“[David] descends the spirals of grief after losing his wife… With death and decay quite literally pervading his house and life, David finds himself both terrified by his situation yet drawn towards some obscure peace with it, as if giving in to a dark and fungal siren”

Amelia Gray is back with her third collection of short stories, Gutshot. As the title suggests, this is an uncomfortable book. Like, being-shot-square-in-the-guts level uncomfortable. There’s a man who vomits every time he speaks (and carries an empty pop bottle for convenience), mutual genital mutilation between a couple struggling to conceive a child, a family who carve up an over-sized heart with kitchen knives. There are giant snakes and desecrated graveyards and twins within twins. And yes, there is blood and shit and mucus in large quantities. 

As in Threats, many of the characters in Gutshot seem aware of their situation but unable to change, as if passengers on a train called Life or Destiny which they understand will arrive at its destination regardless of anything they might do. These are people caught in a strange stases, pervaded by vague sensations they can see and feel but not avoid, sensations which eat away at their insides until they are hulled and hollow. Opener ‘In The Moment’ is a good example, a story where a couple eradicate all references of the past or future from their apartment, removing all context from their existence and thus making life at once fascinating and impossible. See also ‘Away From’, the tale of a kidnapped woman who freezes at the top of the stairs when trying to escape. Reading these stories is like watching a fungus bloom across a wall, like watching a slow-motion video of yourself going up in flames.

This feeling hangs over the majority of the stories, even those in which the characters are decisive. Even ‘The Labyrinth’, which sees a not-so-brave man decide to be brave teeters toward a cryptic ending, or rather ends cryptically before any real conclusion. This is typical Gray, never quite giving the reader that satisfying click of recognition, the realisation of where a story is going or what it means. Good people aren’t rewarded and bad people aren’t punished and even passages that first appear clear allegories or fables skew into confusion. In ‘The Labyrinth’, the narrator, Jim, is forced to carry an (heavy) enigmatic disk through the maze:

“I don’t know about this,” I said.

“It’s the Phiastos Disk,” Dale said. “I paid a pretty penny so mind where you set it.”

It did seem to be imbued with some significance.

And so Jim takes the disk into the labyrinth without ever understanding why. Gray’s grotesque imagery is much the same. It remains important, vital, to her work without serving any clear function (ie. any ham-fisted metaphorical purpose), as if its meaning is so large it’s impossible to focus on. ‘Year of the Snake’ is set up like a strange and ambiguous fairy tale that never narrows down to some moral principle, while ‘The Swan as Metaphor for Love’ begins like an amusing love-is-actually-terrible gag before subverting the subversion, delving so far into horrible, biological truths that you’re left with an existential consideration so primal it registers as a taste in the mouth.

I could go on: ‘Device,’ ‘These Are Fables’ and the title story all seem to tee up some valuable punchline without following through, highlighting something that makes Gray’s writing so special. By not giving answers, or sending explicit messages, she manages to create characters and situations which feel real despite their surreality. Whether they have a device which can predict the future, an unending compulsion to say thank you or a prostitute locked in the heating ducts of their home, each and every character is vividly, fatally, human.

To review the collection as a whole is a difficult job. The book reads like a carefully constructed chaos too nuanced to be unified into a clear theme. Occasionally an image or theme is amplified by what seems like inadvertent recurrence, while other times they clash messily leaving once-clear messages and morals adrift in ambiguity. This gives Gray’s design an decidedly organic feel, each piece, ignorant of the rest, fulfils its own role as if it is the most important thing in the world, creating a system of blind parts working furiously toward some obscure goal, and giving Fernando Vicente‘s artwork a whole new meaning.

Gutshot is out now, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Seeing as we are primarily a music website, we thought we’d included a playlist of songs to accompany each book review. The tracks aren’t necessarily directly related to the anything in the stories, but rather get close to the same sorts of imagery and moods. Enjoy.

The post Amelia Gray – Gutshot appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

