MUSIC // “tooth hound sand”
“souls, they task ‘em / get eaten by the moon or past him”
First, a quick programming note.
If you’re in New York next Monday, October 20th, come to Artist’s Space for this month’s edition of Abasement. I’ll be playing in Demsyl and sharing the bill with the illustrious Rubber (() Cement, Mephitick Ooze, and Weston Olencki. Free show. Insane circumstance.
Having said that: a couple of music posts coming down the pipeline, this one in honor of the fact that the latest set of recordings by Angels in America, my ancestral music project with Esra, has been mixed and mastered and is heading into the world shortly. More details soon, but meanwhile, a little dip into the archive.
No regrets on cover art.
In 2009, with the first two Angels cassette releases in the books, we commenced looking for some new moves. The early albums—strictly guitar-and-effects-based affairs constructed from long recordings direct-inputted from the practice amp into the Macbook’s late lamented line-in minijack—gave way to an audio interface, dedicated patch cables and, most fatefully, great/crummy synths. I eBayed a monophonic Oberheim Matrix 6R, tag-teamed it with—ahem—a microKORG, and proceeded to start enjoying life.
The idea for “Tooth Hound Sand” was the first half-decent one that resulted from this setup: a basic chimey sort of riff with obnoxiously clean ping-pong delay, a thick Matrix bassline, and a bunch of buzzy saw leads overtop. The demo (which we released via Nina in 2022) featured some hastily scrambled lyrics touching on half-remembered concepts from a cool class on Valentinian gnosticism, Gurdjieff’s contention that human life is “food for the moon,” plus the era’s general tendency toward theoretically-laden religious/violent imagery. After the demo stage, we cranked the gain on every stem, thinking the blown-out levels would smear up the digital cleanness and provide us some noisy cover. None too subtle, these moves, and legibly fear-based, too. But the thing worked.
The track would appear on our split tape with Weyes Blood in 2011 (go figure, it’s our most successful streaming release by an order of magnitude), as well as our 2012 Night-People tape A Public Ranking (which we released under the name “Miami Angels in America” in what was mostly another misplaced bid to avoid owning the synth-heavy sound, but also because we thought it would be funny). For that latter release, our longtime buddy P77A aka lilbuckminsta cooked up a little-seen architectural walkthrough vid for “Tooth Hound Sand.” When I asked him about it this week, he told me the follow-up clip was going to be called “In Search of the Ancient Hoodie.”
In 2014, I redid the song yet again for a solo release, this time in a mostly acappella setup with some additional lyrics (incredibly, they’re on Genius; more credibly, they’re wrong). I’ll go ahead and leave the real words below, to guard against the offchance we decide to put this thing out a fifth time and are tempted to try gin up some fresh mystery. The thing, alas, is an open book: a sixteen-year-old composition whose effects on me, however scuffed by time and self-consciousness, are no less detectable.
bodies, I heard
get caught in some between point lowered
to trap them from above all toward
preserving them in virginal divinity
souls, they task ‘em
get eaten by the moon or past him
in a rotten mood you asked ‘em
questions floating by into infinity
I was dreaming
woke up when I heard the screaming
I knew they’d come for you outbeaming
the moon and me and mine in hollow trinity
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