Musee Mecanique
Suspended In The Rusty Moans Of The Theremin Birds
Jan 30, 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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Like Home
original version appears on Hold This Ghost
Micah: This is one of the oldest songs on Hold This Ghost. It was sketched out while living in a small corner of my mom's office in San Diego then fleshed out during the recording process in Portland. It became a sort of touchstone for where we would ultimately go with the album... what sounds we wanted to include, the world we wanted to create. The lyrics to the song are an idea that I had about the way in which people change things about themselves that they don't like. I had this vision of people shedding these ghost-shells that would trail behind them, invisible to everyone else but the owner. The line "Oh, this ghost feels like home," was the essence of that idea... that you could never really escape these former selves no matter how fast you try to run from them.
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The Things I Know
original version appears on Hold This Ghost
Micah: This was the first song I ever wrote that had any fingerpicking in it. It's a really simple pattern and wrote it after learning a couple Simon and Garfunkel tunes... so I think there's a lot owed to them on this song. I first showed this song to Sean in Balboa park in San Diego and he came up with the brilliant counter-melodies in the second guitar line. That really made the song work because it made it intricate enough to be interesting but also not too complex so that it just feels like noodling. The song is about being infatuated with someone from afar... knowing only the simple actions of their lives but being fascinated and trying to divine what their life might be like only by distant observation. The inspiration for the song is actually a girl that I still have never met that lives in Texas.
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Somehow Bound
original version appears on Hold This Ghost
Sean: When you're ready for a relationship to end - you know you can't love someone properly anymore and they can't help you grow - everything logically points to "this is over." But there's an indelibility. No matter how much you want to move on, you can't. You're tied to them beyond reason by a few stubborn heart strings and little things left around to remind you of a love gone bad. You're somehow bound. Maybe by some quirk of human existence. Or maybe our inability to forget certain things is also a way of forcing us to know ourselves a little better. We especially like the synth solo / bridge in the middle - the instrumental way of punctuating a relationship gone awry and attempting to move on in a lighthearted, spirited manner. It's like the end of some weird Japanese animation film combined with the line from Joanna Newsom's "Bridges and Balloons": "Oh, my love - Oh it was a funny little thing it was a funny, funny little thing..."
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Our Changing Skins
original version appears on Hold This Ghost
Sean: Wondering - especially that of altering through different versions of ourselves. There is a short story called "Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros (I found it online here). We are at once all the ages we have endured. At the same time we somehow have trouble identifying with our younger selves. In photos, those aren't our hands anymore. That's not my shirt anymore. We once imagined our futures. We once wondered at the similarity of laughing and crying, of mortality. Angels. And now, our wonder folds into itself when we view those old photos, or hear those stories from our parents about things we did as kids, and maybe we write a song about it.The cassette plays some field recordings from the old Oaks Amusement Park down near the estuary and mausoleum a stone's throw from our house - a chance, but apt location for a song about mortality. Matt says it's particularly nice to listen to while driving in falling snow.
The following should not be considered torturous, at least not in this circumstance: getting painlessly saran wrapped to a long and thick wing of a windmill, an old one that's sturdy as it holds, but gives off a good and rusty moan every time it lumbers through another revolution. It would be good to be attached to that oar-like wand, with your head on the bottom side of it, as far away from the epicenter as possible so that you could feel the full rush of the movement in a circle, the spinning as gracefully and easy as it could possibly be in the belly of a modest, almost charming wind. Around and around you would go, the blood flowing like a flash into your eyes and sinuses and then letting up as you turn, pulled by gravity around the bend. Under a clear blue sky, high enough up to be away from all of the stink of below, all those people fighting it out and thinking cruel things about others under their breaths, there can exist a sunny sense of calm that has everything to do with that suspension and that view unobstructed. It's a liaison with a certain space that feet can't take you to and that makes it unbelievable, in a little way. It's one of the reasons that man wanted to fly so badly, to conquer that space that we could build skyscrapers and elevators and stairways and bridges into, but could actually just walk to. Portland, Oregon's Musee Mecanique makes very spacious music that has soft corners, and echoes and light and airy streamers, as if it could just be gone from all recognition before a blink, before a swallow. They might as well be making it in that open field in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where the Wrights were solving the "flying problem" for the first legitimate time. It's daring and full of dreams and a complete lack of tension. It's impossibly beautiful and it feels as if it were the blueprint for what it would take to live up there on that windmill that was written of earlier for as long as the weather held, as long as we were covered appropriately. It would be okay to be up there in that space - of theremins and friendly ghosts, of fall scents and the body odors of birds, not to mention the coos of the sleeping trees - even during rain showers and snowstorms, when the water forms itself to match the hanging and gently drifting flakes of melody of Musee, or their sloppy and slow kisses either. The sounds of Micah Rabwin and Sean Ogilvie's voices howling so whisperingly through these warm and nuzzling folk songs is more than a tonic for weariness and dismay. It's an opening up - with great vigor - the flaccid curtains hanging in front of the windows, on a morning when the sun has already got a good, but tolerable cook going on and the light it friendly in its blinding. But then it's as if the light - this blinding and magnificent light - is in no hurry to reach your body, as if it's taking its time to travel from the other side of the window. You can feel it getting closer and you just close those eyes back up and allow it to physically move across you. There's a sound associated with that. Or at least now there's a sound associated with that.
Musee Mecanique Official Site
