A book within a book, Hystopia is actually the novel left behind by Eugene Allen, a Vietnam vet from a slightly-alternate version of the 60s where John F. Kennedy survived Oswald’s assassination attempt and is serving his third term in office. Opened and closed by various notes and testimonies from friends and family members, Allen’s work makes up the majority of the novel, a narrative imagining characters from his time in Vietnam once they return home. The kicker, though, is that while they are back in the States, they never really ‘get home’, with the war following them back to a dystopian (but far from unrecognisable) America ravaged by biker gangs and forest fires.

In an attempt to solve the crisis of PTSD and violence, the government turn to an experimental psychiatric method called ‘enfolding’, where veterans reenact traumatic scenes while dosed up on a tranquilliser, Tripizoid. While even the doctors working on the project believe the technique to be without substance, it proves paradoxically effective for many subjects and blanks memories of combat. “Confusion is undoubtedly an element of the curative process,” writes Means. “In most cases the patient does forget about it, becoming fully immersed in the reenacted trauma’s nullification of the real trauma”.

Which isn’t to say it’s a silver bullet. Indeed the novel opens with a “failed enfold,” Rake, a man filled with the sort of all-consuming rage and propensity for violence unique to men forced into the sacrifices of war only to end up on the losing side. We find him with Allen’s sister, Meg (whom he has almost certainly kidnapped, and has undergone some degree of enfolding too), as they drive across Michigan on an anarchistic rampage of murder, drugs and destruction. Eventually, they reach the home of Hank, Rake’s former sidekick who has developed a love of trees since enfolding, a man who tries to protect Meg and figure out a way in which they can save themselves from Rake.

The second strand of the story deals with another enfold Singleton and his colleague Wendy, government officials breaking protocol to meet up and fall in love, who somehow end up on the trail of Rake, as though their rule bending was in fact a conspiracy on the part of their superiors to engineer the operation. Again though, confusion reigns, with Singleton’s boss admitting that a key part of being a commander is having the “gumption to go back and revise history”, talking of writing operation plans after the operation in order to ensure they are correct.

This sense of counter-history runs throughout the novel, from Singleton and Wendy’s quest and Hank’s transformation into peaceful nature-lover, right down to Eugene Allen’s re-telling (re-imagining?) of his sister’s story. What becomes important for these troubled people is not discerning the capital-T Truth but rather finding a variation they can believe in. More often than not, this involves a sense of mission, the victim’s need for order in the face of chaos, the desire for purpose or meaning in “an age when everything else seemed to be spinning deeper and deeper into despair,” anything which enables them to form a narrative of the world in a way they would like it to exist.

“It was crazy, he admitted, but it kept him going and like all good delusions it was fuelled by genuine hope and dedication to the truth”

And that’s what sets apart David Means’ Vietnam from that of the postmodern cannon. Yes, it is full of claims and counter-claims and impenetrable paranoia, but rather than using these to trace a descent into bewilderment, Hystopia utilises them to chart a way out. In a world where confusion and conflict constitute the resting face of the planet, maybe disinformation is needed not to obscure the truth but rather create it?

Here’s a playlist of songs that are suitable or relevant in one way or another, or maybe just capture the mood of certain characters and scenes.

Tracklisting:

1) Search and Destroy – The Stooges
2) IN EVIL HOUR – Battle Ave.
3) High & Wild – Angel Olsen
4) My War – Black Flag
5) Everything Falls Apart – Hüsker Dü
6) Saigon Shrunken Panorama – The Mountain Goats
7) Rugged Country – Japanese Breakfast
8) Meg – Hovvdy
9) Love, Come Save Me – Right Away, Great Captain!
10) I Need You To Tell Me Who I Am – John Moreland
11) Drugs To Make You Sober – Jeremiah Nelson
12) Are We Failing? – Hallelujah The Hills
13) Flaming Home – Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron and Frederick Squire
14) Lovers as Mirrors – Paper Bee
15) Forgetting is Believing – Nathaniel Rateliff
16) Redemption:1 (An Army Man And His Self-Discovery) – Justin Vernon

Hystopia is out now via Faber & Faber (UK) and Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US) and you can get it from most good bookshops. Check out the other works by David Means on his Goodreads page.

The post Hystopia – David Means appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“The song is constructed from a multitude of small details, dreams and snapshots and sensations which knit together into a kind of abstract storyboard for good times. Or a vivid representation of life’s sunny side. A shiny plum indeed.”

Ben was kind enough to answer a few of our questions, so have a read below as we discuss imaginary audiences, sincerity in music and the poetry of Eileen Myles.

Hi Ben, thanks for speaking with us! How is life now that Bowl of Plums is out in the world?

I honestly feel wonderful! The release show last week was really, really nice and putting this record out has been a really opportune moment to reconnect with people + talk to some new folks. I’m a little bit relieved, also – happy to finally cross the finish line. I’ve been walking around beaming!

