The wonder world visions of Keen Dreams
Live in the act with Keen Dreams; photographed by Sarah Manors.
“In my job, I speak to people who work with animals, and they, too, often give me an impression that there are different ways to exist in a body: that there are truths about any body — your body — which are not quite the same as the reality of that body's everyday life. The things I know to be true, in an abstract sense: satellite images, shots of chromosomes, hydrocarbon spreadsheets — they don't always feel real.”
— Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body
This early passage from Hildyard’s book encapsulates the inspirational spark that lent itself to the inception of Keen Dreams’ debut album, titled after its namesake. Former operator and founder of New Orleans’ beloved Euclid Records shop, James Weber Jr. became captivated by The Second Body’s notions on the extents of our influence, presence and connections to vast, prolific universal senses of pan-terrestrial phenomena. In the grand tradition of polymaths taking creative cues from authors, auteurs and the like; Weber along with fellow musicians Eric Martinez and Shana Applewhite have created one of the most anticipated and best records of 2021. In media pressers, James described the creative backstory behind this conceptual album with the following preface:
In 2018 I had just walked away from Euclid Records in New Orleans, the music store I built and operated for the better part of a decade and enrolled in graduate school for history. Broke and studying world history full time, it sounds like a million miles away from the record store, but trust me: music shops cultivate plenty of very devoted, very broke historians.
Half a mile down from my apartment the street could be read as pretty anarchic, boozin'-and-prankin', good times and a little crime. But the traffic I watched from my stoop at St. Claude and Desire just a few blocks away looked more like the secret Second Bodies of the party: an endless flow of belching tractor-trailers carrying the loot of our lives to and from the river, ragers rolling by en route to any party anywhere else, humans sheltering through the night up against the unused movie theater across the street.
Keen Dreams’ debut can be considered part of the current wave of opuses emerging from artists and auteurs that were made and perfected under quarantined conditions with a spit razor sharp focus. Recorded with Leverage Models’ Shannon Fields, D. James Goodwin, Andrew Barker, Mario Viele and more; the Gulf Coast artists James, Eric and Shana have fashioned a truly massive, all encompassing undertaking of a production. A synergy realized from the pre-lockdown era of live performances, later to be purposely perfected and delicately detailed song cycle of a towering mind and spirit expanding scale. The Second Body is an album that cleverly cloaks itself into the atmosphere and environments of your favorite 80s independent, obscure, punky, precious DIY dilettantes and debutantes of promise and other associated mythological legends of underground pop lore.
The Second Body experience arrives with the bird descending panoramic instrumental opener "Herons". It proves to be the perfect entrance track that brings the listener into the foyer of an album of epiphanies and mediations expressed in bright ambitious tones and movements of unrelenting might. "Pinks & Reds" pays tribute to your paisley underground idols while taking on a life of its own autonomous liberty like a neon electric bird ascending skyward in an eruption and blazing luster of rouge. The underachievers power pop playback comes into full aural view on the thirsty and heavy hearted "Big Gulps" that seeks to satisfy unquenchable appetites. "Ducks" serves as an electro sound off interlude between synths and brass, as "Unsubscribe" accelerates the Keen Dreams sound into a whole new echelon of delivery and power chord prowess that spares no energetic expanse.
An album truly meant to be heard, witnessed and felt more than just experienced through the approximated stilted constraints and limitations of these semantic superlatives: Keen Dreams' The Second Body concludes with the duet “Immediate Tonight” between James and Alena Spanger (of Leverage Models, Tiny Hazard) that emanates a kind of timelessness channeled through the cult pop canon that marries the group's anachronistic affinities with a contemporary artistic immediacy. The NOLA dreamers seek to seize the day with an all encompassing vision of connecting to the world and being both in the present (with one foot in the future and the other firmly in the past).
James Weber Jr. out of the blur; photographed by Sarah Manors.
We had a chance to exchange cables with Keen Dreams’ own James Weber Jr. in the following expansive discussion:
Tell us how Daisy Hildyard's book The Second Body informed and influenced the debut album of the same name.
