Karen Schoemer Remembers ‘August’
How she and her friends created a sweet, strange war between sound and word
Exotic music, beautifully done, is an act of faith, an investment in hope.
When someone takes the time to conceptualize and create some strange magic, and when we take the time to listen to it, these acts seem to say, “Grace and thought are worthwhile. Still.”
Don’t just listen to August, the very small and very big and totally engaging new album by Karen Schoemer, because it is a conceptually fascinating and thought-provoking work based around the instrument of the spoken voice, measured, armed, defensive, offensive. Listen to August because it is a wonderful album to listen to, with or without being swept up by its terrific strangeness. Karen Schoemer has created a work of exotic and compelling depth, a band in the palm of your hand.
Schoemer is a polymath; a terribly interesting thinker, writer, journalist, artist and all sorts of things, and a mainstay of the Hudson Valley words/art/music scene. Relatively recently, Schoemer created a book of poems called August, which was filled with words/images/ideas/cut-ups, one for each day of the month, and all a (partial) homage to the poems and photographs of Bernadette Mayer (it feels insufficient to call August a book — it’s really a readable artwork, a feast of language’s shadow).
August — the book — has the effect of being a very aesthetically engaging representation of how the mind actually works, as we take in 880 things at once, and attempt to delineate what may be beautiful and important, but are constantly distracted by the mundane, the funny and the tragic. (The book is like an MRI of memory itself, as it tries to distinguish heartbreak from shopping lists from childhood memories that may or may not be relevant to who you love and what you buy at Trader Joes.)
Next, Schoemer, with the help of a fascinating roster of avant and indie rock spelunkers and astronomers (including Mike Watt, Amy Rigby, Steve Almaas, Zak Boerger, Eric Hardiman, Parashi, Wednesday Knudsen, Madeline Darby & Body Memory, etc.), created an album of 31 tracks based on her book of poems. Now, all of this backstory is wonderful, but I really don’t think you have to know this stuff in order to appreciate what an extraordinary piece of work August (the album) is.
After all, if a joke needs to be explained, it’s not really funny, and if a piece of music requires a backstory to enjoy it, it’s probably not worth more than one or two listens…and that is defiantly not the case with Karen Schoemer and August.
Frankly, I am less interested in the concept — as valid and even remarkable as it may be — than I am with the effect, which is, above and beyond anything else, musical (just because the singer speaks, that doesn’t make their music spoken word — ask everyone from Mark E. Smith to Leonard Cohen). August adamantly confirms that breathe and syllable, the rhythm and anti-rhythm of human thought, the sometimes purposeful, sometimes pointless diary of our homunculus, is as musical as any instrument.
The accompaniment around Schoemer is a landscape of dusk and dust, chime and churn, strangeness and charm, the kind of exquisitely quiet music that feels terribly loud. It also has great variety; I especially like Eric Hardiman’s contributions — half Michael Rother, half coffee-shop-volume Sunn O))) — and I was especially moved by (the track) “August 14,” where Oli Heffernan provides a gorgeous, almost Durutti Column-esque feather-chime melody.
As (truly) varied as the music is (on “August 4,” Amy Rigby summons a Feelies-via-third album Velvets vibe; “August 7” is built around Parashi’s relatively straightforward banjo; and Madeline Darby & Body Memory’s contribution to “August 3,” “August 6” and “August 10” are matchbook-sized Delia Derbyshire), the effect and impact of the record as a whole is damn consistent.
This is very much an album, a piece that merits being heard in full. And once you do, you will be invited to lose yourself in a landscape of text and sounds that is delicate, fierce, strange, magical, enchanting, aggravating; it is sometimes the sound of breath and sometimes the sound of the fear of death; it is sometimes lust, sometimes the emotional wreckage of lust’s results; it is the simplicity of love and the complication of love; it is the crossed wires of joy and terror, shame and pride; it is pop and the fear of pop. Much like the book of poems that inspired it, August has the feel of a notebook, a miracle masquerading as a casual object or work in progress.
The book is strange and gorgeous, as wondrous to look at as it is to decipher and read, art and language and images and texts slashed and scarred and laid out with love imitating chaos and chaos imitating care; and the album is a perfect complement for the book (and vice versa), it is a sweet and strange war between sound and word.
At the center of all this, Karen Schoemer listens. She listens to life, she listens to the acres of space between words and ideas, and she listens to the musicians she has brought into her orbit who listen to her. And as much as she listens, she also has the fearlessness of someone who refuses to listen. And that is the backbone of this unique and wonderful album: Lack of rules, in the service of making us think about the strange and deep poetry of our everyday experience. August draws frames around everyday experience and the skin-popping puff of goose bumps, anticipation, regret, memories recalled and memories forgotten and memories conjured; Schoemer then takes all this and hangs it on a wall.
Now, admittedly — and this is a good thing, in my opinion — Schoemer does sometimes sound a bit like a Sunday morning NPR commentator, albeit one who narrates the mundane and the tragic and the tragically mundane and is on a voyage to sort shame and wonder. And I’ll take that: When you wed all that to these dust-bunnies of art rock and slocore (think of the spaces between spaces of your favorite krautrock records, or maybe funeral parlor music if it was made by Savage Republic or Mission of Burma), and do it very well, the effect is extraordinary.
Ever since I saw Young Marble Giants perform way back when I was still in my teens, I’ve had a very expansive idea of “what” rock and roll “is” — and that idea absolutely and utterly includes swabs and swatches of sound, wrapped around an idea (and not necessarily a drum kit), feather and wire and space…
Which is all to say, August feels very much like my kind of rock and roll record: It punches, it whispers, it asks questions, it draws pictures in memories real and presumed, it has origins in Dusseldorf and Dothan, Memphis and Mount Tremper, it’s Sunday morning staring at ceiling fans in the coffee spoon and Saturday night staring a pierogis in the East Village. Luxurious and extreme, the mad and mundane diary that is August will demand that you call it a mirror, in which you will see what you know about yourself, what you don’t know about yourself, what makes you curious, what makes you terrified.
AUDIO: Karen Schoemer August (full album)
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