The writing/recording process sounded like an interesting one, with a collection of very different songs coming into being pretty much right across America (from Alaska and California to Brooklyn and Queens), so much so that you’ve describe the album as a “greatest hits album”. Was this your intention from the beginning?

I never intended to write the album that way. After a few years of bopping around, through touring and visiting my family out west and doing some different artist residencies, I had a pretty big grab bag of different songs that weren’t necessarily part of one larger body of work. Thinking of the “greatest hits” helped me conceptualise everything, and helped me find the thread of humanity that was common to all these tracks.

I also liked how it’s a little tongue-in-cheek – greatest hits albums are for people like Tom Petty and the Eagles, goliath recording artists whose songs top the charts. Calling my tiny little campfire of an album anything grandiose is an almost-funny joke.

Also – “Yellow Roses,” an album-length song/jam I put out on tape in 2015 was partly about really embracing a classic rock vibe, just laying super hard into dominant chords and multiple guitars. We kept thinking of the tape design as something you’d pick up in the discount music bin of a car wash, a 50 cent tape of a band from the late 70s that nobody had ever heard of. I think maybe the “greatest hits” idea started creeping in there a little bit.

Do you think you’d like to go back to any of the tracks and write a more cohesive album around it? I mean, will we see any of the trees from which the plums fell?

It’s possible! But I don’t have any specific plans right now. The thing I’m working on now is based on my teenage years in California when I was just starting to outgrow religion – I’ve been listening to Everclear a lot for inspiration, haha, so who knows.

The thing that strikes me most about Bowl of Plums is how you manage to capture those transient moments of wonder and joy. Do the songs arrive in your brain like that, in little golden instances? Or do you work hard to conjure that feeling through trial and error?

I actually find that the harder I work on something – especially its words – the less resonance it has. The title track, for instance, went through a number of lyrical changes over the course of a few months that I was never happy with – I ended up using the very first draft of lyrics, the words I scrawled down in a beat-up notebook while I was hunched over a table still awkwardly wearing my guitar. Something like first thought, best thought. Revision and fine-tuning is something that I admire in a lot of other singers and writers but for me it just seems to dull my instincts and pull me out of the soft, human dreams I’m trying to live in with these songs.

The other thing that strikes me, as was the case with your self-titled album, is the sincerity of your writing. There are a million and one things I could ask about this but one thing I do wonder is how much of this is a concerted effort on your part? Does sincerity flow? Is it your default setting? Or does it require practice and patience and hard work?

I think the sincerity flows, dude! And I think it flows in most people, too, but for various reasons we learn over and over again to be cool, a little distant, intellectual, whatever. Maybe it takes hard work to overcome those impulses.

Without sounding like too much of a stoner – – you can’t aim for sincerity, I don’t think. You can’t say, “I would like this thing to be sincere.” With that thought, you have automatically disqualified the sentiment from ultimate sincereness…you know? You say something, make something, and if it’s an honest exploration of a compelling subject, done with tenderness and maybe, like, a lack of guile, then it might be resonant and might appear pure-of-heart. But you can’t aim to make something sincere.

Would you say you experience increased anxiety when sharing songs so vibrant and personal? Like, all artists suffer the will-people-like-it? thing but it must be more difficult when you put so much of yourself and your experiences down so clearly (as opposed to, say, masking it with irony or diluting it with fictitious characters and events)?

I have certainly been scared of people not liking what I make in the past, but I think I’ve outgrown that fear – – I’m pretty confident in what I do and, more importantly, I know that it’s for sure not everyone’s cup of tea. I’d hate to disappoint my regular listeners with a turd of an album, but I would also never put something out that I wasn’t stoked about and proud of personally. So, no!

The thing that I’m REALLY anxious about is the album and the songs just not making much of an impact, just kind of vanishing into the ever-growing content void. I recently called Bowl of Plums a paper sailboat, carrying my heart, set out to drift on the ocean. It’s also something like setting off a cherry bomb in a metal trash can – I’ve lit the fuse and I’m just hoping that the explosion is physical and loud and satisfying instead of anti-climactic – – mm, yes, haha. That is the thing that worries me right now.

Fortunately this interview will help!

You shared an Eileen Myles poem with the release. Did you have the poem in mind when forming the album, or did you discover it later and think it relevant? Does poetry and literature in general play a role in your creative process?

I was reading Eileen Myles’ semi-autobiographical poetic memoir kinda book Inferno (a poet’s novel) the summer I wrote a lot of this material. Such a great book, really hypnotic and steamy and smelly – – very accurately captures something about New York City, I think. And it’s just so direct and fearless – proud, too. I think her writing and her poems just made me want to sing about things that weren’t easy, to push through.

Later on, after I had been recording for a while, I came across the quote I ended up using as the epigraph – having written numerous songs name-checking flowers and, in one verse, just naming a few, it was too perfect – it concisely summed up the sheepish and outlandish presentation of a bouquet of flowers that I believe this album to be.

