Hello this is Circuit des Yeux here doing my civic duty for the glorious tQ. Why am I writing a piece for this magazine? I have an album out on Matador Records called Halo On The Inside, that’s why. It’s out now. Maybe once you read this and have a little laugh you will go ahead and check it out. This album was written and recorded mostly by myself in the basement of my lofted studio in Chicago, Illinois. I laughed a lot while making this album. So imagine me completely alone in the darkness, chuckling at myself.
I have been compared to Scott Walker with every release I have put out, starting all the way back with Overdue in 2013. Back then I was utterly confused by the comparison. I couldn’t help but look at the face of a 70-year-old man and wonder what it was about him that these people saw in me, or worse, what it was about me, that they saw in him. Eventually I took the plunge and immersed myself deeply into his catalogue, falling in love first with his baroque period. His arrangements have always felt so perfectly paired to the emotion and words he is singing. I was immediately drawn to the 360 degrees of emotion he was able to evoke through the marriage of instrumentation, melody, and words. In his later catalogue – Tilt to Bish Bosch – extreme music foley and other unconventional sounds were used to provoke concise emotion with as much precision. You simply cannot find this anywhere else. This kind of self-serious music – poetry added to sound, something that reads more like the work of a playwright than a songwriter – was equally balanced with a surprising amount of… poop jokes?
Admittedly the first time I heard the ‘Corps de Blah’ fart symphony I had to stop listening. It was hard for me not to initially ingest his use of scatological humour as boy-ish – gendered, immature and coming from a privileged frivolous place. But by the second listen I realised I was… bracing for the fart part. The fart part blasted through the fog of the drama, levelling with me in an “everybody shits” kind of way. In an interview in 2012 with this magazine Scott described his fart symphony during ‘Corps de Blah’ as an “intended break”. Much of his humour is scatological. It’s a wonder to hear a voice so dedicated to phrasing and tone, twist the air and turn the tongue to its highest calibre while forming the words, “A sphincter’s tooting our tune”.
Climate Of Hunter offers no humour. It describes the isolation of society, and is largely misanthropic. It is a message sent from a person grappling with the darkness of civilisation, unsure where to turn next. What comes after isolation? A gesture to reconnect via humour? Was this late period sense of comedy a piece of Scott that he didn’t let shine until later in life? Or did this come post-self awareness, and develop over time? Did it have anything to do with being dropped from Virgin Records?
It’s a bizarre turn of creativity and one that has taken me more than a decade to come to terms with. It is the crosspoint of having art be everything while simultaneously saying, “It’s not that big of a deal”. The humour in Scott Walker’s discography is peppered and never used to create a new trajectory. It’s simply a hot/ cold plunge with this guy, and it is used to devastating effect.
A swanky suit
On ‘Cossacks Are’, Scott sings, “That’s a nice suit/ That’s a swanky suit”. Yeah, you know who comes out with a phrase like that? Someone who is not rich. The sort of sly, suave delivery really sells it. Then the rhythm and melody drop out as if the lyric is an aside, a send and return from the song, before diving back into the dark atmosphere of the drama at hand. The word “swanky” evokes the colour navy blue with a slight sheen, maybe the suit is oversized. This line helps me feel middle class in an okay way.
“Bish, like ‘dat my bitch’. Bosch like Hieronymus”
Scott Walker was really blunt when explained what Bish Bosch meant in 2012. I like how the title intertwines modern love slang with the name of someone who made one of the most fucked-up nasty depictions of human society. I have two sisters. One of them is your state of the art Indiana Woman. She eats McDonald’s when she wants a snack and is smart enough to buy her plastic pool at Walmart on Black Friday and swim in it while blasting her favourite 90s alt country. She found Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden Of Earthly Delights via Pinterest a few years ago, bought a print, and tried to hang it up as the main art in the house. Her husband completely vetoed it, stating that it was “too fucked up” to have as the centrepiece of their home, and I love her for it. She is my Bish Bosch.
