Boy, did I go on a weird trip with this one. Thanks, Marc.
The short story is that this piece was inspired by the later work of musician Scott Walker, in conjunction with the strangeways of Google Translate.
Long story:
I was sitting on the couch with partner last night and I mentioned this Junto prompt. She thought about spooky kinds of music and said straight away, “oh yeah, that Donald Duck one by Scott Walker.” For those unfamiliar with where that reference is pointing to, it’s the penultimate track on Walker’s 2006’s album, The Drift. The entire album is harrowing, but “The Escape” brings things to a ghastly (and profoundly surreal) climax. Those who have heard it will know what I’m talking about; those who haven’t - well, you can check it out for yourselves.
We discussed this a little more, and I thought about doing something in the vein of late-period Walker; along the unsettling lines of The Drift and 2012’s Bish Bosch - with a heavy emphasis on queazy atmospheres, abrupt cuts, disturbing lyrics, etc.
I grabbed a recent book of Walker’s lyrics (Sundog) which compiles lyrics from across his career, though with a heavy emphasis on his later work, including several sets of lyrics (c. 2016-2017) which remained unrecorded up to his death earlier this year. These unrecorded lyrics are fascinating and you couldn’t help but imagine what they might have sounded like against Walker’s incredible voice and his knack for interesting structures and phrasing.
A favourite of his late works is “Barracuda”. Much like the bulk of Walker’s late work, it doesn’t easily derive clear meanings, and is rather a sequence of fragmented imagery and sensations, which reads a lot like the narrative of a fever dream. The chorus is particularly strange, whereby one dreams of a barracuda which appears to shape shift into spires, razor wire and burning tyres. I’ve provided an extract of the lyrics below:
the collapse
of the
rubber boom
confetti cannons
ashes
around the
room
bladders stop
beating
like
moon flowers
your bones
on my back
your long lost
nom de spume
there’s everyone
that isn’t you
no eyes behind
my eyes
dreamed into barracuda
dreamed into shining spires
dreamed in barracuda
dreamed into razor wires
dreamed into barracuda
dreamed into noonday choirs
dreamed into barracuda
dreamed into burning tyres
**
A peculiar characteristic of Walker’s later lyrics is his usage of really odd terms (such as ‘Gynozoon’ [in 2012’s “Zercon”] - good luck Googling that), phrases and the occasional line of non-English words. Pulled together, everything becomes a chain of brain-swelling non-sequiters. When I was re-reading through “Barracuda”, I was struck by the line ‘nom de spume’. I went to Google Translate and it picked it up as Romanian, translating to: ‘name of foam’.
Now, that might not be what the line actually is (if it is anything at all) but it set my mind to what I might do with “Barracuda”. I had originally thought about recording a spoken text of the lyrics to music, but this struck me as a little uninspired. What I decided I would do - based on the ‘nom de spume’ translation - would be to run the lyrics of Barracuda through Google Translate into a different language and translate it back again into English.
It took a bit of experimentation, but eventually I settled on using a combination of Romanian, Turgik and Sudanese, which warped lines of the lyrics into a semi-desired outcome. I then took the ‘remixed’ set of lyrics and translated the bulk of it back-and-forth a couple more times. This was the result of the third iteration:
straps of the sleeve
dark gray in the room
the shoot grows like the flower of the moon
my bones behind me
lost a long time after baking
they are everywhere, not you
he doesn’t even look at my teeth
I have a dream
dream in a shining glass
I have a dream
Barracuda
cast into the fire
I have a dream
you eat breakfast
I have a dream
pour into the wheel of the car
**
I loved how the process of translating the lyrics back-and-forth could warp words and phrases and transmute the original lyrics into this kind of parallel reality version of “Barracuda”, whilst keeping some of the original elements of it intact. In this respect, I thought the original was pretty spooky/uncanny; then I took it into even spookier/uncannier terrain.
For the musical accompaniment, I recorded me reading out the remixed version of “Barracuda” and then dubbed this to my old Tascam 424 cassette multi-track. I used an old cassette that I picked at random, which I discovered has these field recordings on a couple of the tracks. I kept these field recording, and then recorded an additional track of me improvising with a microphone (via a loop/delay pedal.) This was dubbed back into Logic and I did another four-tracks of improvisations on the Tascam. I then mixed it all together in Logic.
I’m quite happy with the outcome. I hope Scott would have liked it (as well as the rabbit-hole process.) I’ve always liked the medium of cassettes and memories of discovering old ones in boxes and finding some really weird things that people had recorded to them. All grainy, hissing, warped and strange.
