White Hinterland

Where The Creeping Feels Gather

Sep 18, 2008

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

The ways that I've only heard of Casey Dienel acting are more numerous and full of triple the dimensions in relationship to the ones that I've seen with my own eyes. It's probably exactly that way with every single person that any of us have ever come into contact with throughout our many days - you, me, all others and the dead. They are mere tips of monstrous icebergs that those around us allow glimpses of - the original paper doll before the connected family is unfolded like a triple-gate letter, shocking us with numbers, a magnitude of aspects, of a billion blinks, a million fingernails and platforms and thousands of gestures and angles.

Most of the things she does have nothing to do with music. She just makes them into music, though we'd never think it so simply. Right now, as the red and orange leaves are slipping from their grips and tumbling from their barren rooftop dwellings, Dienel is in the middle of canning season, taking ripened fruits and vegetables and processing them just so in order for them to keep over the winter, in the see-through Mason jars, in storm cellars and dank basements. These are scenes that most wouldn't remember ever having seen before - rows and rows of canned pears and stewed tomatoes - for the stores are all so close now and they always will be forever more. Those that my grandmother kept in her small basement in the city were surrounded by bookshelves full of recipe clippings and a deep freezer that all of the grandchildren knew contained the gallon of Neapolitan ice cream that we wanted to cover in hot fudge from a can, exposed to the air with a can opener - the same way we jacked our Hawaiian Punch, with the triangled holes on both sides, one for the air and one for the juice to flow. Who knows what happened to that freezer full of ice cream and those shelves of recipes and fermented grapes in cans when she passed away.

A basement just like that - full of silent stories and oddly scary jar after jar of canned fruit - could be something that Dienel channeled on her latest full-length, Phylactery Factory, relating to the dungeon fare and the labor-intensive and mundane procedure that trapped all of those food stuffs, as brains and organs are preserved. How they were taken out of their natural element and forced to remain young and edible through air-locked ingenuity and help prisoner in a dark place is the heart of the idea. The new Portland resident - after a debut record that was more whimsical and playfully cute - slid her slippers off and plunged head-long into the remote reaches of a forested imagination and let all of the murky waters that she never knew she had play, making for herself music that has a spookiness that not you nor anyone you know could put a finger on. There are invisible cobwebs hanging down from its corners and those sticky webs hit you without warning. You wipe them away from your eyebrows, like no harm's been done, but there's a lingering thought about the invisible places you're walking toward next, and whether or not there are going to be any more surprises.

This record is a new kind of chronicle of hard to define folklore that is a blend of Dienel's childhood and the scenes that seem to be from a David Sedaris upbringing or Revolutionary Road, where the unease and the delightful awkwardness is palpable and rings as truthfully as anything. She's taken some of the various moments that she's witnessed, filled them with poetic license and then coated them in a creepy, jazz smoking jacket that goes well with everything. These songs carry the same kinds of perpendicular meanings whether or not they start from a haze or from a crisp and clean morning, waking up at a house along the cape. They involve bicycles being thrown out of windows. They involve the painful and sketchy things that cameras are never thought of to capture. They involve the kinds of inherent sounds that saws and theremins make when they're drifting off to slumberland. They involve the stories from cellars and basements. It is a trail of smoke plumes that we follow into these songs, going through them like a maze, feeling our ways out, if we do at all.

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1. first song

   Welcome to Daytrotter
2. second song

   Hung On A Thin Thread

   

   - original version appears on Phylactery FactoryIn my mind, a storyteller is someone more dutifully enshrined to narrative than I've ever been. There's a reason some write music rather than writing books. I'm too sybaritic to be a good writer. I'm far more interested in the way a word feels, in the sounds and gestures it's able to make, than I've ever been in getting across a good story. Ask anyone to name a lyric from their favorite song and I think most will find they can't. Who cares? It doesn't diminish how that song made them feel, the impression it made through its sound. This song is one that unpeels a new room every time I revisit it there's always some vowel, or image, or chord that feels very satisfying. Each time is a little different, but there will be a tiny crystilline 'aha' moment hiding somewhere in there, and suddenly I'm seeing the song again for the first time. I live for those kinds of moments.

3. third song

   Calliope

   

   - original version appears on Phylactery FactoryI don't normally ascribe qualities to my own writing (seems like something someone else might be more qualified to do), but I think this song has a very feminine shape to it. I don't believe it's necessarily because I wrote it, either I can think of a lot of pieces of music that men have written that also were structured in a feminine way (like the first movement of Debussy's string quartet). I say it because it has a very fluid, diaphanous, yet centered structure. It's in Ab a key that's always sounded kind of pink and warm to me, which is why it felt perfect. For all the hypnotic and moodier stuff going on in the beginning, you really need a warm key to keep it from sounding too hopeless. I wanted it to work a little like an invocation, something a little supplicant, written to an omnipotent presence. I think songs are intangible things, trying to make even more intangible things feel tangible even if just for a split-second.

4. fourth song

   Dreaming of the Plum Trees

   

   - original version appears on Phylactery FactoryWhen I was about nine years old, we had these ostentatiously wealthy neighbors, who were always fighting with one another instead of watching after their kids. You could always hear one of their three children wailing about something, getting struck by a toy, etc. One day in the summer, as I watched from our back porch, their marriage came to final blows. He threw his bicycle off their bedroom balcony, she told him (or yelled) that she wanted a divorce. The next family that lived in their house fell into a similar pattern of supplanting love and affection with material wealth, hence the cigarette boat reference. At one point they had a 60-ft. cigarette boat, a separate truck just to move the goddamned thing, and so on. I guess the song is basically an ode to hypocrisy theirs and mine. Part of what's going on is a syrupy gossip cocktail of repulsion fueled by envy. If not for some degree of jealousy, would anyone have bothered to care about it? And how gross to veil disgust under mock concern! To the audience of a nine-year-old neighbor, their life up until that moment looked like Disney World, and I silently despised them for it.

5. fifth song

   Vessels

   

   - original version appears on Phylactery FactoryThis song is one of few that appears now in more or less the same form as it was written, spared of the grueling editing reserved for the majority of its siblings. I liked it for its simplicity. I wrote it in about five minutes it just kind of sprung out unusually full-formed. I don't believe in permanent decisions or mistakes. Someone asked me recently what song I would erase if I could choose. But I don't think I'd erase anything, songs or otherwise, anything. All of that experience just goes straight into the pot, gets you closer to the next ones. "White Hinterland Official Site":http://www.whitehinterland.com"Dead Oceans Records":http://www.deadoceans.com"Casey Dienel Daytrotter Session":http://www.daytrotter.com/article/102/free-songs-casey-dienel