Snowblink

Dearheartedness, A New Word Not To Escape From

Mar 27, 2008

tell your friends…

Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Johnnie Cluney // Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley and Snowblink

This is a knitting, something done completely by hand. Snowblink is the same as those hats of one size that barely fit over a strange baby's ears, those booties for a strange baby's feet or the scarf for that strange baby's new, new neck. The San Franciscan band, the main work of Daniela Gesundheit - a form of snow angel or real, is something that requires so much care it hurts and a purpose without sully, with pure intent to be as adored as it should be.

In Gesundheit's backbreakingly gorgeous words and their airy movements, you feel your arms and your cheeks being rubbed warm as if an invisible hand is doing what you'd instinctively be doing for yourself upon coming in from shoveling the walks or tobogganing over some wildness for a few hours, until the lights flushed and you couldn't see the bottoms to which you were heading anymore. There is a terrifyingly beautiful sense of nothing else mattering as she sings about the antlers that have grown out of her guitar and about these mysterious lines of story that appear before us as startlingly as new colors or languages would. They feel as tender as that yarn from a knitting sliding over itself and hugging tight with its own self, still connected to the rest of itself twisted around the spool. It's that scraping, light as a feather and yet monumental in what it means for a completed blanket or other item of warm cover, that lets us know of the action, of the happening, of the change that its going through. It's only loud in a silent little room - where the walls are close on all four sides and there's nothing bothering the stillness - when the rubbing of one hand upon another (no matter how soft and moisturized they may be) sound like plate tectonics, big rocky slabs of earth smashing together. It's bigger - always - than we would like to think.

Snowblink makes music that you can sidle up to, nuzzle your nose into and cling to for its many, many nutrients and its dearheartedness, but you can't take it with you. It belongs forever in its own special natural habitat, far away from the bungling and crass pollutants and superficialities. It belongs where the ten-foot poles and the prattle bugs can't gnaw holes into it and turned it into tainted and tattered bits. You aren't allowed - the protectors won't let you - just take what you want and leave the rest behind like a balled out carton of ice cream, deformed and used. You take it all - Gesundheit's rippling currents of mountain water, her imaginative pieces of prose and poetry, her dynamic takes on the interplay of life and the nature that surrounds it and a fantastic wonderland of sounds and extractions all put in their proper places. It reminds you of a person who appreciates and falls for a sweet line of poetry like, "I, when you notice, am cast in gold" and wraps an apple in gold foil. It's quite spectacular and right.

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tell your friends…

1. first song

   Welcome to Daytrotter
2. second song

   Appaloosa Whiplash

   

   - original version appears on My Oh My AvalancheLyrics: Electricity! Fishnet, wet and scurry: snuff a good thing with a cat-nap Apaloosa! Whiplash, flash then lose a love of all things fluorescent. Better no color than crude. This explicitly begets complex: your paint-by-numbering my body. Tired old reverie awash with myth-of-me; bellows billow you, lost at sea-of-me. In with the old. Control it. Hold it. Let your feet fill sandbag. Kick it with a heeled crag. Lick a letter, send it back. Don't follow me! hollow bone. Better no color than crude. A field may reveal the color of snow without snow.Description: The refrain of this song references an excerpt of Jerusalem poet Peter Cole's: "Better Colorless Than Crude." He was a professor of mine and I made him an embarrassing and decidedly (in hindsight) "crude" gift. It was a line of one of his translations, about an apple: "I, when you notice, am cast in gold." I wrapped an apple in gold foil and left it in his campus mailbox and immediately and pointedly regretted it, and blushed really hard for the next few classes. This song is also the choice to be without anything/body rather than with a lot of anus-y people that don't get it.

3. third song

   Fish of Little Thoughts/The Haunt

   

   - unreleased; will appear on the forthcoming Long LiveLyrics: Each morning and night when my heart and my head hold so tight something wants to let go, I fill little boats with my boring thoughts then I float them, go,go,go,go,go. A wind blows them all to a small quiet island that's too far to swim but I do not miss them. Their sails show embarrassing home videos, go! go! go! go! go. go . A sea-she on each bow sings memory's freakout. Let them go. Something wants to let go. Each morning and night when my heart and my head hold so tight something wants to get gone, I fill a dogsled with my head's hem-and-haws, mush their cold paws to a frozen dawn. And those good dawgies take me far as I can get from me, go! go! go! go! go. go it's too far to walk, so I will not stop them, go,go. Let them go. Something wants to let go.Description: It's just true. There's a crowded bay someplace where all my boring dream-thoughts are docked. It's like NYC sending its garbage to Orange County.

4. fourth song

   Rut and Nuzzle

   

   - unreleased; will appear on the forthcoming Long LiveLyrics: what'd you grow those antlers for? some days we fight them. some days we fell them. held tight as a weathervane rooting a rooftile or let loose as a leaf from a pile. some days we wear them to survive. some days we fell them and thrive.Description: My guitar has antlers, so it's a question I get asked a lot while on stage. It is just a hair more frequent than the cat-call "those antlers make me horny." They're big on that in rural Manitoba, and Oakland. I had a dream that my guitar had giant fuzzy moose antlers, so I settled for some deer antlers and had a friend help me saw the scull off of them and drill a hole in them. Then I found the kindest man at this hardware store in Montreal (I was living there at the time) to help me devise a way to affix them to the guitar. One day I walked in the store barefoot because I had just stepped in dog poop before I got there. He took my shoes to the back and cleaned them off for me! Let's call him Guillaume. An earlier unreleased version of "Rut & Nuzzle" was recorded and produced by Brooklyn's MGMT.

5. fifth song

   Tired Bees

   

   - unreleasedLong LiveLyrics: one little breeze, as quiet as a hiveful of tired bees one little word, as soft as the breast of a hummingbird one little song, sung oft as a moth moving towards a light left on one little tremor, as tender as a frost thawing into pond one little word, as soft as the breast of a hummingbirdDescription: It's kind of about quarks about putting a lens on the minutest possible players on team earth.All songs perfomed by Daniela Gesundheit . . . lead vocals, electric guitar Frank Lyon . . . vocals, percussion Dave Wilson . . . vocals, percussion