Tuesday, January 24, 2012

End Of The World Ephemera


Fangtoothed & Wild
&
A Wig Full Of Spiders

Thursday, January 26th at 8pm
Mr. Dennehy's Irish Pub
63 Carmine Street, NYC

Monday, January 23, 2012

Thoughts on the sound of Fangtoothed & Wild and A Wig Full Of Spiders




“A Wig Full of Spiders” and “Fangtoothed and Wild” are my Garage Rock plays. They’re rough, a bit sloppy, and they stagger around the stage.

I’ve always had a love for Garage Rock and lo-fi Rockabilly, anything that sounds so overdriven that it’s about to turn into white noise, something that shakes and rattles and is always on the verge of falling apart.




The characters and tone of both plays are a bit different than what I usually write. They’re not strictly surreal or experimental, they’re just…off. I wanted to write something that put language first: the sound of it, the mythologizing, something a bit like the imagery in a song like Bo Diddley’s “Who do You Love?”:

“I walked 47 miles through barbed-wire; I use a cobra snake for a neck tie….”



“I’m just 22, and I don’t mind dyin’…”

Which was, just last year, repurposed into “California”, a beautifully apocalyptic song by Ema...



...which begins:

“Fuck California, you made me boring; I bled all my blood out…” and resolves into that same Bo Diddley line before crashing into the jarring:

“What does failure taste like? To me it tastes like dirt.”

This mirrors “Who do You Love?” ’s bravado vs nihilism. Of course a man who lives in a house of skulls doesn’t fear death, and of course a woman who’s bled all her blood out doesn’t fear it either.

The characters in “A Wig Full Of Spiders” fear death (and intimacy/vulnerability of any kind) and those in “Fangtoothed & Wild” either deny it or instinctively know how best to weather this Twilight of the Gods.

“A Wig Full of Spiders” is a groove, two repeating patterns playing against each other: drums and bass. It introduces the idea of being terrified of myths, especial a myth about the apocalypse, one led by Fenris, the world-eating dog.

“Fangtoothed and Wild” builds on that. It’s the fuzzed-out guitar. It’s the end of the world and Fenris is here, scamming drinks in a dive bar. The world shakes apart and much like the myth Fenris stars in; the Gods fall and the humans endure.

This Week! Dialogue with Three Chords Returns!