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The only performer to make the trek from Liverpool. He busked his way up to Northern Ireland and fed us strange barley grass powder.

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PLEASE LISTEN AS YOU READ

Across the ocean
From New York to Liverpool to Derry
We are the ones
Who Believe
That through joy
We can (forever) live.

May 21, 2011, a bomb was detonated in a bank in the Diamond of Derry, Ireland. It was the day that I arrived home to New York after three jubilant weeks of fellowship, performance, and understanding, called Never Records.

May 21, 2011 was also my forty-first birthday, an awkward age that some distant version of me might dread, or romance, but in the becoming, I had a realization of some prescient sense that I have only begun to live properly.

Our road to ruin
Was built with
Broken architecture and morality
An endless holy war upon
The enchantment of desire
And the wild romance of beauty.

When we went to pick up Rose in Belfast, we scoured the forest of tourist information kiosks in Belfast City Airport for a map or a brochure of Derry but could find none. We finally found a three-page pamphlet with the assistance of a woman behind an information desk after the three of us searched together for another ten minutes.

Mickey Guinness, an older gentleman who worked at the BSR turntable factory during the 1950’s and 60’s, told me that Derry’s dereliction and neglect was a result of its “preponderance of Catholics” while remaining an icon of Unionist history.

In a city renown for its history of shirt manufacturing, a job held exclusively by women, the BSR factory was one of the only factories to employ Derry’s men in the 20th century.

Some people sing
life’s hard and then you die
that nothin’ matters and what if it did
the ultimate sin is giving up.

Every day in Derry I faced an almost insurmountable task. I had to give each recording session, and there were many, my full attention and love, even if the music didn’t interest me, even if the performer was awkward and unengaging. These feelings were compounded by a horrible diet of overcooked, over-fried, reheated mush, and an almost intravenous consumption of Guinness.

One day, an awkward, shy, kid came into the shop. In spite of myself, I would judge him with my cynical and egotistical New York vanity. Then, out of his mouth would come a song of such eloquence and tenderness that I would become convinced once again there was no better place or thing for me to be doing with my life.

People like us must learn and sing
a song of resistance
together we will make
a joyful noise in the dark
our wild magic songs
will never die.

One of our first concerts at Never Records in Derry’s Context Gallery was on election night when I received a crash course in an alphabet of political party acronyms from Teknopeasant’s set: DUP, SF, SDLP, OUP, Fine Gael, Fine Fianna Fail.

While many of the artists I recorded to vinyl were more concerned with love than dissent, there was this palpable feeling that the music scene was the only guiltless group in town.

Long before, Punk had united the sons and daughters of paramilitary parents from both sides of The Troubles; music had always been a secular refuge in Derry.

Diane from Paddy Nash and the Happy Enchiladas described the artistic communion called Never Records in an interview with BBC’s “Across The Line,” “There was something really nice about the process. It felt like a gift.”

Luckily, the bomb blast on the 21st injured no one. While those responsible had probably never heard of Never Records, I feel its timing was symbolically significant.

Recently, I was asked to be on a panel discussion about the working artist. The conversation was preoccupied with the unjust nature of an all powerful commercial art market ruled by classism and greed. Panelists decried a system that needed to be overthrown, and demanded new and revolutionary solutions.

I purpose an idea: simple, timeless, and truly revolutionary. The most political thing we can do is to make art as fully and as wholly as we can, and art that is true to ourselves. We must be remade by our work and gift this process with those that will hear its song.

For a few weeks in Free Derry, we traded the experiences of audience and performers. We sang, beat-boxed, rhymed, strummed, and beat drums. The shock wave from our collaboration created seismic echo, a sonic boom, that, for a brief moment, arrested the hopelessness and cynicism of our age and etched our voices onto record. On vinyl or in our memories, our songs will never die.

As part of Jason Losh’s “Chinese Take Out” I was fortunate to sit in with some of Chinatown’s most gracious musicians in a community center on Mott St. I became instantly attracted to the guqin, which has an open tuning in a pentatonic scale. While I floundered with the song, I had luckily re-tuned my guitar the day before, and was only off a half step. It was tricky playing with the guqin and ehru, but I think I held tough under the formal and quick circumstances.

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For Jason’s project, I wanted to re-interpret this session through my ears. I’ve been obsessed with The Clash’s Sandinista of late and I have been wanting to pay homage to the Walt Whitman of punk, Joe Strummer. Here is the result.

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The music will be played from inside a 1917 Victrola that Jason and I purchased in a mega dim sum restaurant in Chinatown this Spring/Summer.

In November, I began a musical collaboration with Phil Jeck which I hope will continue in perpetuity as long as we are friends. I sent him an instrumental guitar piece that I had cut to vinyl. The song was a wistful guitar minuet, a hopeful ditty based on two guitar parts locked in a tight counterpoint.

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A month went by, and then a small package from Liverpool arrived in the mailbox at the top of the cement stairs that my uncle Alfred built. Inside the package was a CD containing Phil’s musical reply. Phil had taken the vinyl I sent him, and processed it through a pair of trusty 1960s stand alone turntables drenched with reverb, flangers, and envelope filters. His version of my song was unrecognizable as my original composition. It even seemed transposed to a different key and mode.

He had taken my pensive song and transmuted it into something infinitely more subtle, more substantive. It took me several listens to adjust my auditory focus and then I realized the vastness of the landscape he had created from just one note from the music I had given him.

The band I was in, called The New You, was once given a critique in which our songs were described as being “so fragile they threatened to collapse under their own weight.” We saw this as a positive review. That state, when gossamer ideas align in perfect symmetry no more concrete than feathers or eardrums, is the most difficult to achieve. Phil seemed able to distill and recast my music with ease.

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I listened to the piece for weeks. It seemed like anything I could do to it would upset its quietude. I was intimidated by Phil’s maturity to allow something so minimal to last for so long without embellishment or flourishes or modulation. And then I surrendered and stopped trying to come up with a retort.

I cut a copy of his song onto a black 12’ vinyl record, blasted the record on a plastic turntable in the front room of my apartment, and sang and played along. These are the notes that came out.

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The new record is on its way to liverpool.

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