I finally ordered this -
Once, in a time that may have been in the not-so-distant past, the President of the United States was an erstwhile celebrity who stoked the fires of racism and xenophobia under the guise of populism. Inequality was at an all-time high, as was suspicion toward the poor, the sick and the oppressed. Corporations were given massive tax cuts while immigrants and single mothers were blamed for everything wrong with society. The Russians were constantly in the news.
The decade was the 1980s, and the president was Ronald Reagan. It was in this uncannily relatable political and social climate that the visionary novelist and poet Ursula K Le Guin invented the people known as the Kesh. I didn’t know it at the time, but I spent the last day of Le Guin’s life (she died on 22 January aged 88) listening to their strange, wonderful music in a language she created for them.
“The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California,” writes Le Guin in the opening sentence of her book about the Kesh,
Always Coming Home. Inspired in part by her father, who was an anthropologist, Le Guin’s pseudo-ethnographic study is not a novel in the traditional sense, but a collection of the myths, poems and prose of an invented group of people. Through the story of a woman named Stone Telling, we learn that the Kesh live in a world laced with the remnants of a highly technological society, but prefer face to face interaction over network mediated communication. They don’t shun technology completely, but they aren’t seduced by the patriarchal war machine or the consumptive engine of novelty and obsolescence either.
“As I understand it, Always Coming Home was a response to post-apocalyptic dystopian ideas presented in films and novels of the time,” says Le Guin’s longtime friend and fellow writer Moe Bowstern.
“I see in it an answer to the question of what might happen and how we as a species might survive and thrive in an aftermath. We are, in this century, experiencing quite terrible consequences to the global ideology of growth-dependent wealth. Always Coming Home says that wealth lies in our relationships, not in our production capacity or our accumulation of resource-chomping imaginary riches.”
After spending a year concocting the customs and culture of the Kesh, Le Guin found herself wanting to hear their music too, so she reached out to Todd Barton, a composer with whom she had previously collaborated on some public radio projects. Together they created Music And Poetry Of The Kesh, a cassette featuring 42 minutes of original music that was released with certain editions of Always Coming Home when it was first published in 1985.
The sonic world inhabited by the Kesh was composed and recorded in stages, with Barton and Le Guin travelling back and forth between Barton’s studio in Ashland, Oregon, and Le Guin’s home in Portland. Some instruments were built by hand; others, like the horn on “Heron Dance”, (known to the Kesh as a houmbuta), were synthesized on Barton’s Roland Jupiter-8. Meanwhile, Le Guin didn’t just compose texts for the songs and poems – she devised an entire language for them and read the poems in her own voice (Barton used tape manipulation to make her sound like different people). Additional vocals were performed by musicians from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Barton may be heard singing the melody on the lullaby “Lahela”.
A lush tapestry of field recordings were collected at the family homestead in California’s Napa Valley where Le Guin spent her summers as a child – a location that directly inspired the book. “I would get up at 4am and sit in a meadow to record two hours of the evolving sounds of dawn,” remembers Barton of the five days the pair spent in Napa. The result is a sound steeped in specificity; music made not just to accompany a particular landscape but embody it.
Despite the great care that went into crafting Music And Poetry Of The Kesh, the cassette has been largely overlooked for most of its history. Many readers seem to have treated it like an unnecessary extra and let it gather dust on the shelf.
“It’s work which is underappreciated both in the context of Le Guin’s greater career and, more generally, in the world of avant garde music,” says Portland musician Spencer Doran, who discovered the project through Barton’s 1986 self-released LP Pieces, which featured its songs on the B side. “It weaves together various fields – anthropology, fiction, ethnographic recordings, electronic experiments – into a form that picks apart the conventions of all of them to arrive at a unique synthesis.”
Thanks to Freedom To Spend, the sublabel of RVNG Intl overseen by Pete Swanson and Jed Bindeman, Music And Poetry Of The Kesh is finally getting the recognition it deserves. Its first vinyl release comes out this month, featuring sleevenotes penned by Moe Bowstern and illustrations by Margaret Chodos.
Today, the themes of this work are as relevant as ever. “I read Always Coming Home in 1992 when I was 25 years old, working as a commercial fishing deckhand in Kodiak, Alaska,” recalls Bowstern. “The book was hugely inspiring to me as a young artist who was committing to a life of migrant labour as a way to fund creative work. In rereading it, I find it remains a profound way to examine life in community.” A statement from Barton quoted in Bowstern’s sleevenotes perfectly summarises this role of music in societies, both real and imaginary: “It is the glue. It permeates everything.” Music And Poetry Of The Kesh is released by Freedom To Spend Emily Pothast (Wire magazine)
Ursula K. Le Guin & Todd Barton - Long Singing
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