Americana

Found while passing through the great state of Connecticut:



File under "serendipities of the road."

Ocean was truly excellent this weekend in Maine. Many thanks go to Stella from Sinferno who not only gave us a place to stay, but fed us bagels and hot cider for breakfast at Arabica. Portland is a great town, and everyone is nice to the point of it even being a little weird. There are too many white people, though, so we played a little game of I-Spy-the-Minority.

To add to the surreality of the weekend, our friend (and old-school Relapse veteran) Robert Williams of Nightstick was at the show, since CWAF (a semi-related Weymouth band) opened the evening. I haven't seen him in person since we played in Boston with Dysrhythmia back in March, though he wrote me a letter over the summer. He's one of the most gratifyingly strange people I have ever met -- a genius of sorts, obviously highly educated and very articulate. Still, his cocaine use (which he most likely would not define as a "problem") makes it difficult to engage with him in an authentic way. I appreciate his comments greatly, because I think he gets what I'm trying to accomplish musically, but the space between us is huge. In some ways he makes me sad -- he seems like he reached such a point of existential self-awareness that the pain of nothingness overwhelmed him, and he just surrendered to drugs as an escape. When a mind like that misses redemption, it feels like a waste.

At least I left our conversation with two Nightstick CDs and a Siege tape.

Playing:
Ocean - Here Where Nothing Grows