
MIEN – Evil People
If you don’t laugh, you’ll just cry. And if you can’t laugh, you must at least try to be entertained by the world around you. It won’t work at first, sure, unless you’re some kind of maniac who gets off on pain, suffering, and terrible deeds. But with enough influence from media and friends, you may come to look upon everything as normal, even interesting.
Movies and books about murderers are more prevalent than ever before. In fact, these are a genre in themselves. You can always pick up a nice biography of some ruthless dictator while you are waiting for your flight. And if you watch the news and don’t get hung up on some routine atrocity presented there, you’ve achieved a higher state of bliss than most.
MIEN’s “Evil People” is a marvellously, perversely catchy psychedelic-rock song that feels like the soundtrack to joining a dangerous cult. There’s both humour and malice here. But what really makes the song tick is the evil energy that propels the musical ideas. It all ends up sounding like some car chase over a barren land where bullets don’t hurt, and nobody ever really crashes into a wall.
E.W. Harris – Accidents Repeating
Why are new and new Lit students and hipsters so obsessed with James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon? Because they’re too smart for a good conspiracy theory and unable to ignore it completely. Joyce was right when he claimed that he’d discovered a way to achieve literary immortality – create a novel (or two) so dense with hints and hidden meanings that people would have to pour over forever to try and fail to understand it.
The very same thing goes for popular music. With so little left to reveal about any of your favourite artists, people are just dying for a bit of mystery. Why, there used to be all kinds of legends circulating about what rockstars might be doing in their free time. There used to be all sorts of incidents of them behaving outrageously on stage. What do you get now? An endless Twitter feed. The artists are captive and forced to photograph their breakfast every morning so that we know they’re still working for us.
If you can, activate your paranoid side of the brain for a moment. You may need. But you keep your ears open as well. E.W. Harris is a fascinating, intelligent man who may or may not be working on starting a doomsday cult. But the main reason we feature him here today is that “Accidents Repeating” sounds amazingly good.
Obsessed with musical details and strange instrumentation, as well as with creating a strange universe of myths, lies and half-truths, E.W. Harris has created something fascinating. It may take you years to figure out what it’s all about, but you’ll have something nice to whistle along to while you do.