{"id":2650,"date":"2016-09-11T02:18:19","date_gmt":"2016-09-11T06:18:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/?p=2650"},"modified":"2025-01-08T21:07:00","modified_gmt":"2025-01-09T02:07:00","slug":"beneath-the-dark-wide-sky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/beneath-the-dark-wide-sky\/","title":{"rendered":"Album Review: Dream The Electric Sleep – “Beneath the Dark Wide Sky”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Art is urgency: It pierces our awareness in a flash of brilliance, pulling us into an experience bigger than our selves, provoking a response. It is, perhaps, the activist\u2019s most powerful messenger.<\/p>\n

\"Allie<\/a>
Allie Mae Burroughs, by Walker Evans<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With a passion for reform, a corps of American photographers set out in 1935 to compose a message. Their photographs of the rural poor encapsulate the Depression, the accompanying ecological collapse, and the mass migration of families from the Great Plains to California. Through skillful composition and informed selection, they documented rapidly vanishing lives and devastated landscapes.<\/p>\n

Their images, once urgent, have become cultural icons. Icons lose their vitality, however, and urgency must find another aperture.<\/a><\/p>\n

Dream the Electric Sleep<\/a> provide that opening on their latest release, \u201cBeneath the Dark Wide Sky.\u201d<\/a> Shimmering in on locust wings, the album invites immersion into its mesmerizing and relentless energy.<\/p>\n

\"Dream<\/a>
Dream the Electric Sleep: “Beneath the Dark Wide Sky”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dream the Electric Sleep, an independent rock trio combining the force of Soundgarden with the eclecticism of Peter Gabriel and Led Zeppelin, take us into the 20th<\/sup> century collapse to shake us into awareness: We have not solved the problem. Working with producer Nick Raskulinecz<\/a>, Matt Page (guitar, vocals), Chris Tackett (bass), and Joey Waters (drums) passionately connect us with the people who lived through the desolation, urging us to act.<\/p>\n

Inspired by the work<\/a> of Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers from 1935 to1944, the album amplifies their activist spirit, suggesting that their present is quickly becoming ours.<\/p>\n

\"Dust<\/a>
Dust Storm in the Texas Panhandle, by Arthur Rothstein<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Page, the band\u2019s lyricist, faced a significant challenge: translating photographs into melodic poetry, reaching outside those images to connect with the larger, violently moving picture around them. His scenes are striking and provocative: ghostly faces compel us to purge our self interest; a mortgage is foreclosed without an antidote for the pain; migrants roam the deserts like Jesus, fleeing the black wind that chokes the life out of them. Page writes with fluid minimalism, abstracting photographic fragments into elegant dreams and devastating nightmares. Each song stands strongly on its own, but together they weave a harrowing narrative of human-induced loss.<\/p>\n

On my inaugural listen\u2014headphones on, lights dim, notepad in hand\u2014I found myself in a conversation with Page as a poet. I scribbled my own lyrics into the empty spaces, interacting as if in call-and-response. We spoke of heritage, of sustenance, of bounty; the tragedy of collapse; empathy; hubris; wished-for death; the intrusion of darkness; wondrous beauty and its impermanence; the sad carnival ride of fate; and the effervescence of fleeting hope.<\/p>\n

Some things are inexpressible with words, and \u201cBeneath the Dark Wide Sky\u201d has two carefully sequenced instrumentals. The gentle admonition of \u201cFlight<\/a>,\u201d\u2014she gave you flight and sky\/and everything that you adore\/then you hit the floor<\/em>\u2014summons the menacing and torrential \u201cWe Who Blackout the Sun.\u201d This instrumental track then leads us into two songs rich with death imagery, \u201cHanging by Time\u201d and the sinister \u201cCulling the Herd.\u201d<\/p>\n

The second instrumental, \u201cThe Last Psalm to Silence,\u201d appears now, a respite from the storm. Ushered in by the chirping of crickets, it scans the calm landscape, memorializing the human lives that paid for the surreal silence.<\/p>\n

The high contrast of the two instrumentals reminds us of those photographs: black and white, stark, disquieting. We are not done with the darkness in spite of the light. It\u2019s a gritty balancing act from here to eternity.<\/p>\n