1. I’m Going Down (Bruce Springsteen Cover) – Vampire Weekend
2. Weird Sisters (Sparklehorse Cover) – LØZNINGER
3. Chiamami Adesso (Paolo Conte Cover) – Julia Holter
4. When Rosa Speaks (Pickwick Cover) – Kevin Long
5. Woody (Hayden Cover) – Winter Makes Sailors
6. Cheers (Blake Mills Cover) – Floating Action
7. The Park (Feist Cover) – Anna Scouten
8. Momma You’ve Been On My Mind (Bob Dylan) – Matthew Ryan
9. Reason To Believe (Tim Hardin Cover) – Horse Feathers
10. You Can Call Me Al (Paul Simon Cover) – Colossal Gospel
11. Kiss Me (Sixpence None The Richer Cover) – Mikal Cronin
12. Holocene (Bon Iver) – Rounak Maiti
13. One Day At a Time (Willie Nelson Cover) – Pure X
14. Back Home Again (John Denver Cover) – Low
15. Ultraviolence (New Order Cover) – Seekae
16. The Eagle And The Hawk (John Denver Cover) – Bonnie “Prince” Billy
17. Asa (Bry Webb Cover) – Denison Witmer
18. Rust or Gold (Jill Andrews Cover) – Jeremy Squires
19. In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (Neutral Milk Hotel Cover) – Clem Snide
20. Thinking About You (Radiohead Cover) – Hezekiah Jones
21. Surrender (Cheap Trick Cover) – Frightened Rabbit
22. The River (Bruce Springsteen Cover) – Josh Ritter

You know the drill, please support these artists. Go and buy some records, see a show, get a t-shirt, anything to enable them to keep making music.

Previous covers mixes: Volume I, II, III, IV, V, VI and VII

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

The post The Covers Mix: Volume #8 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Hi Brian, how is life on Long Island? How does it feel to finally release the new album after the long hard process of getting it into existence?

Long Island is excellent.  It’s a pretty small town I live in.  I commute via the railroad to Manhattan for work.  It’s nice to feel the energy of Brooklyn and NYC, but also have a break from it every night, and a bit of room to stretch out.  Releasing this new album is quite an amazing feeling.  As a musician, I think every time you can finish something it feels like a triumph on one level or another.  This is the first time we’ve ever worked with a PR company, so the process of waiting and not just releasing everything immediately via Bandcamp was challenging for me.  I think my impulse is just to share stuff and see what people think, but not that we’re finally here I’m super excited.  Brian V. and I are really proud of the album.  The songs come from a really honest place, and even though some of the songs are melancholy, there was a lot of joy that went into making it.

Your explanation of the new album on the Bandcamp page gives an honest picture of your life at the time of writing – the band’s situation, your family life with a wife and kids, the economic struggle and so on – and you say this heavily influences what you write. Do you find it difficult letting the people close to you see/hear the new songs?

There are a few songs – “Stars Collided in Our Hearts” in particular, that do feel really vulnerable and emotional to perform.  “Head Underwater” is another.  I think in the past I’ve written a lot of songs that portray more of a romanticized view of love and other things. I was always trying to create a dream world that was somewhat removed from my reality – an escape.  This time I was determined to let go of that a bit, and speak more directly from the heart.  I think one of the things I’ve learned as more of a general life-lesson is that it helps to be open about things.  I think a lot of people are really secretive about their problems, especially when it comes to money.  It’s fine to be private, but handling things that way can also create this weird cycle of shame and depression.  I found myself saying things in these songs that I wouldn’t say to friends and family.  It’s funny – a lot of those people will hear the record and probably won’t listen closely enough to the lyrics to really catch what I’m talking about.  It’s bizarre and ironic that I get to speak more intimately with strangers around the world through music than I do with family, but I guess it’s also pretty wonderful and amazing that I get the chance to do that.

As a follow-on from the previous question, do you see your music as a way of speaking to your loved ones? For example in ‘Hard Times, Go!’ you sing‘I haven’t been as brave in how I’ve loved you // as I know I should have been // I thought if I kept quiet // you might think I was strong’. Do you want your wife to listen to your music and treat it personally? Or do you use your situation and emotions to mould songs that are about (and for) other people? In other words, are you writing songs concerning your life and self? Or are you writing fiction from experience?

Ha – I’ve definitely learned that speaking through lyrics is not the most effective way to communicate with my wife!  That being said, this is definitely the most autobiographical set of songs that I’ve written.  I think I resisted writing that way for a long time, and maybe I was finally just at the point where I had nothing to lose.  When I was younger I started out playing more folky, singer-songwriter type music.  I played around a lot of coffee houses where the thing is to do a more straightforward, confessional style of songwriting.  I always resented the limitation and the implication that things should only be perceived that way.  It seemed like an oversimplification.  Of course, fiction comes from some sort of emotional reality, and there’s always a connection –   but if everything is confessional than you’re eliminating the entire scope of the writer’s imagination.  I always wanted my songs to be more than stream of conscious journal entries.  I took pride in the craft of transcending that.

What are the main influences on your music and writing outside of personal experience? In the aforementioned description you say that Robyn’s Body Talk had a large effect on Hard Times, Go! But are there any others? Do books and literature play a role in song writing for you?

