Pictures of Frozen Water

An Interview With Sam James Hill
by Isabel Lockhart Smith

I think the EP’s title, ‘Pictures of Frozen Water’, is brilliant. How does it relate to the songs? Could we see the songs as the ‘pictures’?

I hope they are pictures. I don’t go overboard on lyrical content in my songs, but I like them to have themes and I like to focus on what I was going into writing it. Because my music is based a lot on repetition, the idea of capturing motives, feelings and ideas and rethinking them is something I’m fond of.

Your music is constituted of many superimposed levels. Do you have a particular process of composition, or does each song materialise in a different way to the last?

I write the phrases of a song before I write the song. Usually those emerge by accident when I’m playing around with effects or rhythms or looping things in different moods and then I ram them into ways or working into each other, or build them on and on each other. Sometimes it was difficult trying to take the phrases apart in the studio to record them. Sorry, did I type studio? I meant tiny cupboard under the stairs.

The sound is really clean, despite these many levels. Has the EP been a long time in the making?

22 YEARS IN THE MAKING!! Well, about nine months. I’m very happy with how it sounds- Alex Carson (Barefeet Records/Musician/piano teacher/social butterfly) did a great job. We did it all in bedrooms with basic equipment, but he’s got a lot of recording knowledge and a good musical ear and had some great ideas. We had to do it slowly- we both had erratic amounts of time, and I was terribly annoying and kept changing the songs I wanted on the record, writing new ones or changing the ones I already had.

Having seen you live quite a few times in the past year, I was wondering whether your songs underwent any significant changes in the transition between performance and recorded material?

We tried to keep things as close as possible to how they were played live, but it did give us leeway to make some subtle changes and some crazier-than-Mariah-Carey stuff. We affected my voice quite a lot to give it a bit of a choral, odd timed feel and thickened out some of the bits I can’t do live- drums, effects. Even when Lydia Walker (from Tawny Owl and the Birds of Prey) is around to play bass live, everything is limited to what the drum machine or loop pedal can do at the time, so it’s nice to expand outside those restrictions. However, we tried to stay within the realms of what could be realistically done, just because that’s how I work out stuff. That said, there is one song- the title track- that’s fully created on a laptop using re-samples of the other tracks- specifically Reminiscence- and shares some of the same lyrics, but can’t really be played live without pressing play on a laptop. It’s meant to be a hazy looking back at looking back, or summit.

Do you find certain themes reappear in your lyrics?

Memories, parties, people, books, pie, cheap poetry, things I studied in my degree, other music, feeling guilty for no apparent reason.

So are lyrics important to you? Or does the music always come first?

My lyrics are vague and not great, but I know what I mean and they’re important to me writing a song.

Who or what influences you?

Soundtracks that change the tone of a film. It’s a really odd sensation when you hear different to what you see.

Van Der Graff Generator (the band, not the electric equipment).

Jon Martyn - he played folk guitar music through a rack-mounted delay system in the 70’s and it sounded rad. I remember catching video of him late night on tv and it was amazing.

I like Mogwai, Four Tet and The Books.

The modern music scene loves to impose genres, subgenres and movements. Please, if you can, define your music for us. A safe little sound bite will do nicely.

Experimental folk(tronic) post-rock?

Perfect.

You quite deftly reconcile the mandolin with the loop pedal. Is it fair to say that you are interested in incorporating ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of music-making? And if so, what do you think is achieved by this?

I’m not sure. I think any and all music that is created today is a reconciliation of old and new. Anyone who cites a previous musician as an influence or had a teacher is incorporating something that has been done before with something else.

Finally, Norwich is in the running for UK ‘City of Culture’. Any other Norwich artists, musical and non-musical, you want to plug (in a bid to up the East Anglian cultural ante)?

Rory McVicar
Space Metaliser
Milly Hirst
Bearsuit (New album soon!)
Lady Panther
Mat Riviere
Follow Your Heart
The Middle Ones
Alex Carson
Tawny Owl and the Birds of Prey (although this is a cheat, as I am a Bird of Prey)
Royal McBee
Horses Brawl
Alto 45 (Album soon!)
Fever Fever
Transept
Alloy Ark
Shane Olinski
King Laconic (new EP soon!)

Sometimes I just have a gander at NUCA’s exhibits and realise exactly how good the art is there.
Ditto with UEA’s creative writing students.
Poetry by Adam Warne is pretty sweet. Also, Sam Riviere and Jack Underwood have Faber and Faber poetry pamphlets published, as well as both being in brilliant bands.

The UK’s only music video festival (28th June – 10th July).

