Not a review: on Geese and collages.
Why would you write a review about a song that everyone has listened to when you could have the viral egg wrap?
You could write about the unique connections we make with sounds. The epithets that resonate and linger.
Last Sunday, I was cycling home from Emily Fielding’s leaflet making workshop at the WPP Writers’ Room in Islington, with one couplet firmly lodged in my mind:
Like a sailor in a big green boat
Like a sailor in a big green coat
A line that spreads vivid brush strokes, that scratches an itch close to my soul. The cutting and pasting of one letter between the two lines is subtle genius, the simplicity of ‘big green’, the lone sailor. It’s whimsy and I don’t really know why but it’s inspiring and fills me with joy in the same way as the closing line of caroline’s IWR. A set of words likely never previously pieced together in this language, far from being overthought, they appear as if mined from a stack of magazines and placed together without thought.
Do you wake up with an old set of handlebars?
The nautical line is taken from Au Pays du Cocaine from Geese’s new album, Getting Killed. I was trying to work out what makes Geese’s Cameron Winter such a compelling writer. And I think it might be the mess, his songs take on meaning not through linear narrative, but through meandering, sometimes contradictory musings. Within each quadrat, a dense microcosm of its own. Through the patchwork, a meaning can be gleaned. But with contrasting directions/messages, the listener’s chosen link must reflect the listener them self. This, for me, touches upon the joy in art.
The same applies to the making of mosaic leaflets, a process of cutting and sticking together disparate narratives to form a chaotic whole. I giggled on that afternoon making leaflets in a breathless and giddy way, imagining the different nonsensical possibilities. Armed with tiny scissors, glue, a bucket of nouns, a spade of adjectives, French magazines, and dozens of leaflets from tourist attractions across York and the North of England, I sat in the square side room of a church in a residential square on a rainy day. I tried to include a brown leaf in my leaflet, but they were all too sodden to stick. I mined the materials without reason, in my flow/play/happy state where I don’t think about what I’m thinking. In this way, three hours flew by.
Both sides being giddy, I feel the same when listening to Long Island City Here I Come which sprinkles biblical and medieval references to Jericho, Maria and Joan of Arc upon contemporary NYC. Winter’s wail is the glue that binds these disparate reference points, the folds in the pages, the creases in our brains. My patchwork comprised poems of workers’ uprisings on the bank of the stour, a crocodile/wooden peg-amorphosis and cashmere snood critics full of beans.
Is that what listening to a Geese album is, a cut and stick scattergraph in which fragments point inwards and shards oscillate around me?
Post-edit: Upon further research, I learned sailors avoided the colour green as it was deemed to harbour bad luck at sea. Thus, a green-coated sailor can only be imagined. So it turns out that this piece’s entropic roots might be illusory. Also, my cut and stick leaflet turned out to be an already released copy of the Financial Times, so things aren’t always as they appear and maybe that’s the real beauty in art.