I take from lots of different places I guess.  I think as a writer, my work was fundamentally shaped by Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and Jack Kerouac more than anyone else.  I still think about Bob Dylan all the time – and just the sheer power of him as an artist.  Of course there are lots of others – Tom Waits is big.  I draw on literature a bunch too – I love the Beat Generation writers, and Bukowski and Henry Miller, but also more contemporary folks like Junot Diaz, Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson.  I feel like film is pretty closely connected to music also, and even television.  The song “Chasing a Phantom” is a direct reference to one of the episodes from the last season of Mad Men.

The album was funded via Kickstarter, and through one of the updates on there you said that you felt it allows artists to receive funding for the work they want to produce, rather than the old model of producing what others want to hear in order to receive funding. Do you think this freedom could allow bands to thrive in areas where that were previously impossible? Does the amount raised significantly influence an artist’s ability to produce their work?

I think it’s part of a larger conversation, about the whole digital revolution, but Kickstarter has absolutely been an amazing tool for us, and bands are absolutely thriving in areas that were previously impossible.  I was always an indie rock kid at heart – I grew up idolizing people like Ian Mackaye from Fugazi, so for me that fact that’s it’s become so much easier to make records than it was back then is a really incredible thing that I’ll never take for granted.  You can make a record for almost nothing.  I don’t think the amount of money raised from Kickstarter relates directly to an artist’s ability to produce work – unless their work relies on more expensive tools than ours does – higher fidelity, mastering, etc.  It does take a bit of creativity and stubbornness to be self sufficient, but it always has.   We treat Kickstarter more like an extended pre-order for the record, with merch and stuff.  Our goal was set to make the process of making the Vinyl and the T Shirts and stuff something we knew we could break even at – instead of the old DIY way of basically funding things on a credit card and hoping you did well enough to recoup your expenses.  We aren’t able to do that.  On a larger scale – signing to a label was sort of the same thing.  Most bands never recouped expenses and got dropped.  My favorite thing about Kickstarter is that if you don’t meet your goal, no one gets charged and you aren’t required to complete or fulfill the project.  It seems responsible.  If there is not an audience demand to support a product, that product doesn’t come into existence.  You make music to connect with people.  You make records if people want them – not just because it seems like a cool thing to do. 

With all the said – with music and with our culture in general there is also a relationship between money and access.  There’s the challenge of reaching people through all the noise.  I try not to worry about that much.  I just try to do good work and share it, making use of the tools I have.  If there a content war going on with our culture – it’s probably a war that no one is going to win.

You wrote an essay on the evolution of the music industry and our relationship with the music we listen to, and conclude that the increased availability of music (and for free) has lessened our willingness to engage with each single album, as if in the gluttony of filesharing we no longer savour each bite and instead gulp down whatever we can (as highlighted by my first post on Beat Radio). Compare this to the positive effect of the internet where unknown bands can reach wide audiences through social media (and the aforementioned effect of Kickstarter allowing artists to create whatever they envision) and there is an interesting standoff between the good and evil of the information age. In your own experience (admittedly without the pleasure of a crystal ball to view alternate realities), has the internet been beneficial or detrimental to your musical career?

I used to get hung up on the question but I came to realize that there wasn’t really any point to look back.  Beat Radio came of age creatively at a strange time where people were still operating with the expectations of the old music industry, but the bottom had dropped out.  We were able to get the attention of lots of people – labels and stuff, but nothing ever really came of it, for lots of reasons.  Without the internet and the support of mp3 blogs and stuff, we never would have found an audience at all.  Without access to inexpensive gear where I could make records in my basement, we never would have gotten past the first album. So mostly I’m grateful that I’m able to make art and connect with an audience.  I feel really lucky to have been able to continue to develop as an artist. We’ve been fortunate to finally start bringing in revenue over the last couple years through licensing and download sales and stuff – but whenever I put pressure on music to have it be something that could take the place of my day job, it always seems to take the joy out of it.

Finally, what music are you enjoying at the moment? Could you list four or five artists that you are currently listening to? Any genre or vintage welcome.

Yeah, of course! I wrote a post about my favorite songs of 2012 here – I really loved the records last year from Will Stratton, Damian Jurado, and Father John Misty.  I also listen to a ton of Pavement over the last few years, and Neutral Milk Hotel.  I heard the new Yo La Tengo today also and that is really great.  I co-wrote a song recently with Drew Danburry and have been listening to a ton of his stuff.  The demos for the new album he’s working on are incredible.  There’s so much. It never ends.

The post Interview: Beat Radio appeared first on Various Small Flames.