If that’s not good enough for a city of culture then I don’t know what is. Although I think the likelihood of Norwich becoming said city is very unlikely. Be nice though, wouldn’t it?
--




Review of Sam James Hill's Pictures of Frozen Water
by Joshua Jones

Norwich-based musician Sam James Hill’s debut EP, Pictures of Frozen Water, is damn near perfect. Which is not to be hyperbolic – it is flawed in parts, though minorly; and these small flaws only serve to heighten the EP’s charm and promise. In short, it is 25 minutes of icily beautiful pop music.

It is the kind of music that is a pleasure to describe. Its influences are many, all apparent enough and somehow all capitalised on, and, to an extent at least, transcended. It brings to mind, often all at once, The Postal Service and The Notwist, Ulrich Schnauss’s A strangely isolated place, Loveless’s less guitar-heavy tracks, Patrick Wolf circa Lycanthropy, The Age of Rockets, Fennesz, Four Tet...the list could go on. While he isn’t necessarily doing anything radically different from bands like the above, Hill has managed to incorporate his influences astutely and to create something of his own, cherrypicking some of their best features and filtering them through his own sound without ever coming off as redolent.

One of the reasons it works so well, one of the reasons I perhaps misleadingly termed it perfect, is that it really should be taken as a whole. It is meticulously sequenced, each track segueing completely naturally into the next, furthering the sound, exploring itself from within itself, from the base of a very assured and complete palette. All the pieces matter, and it is well aware of how best to serve each individual piece. So I should rephrase myself: it is a perfect example and a perfect rendition of what it is and what it wants to be.

The only organic instruments I can detect are mandolin and bass, both effected wonderfully, never losing any of their human qualities amid the bed of electronics. Actually, bed is probably the wrong word to use here – the electronic element of the EP is its soil, the wash of sound from which the looping mandolin and bass parts expand and thrive, interlacing and growing over the course of the individual songs but never leaving or losing the core. The vocals hang and dissolve and return over and under everything, lyrics less important than the tone. The various riffs and phrases loop and circle, changed by superimposition but still there.

‘Reminiscence’ is my favourite track, at least for the moment. It is the longest of the six, and seems to embody everything that the EP is doing. It opens with echoing rimshots and what sounds like Orb-esque electronic keys, slowly growing, vocals washed out as if coming from somewhere other, filtering from channel to channel in search of whatever or whoever it was that prompted the statement “Some things change.” There is a bridge of sorts; for just a few seconds one wonders where the song is going to go next, as if after all this build up it’ll simply return to where it was, until all of a sudden it begins to swell, distorted mandolin burning its way through the production as the vocals dissolve into swathes of sound, only to eventually, at the end of the song, when everything has winded down, play unadulterated on their own for just a few seconds. It is a fleeting, masterful piece of production, the perfect resolution to all the song’s circular searching, returning to a source that wasn’t overtly there in the first place, sounding like a beginning as much as an end.

The rest of the tracks all work similarly, and none of them are weak. The first two are the most immediately striking, the two in the middle content to maintain the pace before the more condensed closing two. The only real flaw to my ears is that ‘Alfred’s Last Gasp’ speeds by too quickly, loses some of the impact it would and could have contained if it just hadn’t rushed through itself. But even that is hardly piercing criticism.

It is one of the most satisfying debut releases I’ve heard for some time, one that holds so much promise and potential for a longer work but is, at the same time, more than enough for now. A multi-faceted, multi-purpose record that deserves exposure and, especially considering its very reasonable price tag, deserves to be bought and consumed unsparingly.
--

You can purchase Pictures of Frozen Water here for just £3. It is released on lovely independent label called Bare Feet Records, which in the coming month we will be featuring, as well as reviewing some of their new records, for the simple reason that they are putting out shockingly good music that I hope we can help reach the wider audience the artists involved deserve.

Two Reviews

Donald Ray Pollock – Knockemstiff (2008)[1]

Only once I had finished Knockemstiff, and had given my stomach time to settle, did I think to consult the author’s biography at the front of the book. ‘Donald Ray Pollock,’ it states, ‘grew up in the town of Knockemstiff, Ohio.’ This came as something of a revelation; up until this point I had simply assumed that the title was Pollock’s own creation. It then took the accumulated gravitas of Wikipedia and Google Maps to persuade me of Knockemstiff’s actual, physical existence. Knockemstiff, it turns out, amounts to a small cluster of buildings in rural Ohio, situated just to the west and a bit below Chillicothe in the south of the state. Look it up, it’s a real place.