I love books, love getting lost in them, and find that the best ones allow you a totally reckless intimacy that’s extremely special and rare. I always think about that idea that Whitman had where, while you read Leaves of Grass and hold his work in your hands, you actually holding him himself. My big project in making music is finding, celebrating, and creating intimacy and tenderness and my notions of what that all means definitely comes from books. And I hope there’s something like that for people who hear my songs.

You’re releasing an EU version of the record through Italian label Love Boat Records (which is a great idea, speaking as a fan of North American music stuck the wrong side of the Atlantic), and plan to tour there this summer. Why Italy in particular?

It’s honestly “just one of those things” – I’ve happened to build an audience in Italy specifically, thanks mostly to the tireless efforts of Andrea Pomini, a musician and music critic who downloaded my last album illegally when it came out in 2014 and ended up championing it as a good, if totally under-heard, record. Once he wrote about the self-titled album in a magazine called Rumore, I suddenly had a sizeable audience in a country I had never been to. Since then, I’ve just taken every opportunity possible to go there and play and do more.

Someone smarter than me might be able to figure out more specifically why my music is resonant there – I’m just happy that it happened.

Essentially, one person happened to hear my music there and believed in me.

If anyone in other countries would like to do the same, I am open to the idea! Would love to be able to tour Japan regularly, for instance.

On a semi-related note, do you ever think about your target audience when writing and recording? Like, aside from family/friends/enemies, do you have a hypothetical listener in mind? What do they look like?

There isn’t a specific person, I don’t think. At least not right now – there have been targeted individuals in the past. I might describe the audience I think of like this – – a crowded room, maybe 20% people I know and 80% strangers, as if I’m opening for someone (actually, I think I’m imagining the time I opened for Evan Dando). And I think about how to win them over, do something approaching beautiful, and ultimately be, um, of some help, I guess is how to say it. How to do right by a tiny sliver of humanity.

I do not currently imagine my many enemies but I think I would like to start doing that!!

Finally, could you suggest 4-5 bands you think we should be listening to? Feel free to name old classics or new buzz bands, whatever you find yourself returning to.

-I’m really into Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith right now and, by extension, really feeling modular synth videos on YouTube.
-I just watched two Bill Callahan sets two nights in a row and I’m completely obsessed, once again, with “A River Ain’t Too Much to Love” and his cover of Kath Bloom’s “The Breeze.”
-I’m really into Abdullah Ibrahim / Dollar Brand, specifically a track called “African Marketplace” that rules.
-The new Karl Blau country album wow, yes yes
-Looking forward to the Uni Ika Ai album coming out in the fall – this track is very good
-And like, just in case – if anyone hasn’t heard “New Day Rising” by Hüsker Dü it is pretty much the best song of all time

Bowl of Plums is out now and you can buy it from the Ben Seretan Bandcamp page, or on cassette from Hope For The Tape Deck. For those of you in Europe (and that includes us in the UK, at least for now), Italian label Love Boat is putting out vinyl and CD editions on the 8th July.

Cover photo by Dan Sullivan, main body photos by Sean Pierce

The post Interview: Ben Seretan appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

1. Lovecrimes (Frank Ocean Cover) – The Afghan Whigs
2. Little Dreamer (Future Islands Cover) – Doe Paoro
3. Bad Days (Flaming Lips Cover) – Siskiyou
4. Again (Janet Jackson Cover) – How To Dress Well
5. Dog Song (Mountain Man Cover) – Stupid Loser
6. Celebrated (Husker Du Cover) – Mark Kozelek
7. Say Say Say (Michael Jackson & Paul McCartney) – Woodpigeon
8. Zebra (Beach House Cover) – Yellow Ostrich
9. Atmosphere (Joy Division Cover) – Flowers Of Hell
10. Climbing Up The Walls (Radiohead Cover) – The Twilight Sad
11. Islands In The Stream (Kenny Rogers & Dolly Parton) – Constantines & Feist
12. Louie Louie (Richard Berry/The Kingsmen Cover) – The Royal Iguana Fur
13. Harvest Moon (Neil Young Cover) – The Sour Notes
14. Into The Fire (Bruce Springsteen Cover) – Paul Baribeau
15. Forgiveness (Patty Griffin Cover) – The Local Strangers
16. Calling And Not Calling My Ex (Okkervil River Cover) – Ola Podrida
17. Please Please Please Let M Get What I Want (The Smiths Cover) – Pickering Pick
18. Jesus, Etc. (Wilco Cover) – Bill Fay
19. Look At Miss Ohio (Gillian Welch Cover) – Blind Pilot
20. The Party’s Over/No Children (Willie Nelson/Mountain Goats Cover) – Manchester Orchestra

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The Covers Mix: Volume #4 from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

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