Viking Moses
Depicting The Head Or A Pillow Where A Head's Been Recently Spotted
Jan 1, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Bikee Summer
original version appears on Is Orange Birds
A cover of a Spenking (Spencer Kingman) song... he originally released it on the Marriage Records compilation "Is Orange Birds". I've been enjoying playing it live, among other songs of his from time to time, genius, this man! I released a 4-track version on album called "In Gratitude" which Fence Records, an independent, totally DIY Scottish label released in their subscription series called "Picket Fence".
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Clown School
unreleased
A new song I'm working on. I started this a while back at my friend Stephen Kent's house in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, England. He makes wonderful instrumental music as The End Springs and he operates his own DIY label of handmade limited releases called Dust Wind Tales. "Clown School" is about hesitation, sexual frustration, I suppose... but in the prepubescent way of getting uncontrolled erections, and shamefully having to hide them, or distract others' attention from them by way of cheap party tricks, or general buffoonery, with the main objective of catching the attention of the admired, and even earning their smile, the ultimate goal, but not being able to work up the nerve to do so, so instead just fantasizing about the whole potential outcome.
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Passed Through the Bones
unreleased
Another new song. This one is pretty autobiographical. About being born in Michigan and brought home from the hospital in the snow by my mom, and about the benefit of letting go of a time which left as quickly as it came.
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Syracuse
unreleased
Probably the song I'm most proud of. It's so short, maybe about a minute long, so I hope it's not very burdensome on a listener. But I just love the melody, and the intention is about as pure as it can be. I wrote the song after I met Laura, and the whole encounter just turned me upside down in the best ways. I'd just met her, and invited her to tour with me, and we parted ways in Saint Louis, Missouri. She went back to New York. I went to my Mom's in Belton, Missouri, wrote the song at her kitchen table. A week later Laura invited me back to do a show with her in Brooklyn. I'm very grateful to say that we haven't spent much time apart since. This is the first of a chain of tributes I've begun to write about her. We recorded a demo of this song for our collaborative project "Saint Eskimo", which we self-released on a handful of cd-r's.
It's a man-sized, bulky pile of time that Brendon Massel has spent driving around this country. He's spent solitary time processing all of the many things that pass through and beyond a head and he's got ways to make them work for him, to make them swirl and ooze and light out with a new upholstering when he's used them up like batteries. He's taken time to cut out for a foreign country, to live and write while living with barely known Scottish half-strangers.
The details of his stay there are hazy now to your narrator, but if hazy memory serves, there were incredibly delightful stories of homemade soups and other kitchen adventures - breads rising, recipes being tried for the first time - and isolation from worries, responsibilities and constructs. If that's not how it went down, it does sound like an appealing way to do it the next time around in another life or just next year or something. Massel's been prolifically keeping track of all his daydreamings, rooting problems and folkloric brambles as Viking Moses for a good many years now and his recording output doesn't even match all that's been flowing during those agonizingly demanding hauls between shows for what could be anywhere between a few and dozens of people. He finds himself thinking about clowns and thinking about old girlfriends and old places that are now behind him, a direction that provides a ridiculous amount of inspiration, for everyone, including him. It's there when all of the details can be read as evidence, can be entertained as the pleats of an extravagant fabric that's more like the continuous scroll that Jack pecked out his road-raging masterpiece while blitzed out on cocktails and hallucinogens.
He sings of a land covered in snow in "Passed Through The Bones," a song with a temperament of brittle sticks holding up a story of something so brazen as a burglarizing of strength, taking the piss and marrow out of the bones of another person, replacing what they were made of with a vaporous soul just looking to eavesdrop a little and move on to regular living, already in progress. Massel's voice, or the Viking Moses voice always reaches me like a soft pillow, with that deep crater in the middle of it where a sleeping head had recently been bowling. It's almost a familiar drop in, an unconscious wave from one person to the next, a peripheral glance that's wry and full of different meanings. There must always be wheels and gears finding the matching and turning teeth on the other side, locking in with them and then grinding together to make whatever kind of determination is going to be made. Massel must count on those gears knowing what they're doing, leaving the luck in the hands of those mysterious miserly mechanisms, looking for the wretched and therefore the most fascinating of concerns. It comes out in an almost loss of concern in his presentation, as if by the time he sings his words, they've been bailed out. They're now just stories and they're bendable and free, they're like bumper cars and the silence that rings through the air and turf just after the recoiling impacts.
Viking Moses Official Site
Viking Moses MySpace