The people and events, however, are completely fictional – if Pollock’s disclaimers are to be believed. And for this we are to be thankful. The stories in Knockemstiff span the second half of the 20th century, and their sole concern is with the deviant, the stinky, and, more often than not, the criminal lives of the characters who inhabit the ‘holler’. It is a gargantuan puddle of vomit, whose regurgitated chunks we are invited to smell. Yet Pollock’s lean, understated prose gives the book a wry humour, undermining the extremities described. ‘Dynamite Hole’, for example, opens with such matter-of-fact narration that I actually laughed, and then questioned myself for laughing. It begins: ‘I was coming down off the Mitchell Flats with three arrowheads in my pocket and a dead copperhead hung around my neck like an old woman’s scarf when I caught a boy named Truman Mackey fucking his own little sister in the Dynamite Hole.’ Aside from incest, there are also descriptions of mouldy fish finger consumption (or ‘fish stick’ consumption), plastic-doll molestation, and lots and lots of faeces.

On this evidence, it would be easy to dismiss Knockemstiff as voyeuristic rubbish, sensationalising depravation and violence, and doing nothing to dispel the myths surrounding Middle America. But Pollock’s debut plumbs far deeper than this, and to dismiss it on the grounds of revulsion would be to dismiss so much more besides. Bizarrely, these people are still recognisable as human. Despite their distortions and their grotesqueries, we feel for them and can even empathise with the patterns of their failure. As in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, the most pronounced of these failures is the inability to escape the boundaries of their small town upbringing, and the undesirable legacies which the fathers pass on to their sons. As Bobby says in ‘Pills’, ‘It didn’t matter how many miles we travelled by day, we always ended up back in the holler at night ....’ It is pathetic to witness, and the sense of claustrophobia is stifling.

This freakish world is littered with familiarities; Reese’s Butter Cups, Campbell’s soup, the original Godzilla movie ...but the characters themselves are not realistic, so far as the ‘real’ is ever achievable anyway. They are instead our exaggerated counterparts, consumed by our most shameful, heinous aspects, amplified to damning effect. In this respect, Pollock is reminiscent of the southern writer Flannery O’Connor. In Mystery and Manners, O’Connor writes that communicating to her readers is best achieved through shouting, as if ‘to the hard of hearing’, or drawing ‘large and startling figures’ as if for the blind. In the context of such grossness, the rare moments of beauty in Knockemstiff, the only viable means of ‘escape’ the characters ever experience, are doubly affecting. In ‘The Fights’, the simple observation of a deer jumping ‘effortlessly over a sagging fence’ seems almost transcendent.

The danger of regionalism is that it can set up its own limitations, in which the author breathes one massive, halitosis breath of nostalgic anecdotage, completely irrelevant to anyone living outside the county boundaries. Pollock, on the other hand, has taken the few square miles of his fictional Knockemstiff to construct a series of modern-day tragedies – both American tragedies, and tragedies in their own right.

Still, though, if I was a resident of the real Knockemstiff, I would probably take a certain degree of offence.

by Isabel Lockhart Smith
----

Kobo Abe – The Woman in the Dunes (1964)[1]

“The sands never rested. Greatly but surely they invaded and destroyed the surface of the earth...ceaseless movement that made it inhospitable...What a difference compared with the dreary way human beings clung together year in year out” (14). And off goes the protagonist, for the most part referred to simply as ‘the man’, tired of his mediocre existence as a teacher, in search of a new breed of insect. He wants to immortalise himself, sure, but the real driving force behind it is his newfound philosophy of sand, summarised above.

The Woman in the Dunes is essentially, if you’ll pardon the lazy reference, another novel very much along the lines of The Castle and The Outsider. Add to those books a sprinkle of Japanese history, the conflict between east and west, classicism versus modernisation, dull the philosophical exposition and the quality of the writing, add in a bit of rapeyness, and this is what you’ll get. It is the story of a man who is kidnapped while out exploring the sand dunes that enclose a bizarre village ever on the verge of being consumed by the sand and forced to work for them shovelling sand. If he doesn’t shovel sand they starve him. He shovels sand, he stops, he moans, he ponders existence somewhat shallowly. There is a lot of sand, and the prose, fittingly, is very dry, lacking in flourish.

