'manliest' and most human moments we ever see him have, and it was so simple yet so beautiful. The man has been through so much pain as much as he has inflicted it - he deserves a hearty moment of release. To cry, to sob, to wail, whatever. He just needed that after everything.

[shemakesmusic-uk]

INTERVIEW: Katie Von Schleicher.

Katie Von Schleicher’s deeply personal new album, Consummation, is out today via Full Time Hobby. While exploring past trauma, Von Schleicher greatly expands her sonic palette; its 13 shape-shifting songs are at once potent and listenable, strange and familiar, and, perhaps most of all, teeming with life. At its core, Consummation evokes the pain of being unable to bridge that vast psychic distance between oneself and another.  

The follow-up to her 2017 debut Shitty Hits, Consummation is, in part, inspired by an alternate interpretation of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Von was struck by its largely unanalyzed subtext of abuse. She knew immediately that this hidden narrative, which spoke to her personal experience, would be the basis of her album. Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost also proved to be particularly influential; soon after revisiting Vertigo, Von Schleicher stumbled upon Solnit’s lacerating take on the film, describing the “wandering, , stalking, haunting” of romantic pursuit that it depicts as “consummation,” while “real communion”—understanding and mutual respect between two lovers—is, to the men in the film, “unimaginable.” The consequence is a fundamental failure of communication.

We caught up with Katie and discussed the making of Consummation, what she would change about the music world today and much more. Read the interview below.

Hi Katie! We last spoke with you three years ago around the time that you released Shitty Hits. How has life been since then? And how have you been coping with the current lockdown?

"Lots of touring occurred after that. I’ve been fine, if I had to sum up three years in a sentence. I live in Brooklyn and I’m a little worried about the coming hot weather - the park is packed on any nice day. The lockdown is tough for creativity, surprisingly not terrible for my anxiety, bad for sleeping patterns."

You're gearing up to release your new LP Consummation which is, in part, inspired by an alternate interpretation of Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

"I started writing in late 2018 after watching Vertigo. The Weinstein scandal was everywhere, there were fresh lenses through which to see society and our experiences. I remember earlier that fall having dinner with my sisters and sisters-in-law, the six of us together with age gaps as much as twenty years and wide political differences of opinion. We discussed what was going on, it turned personal, and suddenly everyone was sharing their experiences with men. I’d never had a conversation like that with them before.

"I had anger. I grew up being friendly with a man who’d abused my mom because that’s considered private business, because domestic abusers don’t always get excommunicated and they certainly don’t get called out at the dinner table. It’s her business and she can laugh about it, because she’s strong as hell, and I respect that. We talked about it at the sibling dinner, and not everyone is in agreement that it even happened. That’s a side effect of silence.

"Hitchcock notedly was abusive to his leading women. Maybe that’s why Vertigo, which is so many films in one, felt more like watching A Woman Under The Influence that December than it had the first time, which is to say it felt like a character study of a woman falling apart under duress. It’s almost like Hitchcock inadvertently imbued it with the personal. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, that’s just how I felt, and I used it as a guiding principle. I knew the colors for the album would be blue and green, that I’d talk about heights (the working title was Climbing Mountains With Assholes, citing the movies Force Majeure and 45 Years, and that bell tower from Vertigo).

"The result isn’t transparently as heavy as all that, or as direct. It’s just what filled me up while I made the record."

What were your musical influences for Consummation? Who were you listening to around the time of writing it?

"I made a playlist for mix engineer Eli Crews this time around (he mixed Shitty Hits as well). It has Anne Laplantine, US Girls, Francis Bebey, Shuggie Otis, The Eureka Brass Band, Low, Robyn, Jenny Hval, Julia Holter, Frank Ocean, Cate Le Bon, Prince, Tim Hecker, Mitski, Kevin Ayers, Iceage. There are some people who’ve influenced me endlessly: Cate Le Bon, whose shows last year I legit teared up at. Arthur Russell, Elliott Smith always. Devo was one that surprised me this time around. I’m not sure if you can hear the influences, but on ‘Wheel’ there’s a ring modulator on my lead guitar, and that was directly influenced by Devo."

What was your songwriting/creative process for Consummation? Was it similar to Shitty Hits or did you do things differently this time around?