Fart noises
The fart noises on ‘Corps de Blah’ are gross. They sound like they were recorded with a room mic, which is even grosser. The fart symphony comes before the torrential climax of Bish Bosch: the most harrowing cliff-falling, fortissimo string section follows directly, and plays under the line: “His severed, yellow-eyes weeping”. He described this as “an intended break” and it works. For me this is one of the best examples of his use of a hot/cold plunge. It heightens the embarrassing and harrowing extremes of having a body. I once burped into a microphone during an improvisational set with Bill Orcutt. I ran out of things to do, so I burped and everybody clapped. Everybody burps, everybody poops.
Donald Duck
There is a cartoon voice on ‘The Escape’, and it is probably the greatest musical left turn of all time. He sings: “Waddles into the afternoon/ Look into its eyes/ It will look into your eyes”. Scott has lead you into an amorphous, anonymous, sinister chase, only to reveal that you’re face to face with the Disney character Donald Duck. Is there anything more sinister than capitalism’s creation of the natural world caricatured to market to children? It’s sinister and florescent. My late grandfather had a split tongue almost like a snake and he would often do a Donald Duck impression for me and it creeped me out. I remember being able to see the slit in his tongue as he pushed it up behind his teeth to make that weird voice. I would force a grin, wishing for it all to be over.
Go fuck yourself
On ‘SDSS14+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)’, he sings: “I’ll grease this pole behind me/ grease this pole behind me”. This passage concerns that ol’ self-sabotaging classic of being told to go fuck one’s self. The lyrics are met with a bouncy oscillation growing upward up in frequency. It’s the sound of expanding elastic, or a point narrowing. Catch my drift? What a mantra. It’s sick that my mind has completed the action set up by Scott Walker in this lyric. And while I’ve never literally greased the pole behind me, I have salivated over high risk situations: I’ve gotten off on the adrenaline rush of catching a plane with a 20 minute layover, for example.
Punching a donkey
Sang in a full-chested voice that feels earnest, the protagonists of ‘Jolson And Jones’ both claim: “I’ll punch a donkey in the streets of Galway”. Now, I’m unsure if this line is supposed to be sexual innuendo, referring to the habit of punching a person in the head during fornication, or if it’s simply about a donkey… that’s getting punched. Either way, donkeys are real cute and so are sex workers. Both are generally a lot smaller than you would think. A donkey comes up chest high maybe, and they are quite furry. Imagine a sweet girl accepting your proposal to make love only to be punched in the back of the head. Now imagine the same thing but with a donkey. Both instances would end in a shock equally filled with humour and sadness. But such is the nature of human intimacy. When I first moved to Chicago I worked at a bagel shop that had a sandwich called ‘The Donkey Punch’. It had chicken salad, lettuce, Swiss cheese, and hot sauce on it. It was my favorite, and I believe it is still available.
Referenced artists
Scott Walker
An Uncanny Investment: Scott Walker’s The Collection 1967-1970
One liners
“I hear the only place you’re ever invited is outside…”
“If brains were rain you’d surely be a desert…”
“Look, don’t go to a mind reader. Go to a palmist. I know you’ve got a Palm…”
“Does your face hurt? Cause it’s killing me…”
There is a contemporary hip hop groove to the one liner section of ‘SDSS14+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)’ in which Walker delivers offensive jokes in a rather ‘angry tone’. This groove under his single breath delivery is something akin to arena drums; a kit doused in slap back. Where one might expect applause, laughter, or even a boo there is instead anechoic silence. For me this is the ultimate mic drop. I have a friend from Eastern Europe who told me years ago that she “doesn’t believe in awkward silence”. I wasn’t sure what she meant then, but now I think I understand that she meant all silence has meaning. This type of humour isn’t gallows humour, and there isn’t some historical credit to go along with it. They are simply mean and angry one liners that hit like ‘your mom’ jokes. They’re dumb, and they’re coming from an old man. There is nothing intellectual about this passage, which is why I absolutely love it. I might even be inspired by it. Consider the following piece: the music is something like Mahler’s Symphony Number 5, while I sing the following phrase slowly, deliberately, and through a slight delay:
“Poof. Be gone
Your breath is really strong
I mean no wait, come back
I’ve got a tic tac
Not one, not two, but you can have three
Don’t worry about the money, this pack is on me”
Halo On The Inside by Circuit des Yeux is out now via Matador