The man wants to be free, live like the sand, which “represents purity, cleanliness” (27), renege any claims on fixity. Why cling to something arbitrary? Why not accept the ultimate meaninglessness of everything and let go of whatever epistemological certainties you misguidedly buy into? Things with form (structure, logocentricity) are “empty when placed beside sand” (41): “The very fact it had no form was doubtless the highest manifestation of its strength” (31). Of course, take choice away, get dumped in a hole and starved and your perceptions of things are apt to change. The man, trapped with a woman he abuses repeatedly, partly animalistically due to his confinement and partly out of disgust with her passivity, her meek acceptance of her fixed location, brushing sand arbitrarily (Sisyphus, anyone?), begins to break down. “As if he had gone mad, he began to yell – he did not know what, his words were without meaning. He simply shouted...as though he could make the bad dream come to its senses” (50-1). There we go, tick tick, the emptiness of language. As the story progresses and his escape attempt fails, he predictably comes to either appreciate the charming simplicity of his life in the village, away from all the concerns of the modern world and its equal meaninglessness, or he is crushed, a la 1984, into believing that he wants to be there. He realises that “the beauty of the sand...belonged to death” (183) and here, fighting pointlessly against it, he has a life of sorts.

In theory it is an interesting story. The problem, or one of them at least, is that the novel relies solely on the image, on the symbol. The man is characterised just enough for us to read his semi-philosophical mumblings as believable and the woman is nothing more than a signifier. The freaky village and its inhabitants, the most interesting things in the novel, are left other. To do more with them would change the point of the entire book, of course. Which would arguably have been a good thing. It lacks the depth of the big existential novels one cannot help but compare it to, and doesn’t make up for this lack stylistically. While it’s not worthless, this needlessly elongated short story/weakly extended metaphor does not warrant the kind of praise as its peers, and as such anyone who has even a passing interest in the European philosonovels of the 20th Century is liable to be unmoved.

by Joshua Jones
-----

[1] Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes, trans. E. Dale Saunders (London: Penguin, 2006)


[1] Donald Ray Pollock, Knockemstiff (London: Harvill Secker, 2008)

One story - Isabel Lockhart Smith

Here you go then people, our first prose piece is live, to be followed shortly by some new poetry. Enjoy! And remember, we encourage comments and feedback.
------------

The Cat

There were no streetlamps, and the cobbles were wet and black. Two people were walking up the hill towards the only light. The one in front made little steps, his head bowed and retracted into the hood of his coat. The other, a girl, lingered at the lift of each foot and looked around her at the shops and flats above. He kept looking over his shoulder at her, as if to check.

Green vapour smoked out from underneath a door at the end of the street. A man stood on the corner in an open-collared suit, balancing a tower of pound coins on the palm of his hand. A cat sat framed in a window to the right.

‘This must be it,’ the boy said to the girl. The doorman waved them through and told them to have a good night. It was empty inside, but an abandoned party was evident all over the tabletops in scattered nuts and puddles.

‘What can I get you?’ The woman behind the bar smiled at them. She squeaked a dishcloth around a pint glass, before putting it down to hand them a menu.

The girl ordered a Bloody Mary without the ice. The boy ordered a pint of something. There was music on the jukebox, but neither of them knew what played. The boy sipped from his glass, raising it minimally off the surface of the bar and bringing his lips to the beer rather than the beer to his lips. She watched him for a second, and then turned away to inspect a local newspaper. Her boots tapped a rhythm on the stool.

‘You have a cat?’ the boy said to the barmaid. ‘I saw it when I walked past.’

‘You’re a cat man?’

‘Afraid so.’

‘Yes, the cat comes and goes.’

‘Any idea where it might be now?’

‘Oh no. You should never go searching,’ the barmaid said.

The boy swivelled his stool around to face the girl. Her legs in pale tights were crossed at the knee, and her ankles rotated in slow, ponderous circles. Her hair was cropped, and the green light illuminated a slight fuzz on the back of her neck. The bulb was just above her head. She licked a bubble of tomato juice from the corner of her mouth, and he reached out to touch her arm. She stepped down from the stool and said she needed to go to the ladies.

The barmaid directed the girl to the stairwell which led into the next room, but she paused for a second to trace the outline of a photograph on the wall.

‘You two live nearby?’ the barmaid said, once the girl had left the room.

‘No, I’m from London. She’s from here I think. I’m not sure. She never mentioned it.’ He laughed and blinked. His every movement was fragmented, as if seen through strobe lighting.

‘It’s the end here isn’t it?’ he said. ‘There’s nowhere beyond this city to get to. You sort of have to want to come.’

‘Yes, everyone says that.’

‘But I like it.

‘Really?

‘I like her, anyhow. And I think that makes me like a lot of things I might not like otherwise.’

The barmaid paused, and bent down below the bar to retrieve a teaspoon. ‘You might want to watch that,’ she said.

In the silence that followed, he became aware of the cat. It was sitting inside the dumb waiter, dragging its foot from the top of its ear to the tip of its nose, over and over again. The barmaid made no attempt to remove it. It was white, with tabby patches on its back and tail. Its eyes dilated to black when it noticed the boy, and its whiskers flickered like fibre optic tubes.