Early in 2019 I found myself doubly attached to Dr. Jim Mokhiber, a professor of history at the University of New Orleans. He taught the undergraduate “world history” course, I was his teaching assistant, and together we tried to complexify a subject often reduced to something like a pat Western Civ or great men on horseback build temples narrative. Sticking to more inclusive themes and dwelling on contingency over unprovable claims helped keep the class honest, but required a lot of debate. We worried the lectures and readings endlessly: what works, what doesn’t, where is fairness, where can we push back against biased thought that obscures the story of real human connection?
At the same time I was enrolled in a graduate seminar that Jim taught which centered on world / global / transnational histories, a kind of historiography of the world history idea and globalization. Somewhere in the perpetual back-and-forth of articles and books, he passed me an essay by Daisy Hildyard published in the London Review of Books that meditated on the material implications of the language and agricultural policy on animal sentience. The deft manner in which Hildyard placed the personal and local in a more global context really moved me.
Well, I immediately looked Hildyard up, tracked down her book called The Second Body, and read it in a single sitting. To me The Second Body accomplishes what we’d been trying to do in the undergraduate world history course, to keep the lens of inquiry trained to the human while pursuing a much larger story. While we’re zoomed out in an attempt to apprehend the tale’s whole it’s quite easy to lose sight of the human connections, and in The Second Body Hildyard offers a way to locate the individual in our current post-global moment that asks for no academic training, includes none of the sometimes gnarly language games of the humanities, demands no thick theory—though I do love all of that stuff! I just think the book is remarkable in that its gentleness maybe hides some very heavy thought.
I’d struggled in the same way to keep the songs I was writing grounded in the personal while placing their stories and -scapes in the broader themes of my schoolwork. Academic pursuits, or reading, or personal research, reaching toward some kind of understanding, and creative work operate in consort, that is there’s no separation of the spheres for me, everything I do is . . . everything I do. So Hildyard’s The Second Body bled into the music I was making and provided a method, a grammar for the record. I dog-eared my copy of the book rather nicely! It’s got multiple bookmarks, found objects, like a Monopoly deed and a Trivial Pursuit card that has a question about the U.S.S.R., a photograph of my niece jumping out of a mini-van, a twist-tie.
Dream warriors — Keen Dreams; photographed by Eric Martinez.
Notes from the creative and collaborative approaches that gave life to The Second Body.
Shana, Eric, and I built my Keen Dreams songs up into some indie trio gazed-out rockers over a summer, and we took them to our friend Dr. Scott’s house along St. John’s Bayou where we bashed them all out into a day’s worth of demo recordings. They were good! And loud with the spirit! But ragged. And felt like a step along the way to where they needed to go, not yet the kind of big musical landscapes that I could drop the songs’ protagonists into.
Well, Shannon Fields has what they call big ears, he listens more widely and carefully than just about anyone I know and I’ve loved all the music and sounds he’s generated or shaped in the last quarter century. His projects may seem at first to diverge pretty widely, but taken together patterns and assonances develop, from the richly-textured maximalist pop of Leverage Models right through Stars Like Fleas’ attempts to cultivate magic through collective improvisation.
So I sent the demo’s up to Shannon on his farm along with an email and a star-chart of musical influences I’d sketched out. And he put headphones on, and looked at the stars, or looked at the horses, and we got to work.
Surveys of The Second Body with James Weber Jr.; self-portrait.
You can find that email excerpted here:
FROM: JW
TO: SF
SUBJECT: (no subject)
Star-chart attached. The LP star matters least, it’s all obvious stuff that can’t be removed from my song DNA. The other stars mean more for now.
• Coda = a key
• Some tracks should trail each other like an almost-remix, or at least each song provides commentary on the song-text that precedes it.
• ~9 songs, 35 minutes, not too long (get to the end and one goes back; it’s not the exile or journey rather it’s the return that allows the story into literature)
• In which case the first song ought to provide the commentary on the last…
• But the first song also has to introduce the language the record will use throughout…
• Pop - big basic hooks - unashamed - yes that chorus is going to repeat, friends, when it should.
• But still three dimensional (or four, music is activated in and bounded by time too I suppose) — the pop operates as a functional sparkly garment draped over the longer weirder darker terrain.
