6. Storm & StressUnder Thunder And Fluorescent Lights
Storm & Stress takes starkness to a level that completely obliterates any form of logic. This album came along when I was alone taking ecstasy, listening to a lot of free jazz; ‘Astral Travelling’ by Pharoah Sanders, John Coltrane; ‘space jazz’, you know? A lot of kids my age got into that music through Sonic Youth and Thurston Moore talking about it, but I got into it through Stereolab. Thurston Moore sort of puts this certain list of records on people, and I didn’t really like some of the same stuff, and I had my own ideas about what I enjoyed out of experimental jazz.
The only reason I bought this record was because it was a clear record and came in a clear bag – plus Storm & Stress to me sounded like ‘sound and fury’. I bought it for its aesthetic. So then I remember putting it on, and it was the middle of the hottest summer I can remember. All the windows in my house were open, I was all alone. And I lay down on my own, and rolled really hard. I never took ecstasy with other people, but it was easier to find than mushrooms. I haven’t done drugs in over a decade now, too… but the point is, I’d never had such a wild experience just listening to a record!
I don’t really know what to say about it… I now know Ian Williams [Storm & Stress, Don Caballero and Battles guitarist] very well, and I’ve met Kevin Shea [Storm & Stress drummer] too and we’ve done shows together. To make a long story short, I don’t really know what they were going for. Is it supposed to be a joke? Because a lot of times the record’s almost like ‘fake avant-garde’, sort of like a satire or something. All I can tell you is, sometimes these things come along in life that are for whatever reason incredibly important artistically or personally to you, and you can’t explain why. It might be the shade of a lipstick, or a photo of a snail on a beach, or that shot in Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood where the apples fall off the truck and the horses eat them on the beach. Just unexplained beauty.
