SVIIB (bones, bread)
Posted: December 4th, 2008 | Filed under: Adventures in Mono |
Soundtrack for this post here
I’m happy to have found a new album to obsess over, full of songs that trade places in my attention with each repeated listen. I admit to relishing particular musics for the space and feel they lend, their affect - I get crushes on music, want to hang around them all the time. This does give me pause about exactly how these sounds function for me; emotion-management seems to be more important than actual listening in contemporary music consumption. Much could be said about this phenomenon and my participation in it; for now I’ll start by simply trying to articulate the grip a particular music has on me.
I’ve been more out of the loop on pop lately, so I didn’t even know School of Seven Bells when I bought a ticket for M83 at Neumo’s in Seattle. I’d seen M83 before and was sort of put-off by the live show, but I get to big cities rarely enough that I grabbed tickets for whatever I could find during a recent holiday trip. Turned out that SVIIB was opening for M83, and it turns out that SVIIB is the new project from members of one of my favorite ex-bands, On!Air!Library!. I was pleased with my luck.
Before they broke up, On!Air!Library! recorded a haunting self-titled album that included the song Bread, one of my favs. Bread has been bouncing around in my head for years, a simple cycle, almost a round really. The lyrics make it for me, though I almost never pay attention to lyrics in music:
The reason why you don’t rest
The reason why you don’t see
The reason why you don’t rest
(You haven’t built it)
Layer by layer you lay
The brick for me
Layer by layer you lay
Shaking in your bones is required
To dream up a colossal empire
The song works like a round, where two voices sing the same lyrics, sometimes in sync, sometimes not. Such song structures have always pleased me, way back to when I was a kid in church. More than the separation of harmony and melody in a song, the round allows distinct voices to stay distinct, without resolving into a single chord. In On!Air!Library!’s song Bread, this separation is all the more apt, since we hear the easily merged voices of the twin Dehaza sisters, the lyrics describing another sort of separation between beings.
I’ve been entranced for awhile by this song’s peculiar and vague juxtaposition of labor, architecture, sight, love. A particular palette of images float through - bread, brick, bones and empire - all in the context of a relationship of service between the speaker and audience. Only recently have I begun to pick out a likely voice and context for the exchange - that of some prophetic literature associated with what Christians call the “Old Testament.” I’m thinking in particular of the Book of Ezekiel. There, a pained and betrayed deity-king, Yahweh, communicates through the willing priest Ezekiel his great love and concern for an enslaved and rebellious nation - a people whom Yahweh had promised to protect and prosper.
The events of Ezekiel take place around 2600 years ago. Jersualem has been sacked, the holy places destroyed, the Jews carted off to Southern Iraq to serve as slaves. Yahweh had seemingly abandoned the Jews, though from the deity’s perspective, the people had abandoned their part of the contract first. Unlike during their time in slavery to Egypt, the Jews in Babylon/Iraq have more freedom to assemble, participate in culture, follow their own religion. This does, however, compound the problem of their break from the deity-king, since some begin to assimilate.
Yahweh speaks through Ezekiel to call back the people he loves. The language of love here is somewhat parental - harsh and pained, sad and caring. The medium of communication is part oracular - human as possessed conduit - and part performative/analogical - human as actor in some bizarre plays.
In chapters 4 and 5 of the Book of Ezekiel, Yahweh instructs the priest to carry out a very odd sort of performance as a message to the Jews. Ezekiel is instructed to set up a brick, draw a picture of Jerusalem on it, then carry out a little toy siege on the Jersualem-brick. Then he’s supposed to put an iron skillet between himself and the brick, and lay on his side for 390 days to symbolize being punished for the sins of the Jerusalem-brick-city. During this time, even tied down with ropes, Ezekiel will eat only a very particular sort of bread, one that isn’t even holy or clean.
After that time, Ezekiel is supposed to get up, shave all his hair off (over a year’s worth!) and weigh it. A third of the hair then gets burned, another third dumped over the brick-city, and the rest thrown to the wind.
And then Ezekiel is to prophesy to the Jews that they will soon go hungry, and will have no bread.
Bread, besides being a basic item of sustenance, is also something the Jews had received directly from Yahweh before - while wandering in the desert after escaping slavery in Egypt, they found bread each morning on the ground, provided by Yahweh to keep them alive. Bricks bear another significant weight in the story of this people - as slaves in Egypt, the Jews made bricks for their masters; later, as a free but homeless people, they had no permanent structures to call their own; and when they finally settled in Canaan, they were eventually able to build a temple for Yahweh from bricks. Under King Solomon, the Jews transformed from a mobile people, whose deity resided in a portable box, to a people known around the world for their resplendent temple in Jerusalem.
The later sacking of Jerusalem by Babylon included the destruction of this temple, a symbolic undoing of the long process of Yahweh’s protection and establishment of his people. Zedekiah, the last King of the Jews before the exile in Iraq, was taken out into the country, forced to witness the execution of his sons, and then blinded.
So the Jews leave Palestine - bereft, blind, hungry, and placeless. No bread, no brick, no sight. No rest. Their deity-king, Yahweh, is bereft and angry, since from his perspective, it was the Jews’ refusal to follow his instructions that led to their being susceptible to conquest. Yahweh loves these people, and desires their love in return. Through Ezekiel he chastises the Jews for their disobedience, but also provides hope in the form of visions. Ezekiel foresees the rebuilding of the temple in Jersualem, and in a more famous passage, the restoration of a blind and restless people to full life again. Ezekiel dreams of a valley littered with bones, which then rise into the air and shake, until sinew and muscle grow and slowly the dead are restored to life.
The Jews remain in exile in Babylon for around 50 years, until the Persians (Iran) come and conquer Babylon (Iraq), and the king of Persia allows the Jews to return. (Some stay, however, at least until the 20th century.)
Of course Israel is never a colossal empire, not like Persia, or Babylon, Britiain, or the USA. If they dream of one, the Jews dream of an empire led by a servant-king, an unlikely ruler who establishes justice and peace through humility before Yahweh. As long as this dream waits to be realized, we still require the patient singing of a loving and chastising deity-king, reminding us of the service that will lead to peace, rest, and vision.
Sucker postscript:
I headed to the SVIIB show in Seattle full of excitement, the nerdy fan arriving earlier than most. In a familiar sequence for me, I had purchased tickets for others as well but ended up going alone. I sold my extras to a woman outside the club, who then had trouble with her ATM card in extracting cash for payment. I let her have the tickets and asked her to find me later with the money when she found a working ATM. I never saw her again that night.
Listen to a live recording of SVIIB’s song Chain from KCRW here
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