"I always do one thing, which is write in total solitude. That’s been coming up lately because I have a roommate, and I was explaining that I have a hard time writing with any kind of ‘perceived audibility.’ With Consummation I had a fresh set of intentions and I feel like I forced things to conform to them more than usual. I reached a new place with making music: I realized I’m going to write songs my whole life, no matter what, and that they won’t stop coming, and I stopped being afraid. Being less afraid made me able to work with more guidelines, to steer the songs more tightly, and to have more fun. ‘Messenger,’ ‘Loud,’ ‘Caged Sleep,’ ‘Wheel’, ‘Can You Help?’ and ‘Power’ were all rhythmically led. I worked with drum machines. I thought about tempo and I forced myself to write on guitar, which also has a different harmonic logic than what I do on a keyboard. Shitty Hits was far more keyboard-driven. Touring a lot made me want to play guitar more live, and make music that transported me differently than my previous set of songs."

What do you hope fans will take away from Consummation?

"Even more than allegiances to artists or albums or bodies of work, I love songs. I hope someone finds a magic song on the album, the kind of song you put on late at night, the kind of song that legitimizes how you feel. If the whole record has some of that, even better."

Let's talk about your most recent music video for 'Wheel', directed by V Haddad. How did the collaboration come about and what inspired the concept of the video?

"I’ve admired V’s work for a while, and found out she lives in LA, so imagined we couldn’t do anything together on this record. After quarantine took over I realized that no longer mattered, and I’m glad she wanted to do it. V came up with the concept from the dual inspiration of the music itself and the limitations of our abilities to leave the house."

You donated the budget of the video to Safe Horizon and are also fundraising for the charity via Spotify. What made you decide to do that and what does their cause mean to you?

"I’m still working on it for Spotify! I keep reaching out. We did donate the budget, so far. Donating her fee was also V’s suggestion. I had originally asked V to do a song called ‘Brutality,’ which is directly about domestic abuse, and I’m not sure if that informed part of her suggestion.

"It means a lot to me, only more over time. Abuse is absolutely isolating. I can’t imagine how the current situation compounds or intensifies that."

If you weren’t making music, what would you be doing?

"For the whole of my life? Impossible to say, but I have alternately looked at grad programs while in lockdown and played Mario Kart on Switch against some of my favorite songwriter friends. Maybe we’ll all become professionals at Kart someday."

With having more time to reflect on things these days, if there was one thing you could change about the music world, what would it be?

"There are more than a few things socially wrong with it, representation-wise. But if I had to do one single overhaul, I’d want to see music imbued with value again. Technological progress has changed the way we commodify everything, and as much as I enjoy the accessibility of streaming, I miss an album having value. I rented a car a couple years ago and drove down the coast of California and into the desert. We bought CDs at Amoeba Records in San Francisco because it only had a CD player, and so for a week we had only a few albums to choose from. In college I’d go to Twisted Village in Cambridge, MA, and take a chance on some truly weird shit, and sometimes I’d spent $18 on a CD I didn’t even like. Was it better? I’m going to relent and say not necessarily because I like that artists are thrown together on playlists on a streaming platform, honestly. Small artists get heard, but they get a spin. The psychology is different, it’s not just that as listeners we don’t value ownership of an album enough to make ourselves live with it for weeks at a time. It’s that as a musician I think the product is also devalued. The advice I get, from the business side, is to release music constantly, because that’s the new way to get attention, just never stop. A lockdown occurs, your album’s about to come out, and someone says the solution is to make and release singles into the ether. Avid listeners may relate to this - something you love wasn’t necessarily your favorite thing on the first three to five spins, even. The music that’s really mattered in my life, thanks a lot to finding it pre-streaming, was something I barely understood at first and came to understand through a bit of meeting it halfway. The psychology, as an artist, of making things constantly because you know it won’t be met halfway, is a bummer. The potential outcome is a lot of sonic conformity."

Finally, are you working on anything at the moment during quarantine? And what do you have planned when all of it blows over? I expect you're keen to get out on the road to tour the album?

"My mindset is that this may be a long haul, and I don’t know exactly how to prepare for trying to play an album live for the first time on the year anniversary of its release. I hope to tour again, I hope my lovely booking agents are able to stay in business. Right now I’m working on a collection of songs that will be recorded to tape with strings and woodwinds and orchestration. Beautiful, lush, tranquil, those are the goals - and it’s nice to just let them be what they are. In the meantime I may throw a few singles into the ether."

Consummation is out now.

Photo credit: Shervin Lainez