‘You’re okay with it being there?’ he asked the barmaid.

‘Oh yes.’

The girl re-emerged from the stairwell, filing her nails as she walked. Once at the bar, she drank the rest of her Bloody Mary and ordered another. Her nail file moved back and forth in flashes of white as she alternated the rhythm, syncopating it with the music in the juke box. ‘I think I’m going to go and sit next door,’ she said at last. ‘They have a piano.’ She pocketed the nail file and moved towards the stairwell for a second time. The boy went after her, extending a hand to the cat on his way past. It waved its tail and licked a paw, arching its neck away from his fingers.

‘Hello!’ he said, peering over the bar, ‘I used to have a cat that looked like you.’

‘But it died?’ the barmaid said, polishing another beer glass.

‘No – ran away.’

‘Ah.’

‘I’ve wanted another one ever since. My girlfriend, my old girlfriend, said that I wasn’t allowed to have a cat as well as having her. A concession too far, she thought.’

‘Cats are never had, as such.’ the barmaid said.

The noise of a piano could be heard in the other room. The playing was amateur, but not tentative. At a wrong note, the pianist segued into a different key, stepping from song to song in an unpredictable trail.

‘I better go,’ the boy said, nodding towards the sound of the piano. He took a final glance at the cat.


The girl’s fingernails tapped on the ivory as she moved up and down the length of the piano. The boy stood behind her, hesitating with a hand above her left shoulder, the space between them compressed beneath the weight of his arm. But his hand remained suspended. He could hear her breathing. A group of people passed by outside, sweeping through drifts of leaves, and their voices muffled against the window pane.

The girl reached a suitable cadence, ended, and slammed the lid shut. She stood up, and her shoulder hit the boy’s hand. He jumped backwards as she pivoted around and banged into his chest.

‘God – what do you think you’re doing?’ she said. Her cheeks were turning a light pink.

He apologised and tried to lead her into one of the nearby chairs, holding her by the wrist.

‘And let go of my wrist!’

‘Sorry, sorry. I’m really sorry. I was just watching you play.’

‘Don’t.’

‘You play very well.’

‘I enjoy it, but I know that I don’t play well.’

‘I meant it.’

‘People say things.’ She checked the time on her wristwatch. ‘I should go soon.’

‘Look!’ the boy said, pointing at one of the birdcages hanging from the ceiling, ‘I hadn’t noticed.’

‘Yes, I saw them.’

‘I think they’re nice.’

‘Really?’

‘Stay for a bit longer.’

She stayed, but chose to sit on the floor instead of next to him. She curled her toes and produced the nail file again. The cat appeared from the other room, dragging the velvet curtain behind it as it passed through the intersection. It jumped onto the ledge behind the seating, against the wall, and came to within an inch of the boy’s head, and he turned to face it. He grinned, rolled up his sleeves, and leant forward. He clasped the cat around its waist, and the distance between his thumb and forefinger spanned the distance from the cat’s spine to the bottom of its stomach. He pulled it onto his lap.

‘Hey, no.’ he said. ‘Stay put.’

The barmaid appeared at the curtain just as the cat wriggled free and went to sit on top of the piano. The boy was in a hurry to roll his sleeve back into place.

But the girl saw. ‘It scratched you! Let’s see!’ she said, crawling on her knees to where he sat.

It was tiny like a paper cut, but a dash of red was becoming visible from beneath his forearm hair. The barmaid came over and apologised, saying how the cat was quite particular, and that it never meant to hurt anyone. The cat began to clean its nose.

‘I’ll get some anti-septic,’ the barmaid said. ‘Just in case.’

While she was gone, the girl held his forearm up to her face and looked deep into the cut. They didn’t say anything to each other. After five minutes of waiting, the girl took her wallet out of her bag and laid it on the table.

‘I promise, this will be a much quicker way.’

‘What?’ he said.

She was searching for something.

‘Here.’ She held a sewing needle up to the candle. ‘My mother taught me this.’

‘Wait. I’m sure she’ll be back.’

‘No, she left a long time ago.’ Her eyelashes caused a shadow of tiger stripes to flicker on her cheek. She injected the needle into the centre of the candle flame. ‘This will make it clean.’

She removed the needle from the flame and bent close over his arm.

‘No,’ he said, and then: “Actually, that hurts.”

She lifted her face to his face and saw that his eyes were watering.

‘Stop it,’ he said.

Her green eyes creased into a smile.
---------

Isabel Lockhart Smith studies American Literature with Creative Writing at UEA. Sometimes her writing tries too hard to sound Pacific Northwest. She is actually from Somerset.