Alexis Gideon
A Labyrinthine Cluster
Dec 6, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Clement Mason
original version appears on Video Musics
Clement Mason is chapter 2 of the animated/claymated video opera "Video Musics". It is based on an old Hungarian ballad of the same title.
Clement Mason leaves his wife and newborn son to go and build the castle Deva. Before he leaves, he gives his son a scarf and says: "This scarf will turn red if I befall an ill fate."
Clement meets up with eleven other masons and they start building the castle for the payment of two bushels of silver and two bushels of gold.
The walls the masons build by noon, fall by night and the walls they build by night, fall by morning. They decide the only way to make the walls strong enough is to build themselves into the walls.
They draw straws and two masons are picked to receive the four bushels of payment. The rest of the masons (including Clement) are built into the walls and die. The castle is finished.
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Brimstone Blaine
original version appears on Video Musics
I wrote Brimstone Blaine for my friend Shane. We were playing gin rummy one night with our friends Shelley and Peter and had a bet that whoever got the lowest score would have to write a song for whoever got the highest score. I lost and Shane won and I wrote the song for him --Brimstone Blaine is one of Shane's many nicknames.
Brimstone Blaine is chapter 5 of the animated/clamated video opera "Video Musics" in which princess Zuska meets up with Brimstone Blaine, a space cowboy card shark.
Blaine and Zuska find themselves deep in a game of gin rummy against two ghosts where they stand to gain a bushel of silver and a bushel of gold and stand to loose their souls. The ghosts are dominating the game and things look dark for Blaine and Zuska.
Zuska covertly grabs Blaine's rocket cycle ship keys and goes to the bathroom. In the bathroom she escapes out the window and busts into the saloon on Blaine's rocket cycle ship.
The two of them escape the pursuing ghosts and Blaine drops Zuska off on earth.
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Sock Hop
original version appears on Video Musics
Sock Hop was the first song I wrote for "Video Musics". I wrote it before I knew what the story would be and made the story fit around it. For the Daytrotter session, I performed a stripped down piano version of the song. Sock Hop is chapter 4 of "Video Musics" and in it princess Zuska is transported to outer space and the future. This chapter is a dreamlike video following Zuska's travels.
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Gone Goodbye
original version appears on Flight of the Liophant
Gone Goodbye is a song off my second album "Flight of the Liophant". It is about growing old and about how that even in your darkest sadest times, life is still full of beauty and wonder.
The kinds of screwy places that Alexis Gideon takes us are not of any world that we're familiar with. There is very little that is recognizable in the way or substance of the Portland, Oregon, resident's music. He has, somewhere along the line, had something very weird imprint itself on his mind and it only lets the man cook up the most insane and almost diabolical music that you've heard in a long time. It's sleazy, it's frightening, it's ghetto-y, it's hair-brained, it's addicting, it's odder than a guy with three pinky fingers, it's invested and inventive and it's even a little bit caramel-y. It's just about everything one could fucking imagine a piece of music and a piece of commemorative lyric to be, if one were looking to experience something that was borderline psychotic, but still perfectly accessible. It's just bonkers and amazingly resourceful, taking from every conceivable genre and medium, if one were tabulating such a thing. Gideon's music is a carnival for every single sensory input that a person has. It's an Olympiad in the ways of linguistics and the countless number of ways that syllables - consonants and vowels, pauses and punctuation - can sound coming out of a mouth, the same mouth, with different bends to the lips, curls to the tongue, exploitations of the windpipe, lung carriage, belly action, etc. Gideon sings/(converses/raps?) like no other performer that you've ever heard. He trails his words into always progressing, sometimes elongated ordeals, never barreling through the pronunciations, but letting them get savored and liquefied in his mouth before exposing them to our ears. He doesn't try to cram anything into tight quarters, but instead occupies as much space and takes his time in claiming it for his own. The content of his words seems to defy any sort of convention, just flying at us as if he was tossing us an impossibly coded labyrinthine story that would require the tail of a dragon, the eye of a newt and a magic crystal that only Gary Busey knows the location of to decipher. It's a thrilling and mind-blowing experience that favors the free-form methods of Adam Green, but with fewer drug references and less silliness. It's just bizarre, in its own way and it travels down a path all its own - one that splits the difference between the road to Oz and a highway to a land of killer bees, sugar highs, nightmares and mirages.
Alexis Gideon Official Site
