I know a girl who once listened to Van Morrison’s “Ballerina” on a loop for almost six hours, and I haven’t been able to shake it since. We really ought to envy the ones who give themselves to music like this. Bring on the scoffs, but maximalism has won for a reason: most contemporary listeners (myself included) look for art hoping it’ll nick their brain as it goes whizzing by, and only measured/impossible consumer restraint can humble like the good times. Dominance vs. submission and all that. This is why Daniel Johnston, for instance, is nestled in such a curious and old-fashioned corner of the canon: it’s not really sonic or even lyrical, but what he does to his devotees. His is a voice that pleads you to live inside of it. Mr. Young being a more pervasive analogue, I wager that, for at least one out of five TMT writers, voice spontaneously stirs something inside them, even before words or melody register. I bring all this up not just because Dust From 1000 Years nucleus Ben Rector (I respectfully decline to call him by his stage name “Totally Bone”) has pipes that fall somewhere in between those two legends, but because the whole act, as an axiom, trusts the listener not to swiftly conquer it. It’s anachronistic in a way, but if you’re like me, there’s a piece of you that will stop you in your tracks.
We can thank Moon Jaw for making that possible, for hoisting the amorphous Bloomington group out of the houndblog depths after five years and approximately as many homemade releases on barely-label So Hard Young Boy. Marble Memo is their first distributed album, following a year without any releases, and it involves itself in explaining what Rector’s been up to for that year. If you’ll permit me a goulash:
“I eat when I can, I eat when I can/ I care more about food than I care about man”; “I keep the curtains closed and stay inside my room”; “I’m gonna nap my life away/ Lay around and feel my fingernails grow”; “there’s not that much left of me”; “I’m living in a thin reality”; “It’s time for the world to fear how I live.”
So we’re talking, essentially, a concept album about weeks or even months of lethargy and agoraphobia, lyrics so straightforward that they pass some upper limit and boomerang back when isolated amongst tape hiss and the lullabye arpeggios of ukes and toy pianos.
The passage of time here is frightening and beautiful, especially for an album barely over a half an hour, and it’s all bound up in the classically lo-fi album structure: the 19 tracks feel like individually distilled one-to-two-minute ideas meticulously stitched together. The fuzzed-out (anti-)consumerism of “Silver Series” cuts neatly through the choirs of “In Dreamtime”; the noonsun slant of “Fat” pours smoothly over its emaciated inverse, the solipsistic “Thin Reality.” The remote, almost industrial loop ever-languishing behind “Scratch Until It Bleeds” could be belabored breaths, as easy to overlook as they are to obsess. Lyrics notwithstanding, the interstitial instrumentals act as an indeterminate side of the same coin, time and space unburdened by gestalt.
Like Johnston, Rector explores salvation via regression, dreams, and other fictions. On “Big Muscles,” he’s soothed that atrophy can at least approximate a state of infancy. “There’s not much sense in staying here, let’s go away,” he says in “The Love That Counts (Can Never Be Killed).” It’s borderline-romantic, arriving long after we’ve realized that he’s stuck where he is, but the reversed drums and churning guitars betray his dread. His three bandmates’ talent is their alchemy — that in coming together they produce such a decidedly personal document. Even the vocals, which ride Brockian parallel octaves all over the place, never seem to be something so communal as “harmony” — instead, they’re a choir of overlapping impulses, from high-register supplication to low-register croak. When the band does let their shit boil (“Leather Jacket”), it says a lot about what happens to Rector whenever he opens the blinds: “Fuck you and your motorcycle/ and your leather jacket too/ You look so proud to be obnoxious/ American dreams can come true,” he glowers through snarling guitars. Funny, but no joke.
The only time the album’s fractured documentary approaches gimmick is on lone-voicer “The Fighters,” which maybe pushes the “I just grabbed the tape recorder and sang” mentality too far with fewer rewards. But most of the time, you’re glad these moments have been captured so delicately. And that ends up being Marble Memo’s surprising strength: it seems like a throwback to “lo-fi,” and though that’ll be the album’s magnetism, it also oversimplifies its uniquely haunting effect. Lo-fi tradition sees space embedded, subversive, bubbling up, or ricocheting when the listener least expects it, while urgency is the central thing being communicated; Dust From 1000 Years invert this space/urgency formula. It succeeds so subtly that by the end of the half-hour it’s unbelievable how much Rector’s thin reality has absorbed — his nadir takes a piece of the listener with it, endlessly beckoning retrieval. I’ve seen this vortex before, but it’s never been so accessible, I’ve never had to articulate it, and I’ve certainly never wanted to live it. Here’s hoping Dust From 1000 Years find plenty more unwittingly perfect ears.
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