“Snakes, why’d it have to be snakes?”
We all know that one. So, how about Mattie Ross? Having just dispatched her father’s killer, our heroine stumbles backwards into an old mining pit, landing next to a long-dead frontiersman. As if that ain’t bad enough, her foot is all caught up in a tangle. Searching for a way to free herself, she accidentally uncovers a nest of slumbering rattlers who’ve made cozy in the desiccated chest of her newfound corpsey compatriot. They menace and bite. An arm is lost. Snakes, you see, are scary, sinister, villainous – sinful. Or that’s the easy contention of Western pop culture, rooted in religion and superstition and the fact that snakes can be, well, super dangerous. I could have picked any one from among a seemingly infinite array of examples. But I watched True Grit yesterday, so there you go.
In the folkloric sphere, however, our legless reptilian friends are less one note, more fully realised. Cracking into my battered copy of Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, I see all manner of snakey goings on, from the dastardly to the altruistic to the downright heroic. Snakes, it seems, contain multitudes.
Raphael Rogiński gets it. The composer-guitarist’s sublime new LP, Žaltys, takes its name from the Lithuanian word for the common grass snake. The way Baltic folklore tells it, žaltys seems pretty alright: it’s a sacred animal, a household spirit beloved by the sun goddess Saulė, a symbol of fertility and a harbinger of good fortune to be milk-fed and esteemed. Then there’s the old saying, “To kill žaltys is to kill your happiness.” As far as snakes go, it’s a real one.
Truthfully, Rogiński couldn’t have picked a better avatar for his work here, which resembles folk music more than anything else. His playing is lithe, his touch light but powerful. The uncluttered compositions are elegant but not without a certain wildness – an old, untouchedness – slithering from brambled undergrowth to sun-dappled clearing, and often playing out like light dancing on inky green scales.
There is a sense of homecoming in all of it, too. A musical one, anyway. As the presser spins it, Rogiński spent formative seasons in Poland very near the Lithuanian border, where he bought his first electric guitar, and where he’d conjure soundscapes, alone but for his four-track, out in the forested countryside. Žaltys sounds and feels connected to that sort of moment. Though recorded in not too dissimilar a fashion from your average record, you can imagine Rogiński posted up in a field of high grass or a wooded copse, inspired, recording these numbers in situ. More than that, you can imagine Rogiński as a kind of folk hero, wrestling these songs up from the earth, pulling them down from the sky. The songs having always existed, waiting.
Which, I suppose, is a quality of all good folk music. Despite its relative newness or oldness, its traditional qualities or innovation (and this is an innovative record – Rogiński and Piotr Zabrodzki created something he describes as a “guitar piano” for the purpose of its recording), a good folk song should feel like it’s been played or sung for countless generations, its origins murky, full of contradictory detail. The wilderness it inhabits both ancient and unkempt, overgrown and unruly. Though named for marsh rosemary, here ‘Pelkinis Gailis’, with its prickly tone, could be a gnarled hedgerow, thorny, having long overwhelmed whatever path it once ran alongside. Haunting yet beautiful, ‘Šilinis Viržis’ might be a treasured memory sung softly into an ageless stone so as not to be forgotten. In my head, in this wilderness, in these songs, time stretches so far in either direction that it ceases to have much meaning, unfurling instead in an endless present. This wilderness has never heard of 5G, nor would it want to.
Speaking of, when was the last time you lost your cell signal? Spent hours or days without 5G, 3G, or even LTE? Where I live, I’d need to drive between five and ten hours to find blessed relief, a spot untouched by connectivity. Because, the thing of it is, for me anyhow, being released from the tether of my smart phone is a rare thing, something like the ultimate luxury. Initially, there’s a certain anxiety. You know, “If my car breaks down here, we are so screwed.” But after a little while, the omnipresent false urgency that permeates almost every second of every cursed, hyperconnected day recedes. And it feels absolutely brilliant. It’s as if time slows down as you properly inhabit a moment. I know this is a bit of a digression, but it’s not without relevance. You see, I think folk music done right does almost the same thing. It is a bane of false urgency, and I think that, in part, is why more and more people have been gravitating toward it.
For me, folk music, regardless of where it’s from, is about being a part of something bigger than yourself, something older, and creating something new within it, pushing forward. It is community music, made communally, that requires real, meaningful connections with real people in real spaces. Stuff like this, it makes your forty-seven Slack notifications seem trivial. But more than just a way to escape, this is music that at its best – and that would include Rogiński – can carve out spaces that exist in opposition to our behemoth Now.
And like žaltys, folk music is adaptable and nimble in its way, it can shed skin after skin and emerge the same but renewed, the same but changed. Take Rogiński, for instance: though his work is deeply inspired by Eastern European folk music, it would, perhaps, be wrong to describe him as a folk musician, strictly speaking. Or even to describe the music he makes as strictly folk. Much like Ben Chasny – an artist with whom I think Rogiński shares an affinity – he is more likely than not to be described as experimental, but also like Chasny, it would be equally wrong to say he is specifically not a folk musician, or to say that the music he makes is specifically not folk music. It is an extension of it, an outgrowth of it, an adaptation of it. Rogiński and people like him are evidence of folk music breathing. It’s a beautiful thing to hear.
Referenced artists
Ben Chasny
Six Organs Of Admittance’s Ben Chasny On Stargazing
It seems like Rogiński has the potential to become one of those dudes that, no matter how stellar his current output, is always mentioned in tandem with one of his older, landmark works. In fact, news of the upcoming reissue of Rogiński’s closes out the Bandcamp description of Žaltys! No matter how great that earlier work is (and it is great), I won’t give its title here – you can Google it. Žaltys deserves to be free of that baggage. It deserves better than that. More than just a stopgap until the new edition of the old (but great) record comes out, this is a landmark album in and of itself. Mostly wordless poetry of the highest order, this is an LP that, in its wanderings, comes near as anything I’ve heard to expressing something of the ineffable all around us.
Truth be told, I’ve never really been a snake guy. Žaltys has me rethinking that. Harbinger of good fortune indeed.