• Olia Lialina, My boyfriend came back from the war
• When I compose songs, because of the goofy-foot way I learned to play the guitar, I cover all the sonic ground available – this has led to perpetual estrangement into the land of the three-piece. I don’t know how to atomize my max’d out guitar beds such that song arrangements can happen. How is there room if that squall doesn’t open the door? Don’t get me wrong here, I love the guitar squall, I dwell in the eye of the squall entire, but difficult to complicate music in a way that makes for maximum impact with such broad guitar blasts non-stop. Tame my excesses where needed.
• But to complicate that some -> I do think the glittery stardust sizzle-trails that follow along dense shoegazers wave-gazers are charming! Since 2011 something like 100 million streams for Nyan Cat 10 Hours happened OK! That is evidence! And I like video game music, and enjoy hearing other people tell me all about their game experiences, and find the aesthetics of games really appealing (especially as, like discographies, they span decades and transitions in the IRL, they are products of human brains and therefore speak about the universe that built them). Music is supposed to be fun somehow, even as it carries or leverages sacral baggage and intervenes/crystallizes. Maybe that’s a step too far, but I mean this song from Kino’s Journey is not so far from John Foxx’s “A Man a Woman and a City”. They both devastate!
• Look, we just want to be whatever it is we are in its high degree of unity in variety like the ontological status of art objects, this essay by this dude Eddy Zemach? I’m just saying we all want to express/be/do/or-not with complete freedom as we can. That means I want to be both Lynn Minmei from Robotech singing the fight song in flashy gear and neon lights AND Rick Hunter driving the Veritech in flashy gear and neon lights like in this clip from Robotech (this is from like 1983 and the song is really something else BUT the point is real and so the visuals too become real and etc).
• I’m interested in attempts to leverage repetition. I think it’s an effective compositional tool and the subtle changes (necessarily improvisatory, you’re trying to do the same thing but you can’t do the same thing you are human not robot, friend) over time yield real emotional power.
• a last bit about the LPs on the star-chart:
o Modern English After the Snow = late Cold War EUR romance
o Close Lobsters Foxheads Stalk this Land = lo-fi poesy
o Prix Historic = mid-fi poetics (guided by a down’n’out LX Chilton)
o The Dream Syndicate DoWaR = the particular avenue with which to touch VU o Teenage Fanclub = so casual, are they even trying? but those vocal beds!
• One song Immediate 2nite I already want to cut like half the words out and have half of what's left be sung as a duet, so there is nothing particularly sacrosanct about any of this project. Until it turns out something does feel sacrosanct at which point let the negotiations begin.
xoxoxo I hope this provides a way to start thinking about it, hope it's not too much or too little,
-jwwjr
Pipers at the gates of dawn — Keen Dreams; photographed by Angelique Sanders.
Like the vintage Commander Keen: Keen Dreams computer game that sports the band's moniker; tell us what a Keen Dreams designed video game would be like, be about and how it would be designed.
Fourteen year old. me would never accept my apologies for stepping even further on the legacy of Tom Hall and the Commander Keen team than I already have. The actually-existing Commander Keen: Keen Dreams game was released without a soundtrack. So rather than video game design, I'd much rather write the music for one.
Insights on how to build better communities, better societies, increase conscientious behaviors and be more inclusive and helpful as individuals / citizens / friends / neighbors / lovers. Hopeful visions of a brighter world.
Rather than flee our re-progammed and crashing planet for Mars or upload ourselves into the URL in a mad bid for eternity, a real radical future might look something like the Resilience Frontier’s “Eight Pathways” which begins with indigenous values and remaking the material ways in which we interface with our environment, a very different approach than remaking our planet through terraformation as such. We could stand to reintroduce the humanities into technology work through a commitment to what Michael Polanyi called “Personal Knowledge,” a kind of rejection of scientific detachment and acceptance of our collective implication in the human project good and bad. But you know, that’s brass ring stuff. Give food, water, and shelter to the people who need it. Say hello. Be considerate. Read a lot. Encourage your friends to put pen to paper. Put pen to paper.
The Second Body will be available May 14 via the esteemed imprints Whatever's Clever / Strange Daisy Records