Takka Takka
A Den Of Catastrophic People With Death To Battle
Dec 3, 2008
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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You And Universe
original version appears on Migration
This was the first song we wrote for the new record and it ended up becoming the final track on the album. We so rarely play this one live even though it's a treat for us to play. It's a song about meditation and not giving a fuck. For me at least.
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Silence
original version appears on Migration
This is a crazy song to play live for me. It's got these different keyboard sounds that are kind of insane and sometimes hard to, um, control. It's also the song we probably worked the longest on. We once had a version of this song with a three-minute percussion jam in the middle of it. That was a bad idea.
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The Takers
original version appears on Migration
If there was an anthemic song on the record, this would be it. But there isn't. So it's not. It's a song about avoiding dealing with things. We're all good at that. But we'll talk about that some other time.
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Everybody Say
original version appears on xMigration
This song was originally called "Migration" and it's got my favorite lyric to sing in it ("She feels so much better with someone around and a light"). The writing of this song was the result of a lot of time together in our practice space and unlike many of the other songs on the record, it remained relatively unchanged throughout the recording and writing process. Oh, and the original chorus for this song was, "Big boys don't die." Go figure. "Takka Takka Official Site":http://www.takkatakkamusic.com
Something smells as if it were burning right out of this roof, right out of this sweater. It's as if a simple stroll of these shoes would leave a charred black trail of soot and ash a mile long if a decision to stand was to be made. Moving these bones into another room - if there are any rooms left, oh, we're monstrously afraid to look out of the door - would made this crumbling down and apocalyptic scorching a reality confirmed by the senses.
It would be here, under our noses, or rather cooked into them as it seems has already been done, and it would be here at the corners of our mouths like a forgotten splotch of jelly or ketchup, grossly discovered hours after the meal involving it. Takka Takka of the known and prolific city state of Brooklyn, N.Y., named its latest release using a term that is most commonly tossed about when discussing the activity that geese and other fair-weather birds - when they book it south to warmer climates when the northern winter sets in where they call home the majority of the year, though this would suggest some sort of continuance of times, a move that could be reversed. How many migrating birds over the centuries have been pictured as the quintessential sight of a crisp fall rapidly approaching a harsh winter of bundling and white canvas, seen against the backdrop of an evaporating light cast golden orange and wild?
The answer is many, but it seems that this dynamic band's material has little to do with a seasonal vacation down into the more southern temperate regions of the world from say, North Dakota or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Put this record on whatever kind of player it is that you prefer and it could cause a response that pulls you voluntarily, yet violently into a lion's den that acts as a front to a pissy beehive that's been laid to a ruin of sorts - though the bees have chosen to sharpen their ends and swarm madly about. But these aren't bees they're talking about, these are people. There are an unlikely number of lions cavorting with these people, creating a theme that somehow still remains brilliantly out of reach at the end of the album. What seems to fling itself to the front and the center, through these words of Gabe Levine, is a world (whether it's the ultimate world or just the personal galaxy of a person or two isn't clear, but it feels like a catastrophic deal) that's been sent through a wood-chipper and then worked over with some flamethrowers for good measure. There are people battling silences. There are people creating the silences that are being battled endlessly. Maybe it's a scene like in "Lost" when everyone's supposed to be dead or something and they just don't know it yet, even if that's not the premise of the television show, so the pundits say.
Takka Takka have made a world of some of the most interesting living dead people - the ones who don't know it, still haven't decomposed and are living as if nothing ever happened - speaking to the people that they always did and waiting for the second half of the conversation to kick in, waiting for their friends or loved ones to pick up the tab this time. It is the oddest and loneliest state that there could ever be. But wait, these people are alive. They are living, but they are somehow on the other side of the mirror and their appreciation for what's going on is enhanced in such a way that they feel like complete outsiders and this comes through in the blooming and swooning arrangements that Takka Takka put together, saying so much with expressions that no instrument could muscle out. They are there though. It takes the eyes being closed to fully appreciate their presence. This is heady stuff and Levine's words read like award-winning prose - the words draping over the slow-churning orchestration like a planetarium or the real thing, deep and purple-y black, ancient.