The band, having composed the music collaboratively, takes us on a journey that is both desperate and bucolic. They present a vast range of moods, stretching out into peaceful spaces then bearing down on us with anxiety. And though topic is dark and the trip demanding, they never wring us out completely. Scattering moments of grace throughout the snarling darkness, they perform with exhilarating equilibrium.<\/p>\n

Purposeful, urgent art must always court balance, delivering an unattractive message via an appealing messenger. When making the messenger photogenic, we risk losing the message itself.<\/p>\n

\"Frances<\/a>
Frances Owen Thompson, by Dorothea Lange.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This problem plagued the FSA photographers who inspired Dream the Electric Sleep. Working in support of Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal agenda, they hoped to improve conditions for poor farmers and sharecroppers who were further impoverished by the economic depression. In pursuit of their mandate, the photographers, and the agency itself, faced unique challenges in publicizing their work.<\/p>\n

The program had many critics, some who considered it an indefensible waste of federal funds during times of austerity. Others viewed the program as an FDR propaganda machine. These charges, levied against the photographs, don\u2019t erase the violent reality that surrounded them: Thousands lost their farms and homes and migrated westward<\/a>, drifting among hastily-erected labor camps. Many became migrant farm laborers in California, some hired into factories. Most continued to struggle. Their lives, like those in a famous book by John Steinbeck<\/a>, shunned the happy ending.<\/p>\n

Contemporary public criticism of the photos\u2019 subjects\u2014dirty children, salacious women, people responsible for their own poverty\u2014didn\u2019t remove the truth of their displacement. Neither did technical critiques of the photos in artistic journals. The subjects in the photos, through the production of the program, had become only objects. Their very real and immediate plight had been obscured by spectacle and taste.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A displaced family during the collapse of the 1930s.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dismissed as propaganda, blunted by critique, deflected by moralistic disdain, nullified by the mass culture industry, art can lose its urgency. The event that produced the artistic impulse is relegated to memory or irrelevance, and people move on, feeling they\u2019ve been inoculated against future occurrences. But the impoverished are still struggling, the plains have never returned to their natural rhythm, and we find ourselves on the brink of collapse once again.<\/p>\n

The beauty of art\u2019s urgency is that it walks hand in hand with insurgency. Breaking through mass complacency and institutional denial, it finds another aperture, and accelerates into a torrent of light.<\/p>\n

\u201cDoes it move you? Does it pull you?\u201d<\/a> asks the second track, “Let the Light Flood In.\u201d<\/p>\n

If so, then do something.<\/p>\n

\n

Here are some suggestions:<\/p>\n

Work for the Right to Refuse to Kill:
\nhttp:\/\/www.wri-irg.org\/co\/rrk-en.htm<\/a><\/p>\n

Explore these rights and sovereignty organizations:
\nFood Empowerment Project<\/a>
\nHuman Rights Watch<\/a>
\nFarmworker Justice<\/a>
\nThe National Center for Farmworker Health<\/a>
\nCoalition of Immokalee Workers<\/a>
\nLa Via Campesina: International Peasant\u2019s Movement<\/a>
\nGRAIN<\/a>
\nEqual Exchange<\/a>
\nFair World Project<\/a><\/p>\n

Learn more about refugees\u2019 rights, personal experiences, and the imperatives of survival:
\nHuman Rights Watch\u2019s Refugee Rights Program<\/a>
\nIFRC (Red Cross\/Red Crescent) Protect Humanity Program<\/a>
\nAmerican Friends Service Committee Immigrant Rights campaigns<\/a>
\n\u201cThe Imperatives of Survival\u201d 1974 Nobel Lecture by Sean MacBride<\/a><\/p>\n

Read a great book:
\nSomething New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th Century<\/a> \u2013 J. R. McNeill
\nThe Labor Wars: From the Molly Maguires to the Sit-Downs<\/a> \u2013 Sidney Lens
\nFirst the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology<\/a> \u2013 Jack Ralph Kloppenburg, Jr.
\nFatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture<\/a> \u2013 Edited by Andrew Kimbrell
\nThe Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945<\/a> \u2013 Cindy Hahamovitch
\nPicturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs<\/a> \u2013 Cara Finnegan<\/p>\n

And be a good human being.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Art is urgency: It pierces our awareness in a flash of brilliance, pulling us into an experience bigger than our selves, provoking a response. It…<\/p>\n

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