“It hit me like a fucking lightning bolt, their music.”
–I said, almost wincing as the words slipped out–though the cute Cal Arts grad next to me probably wouldn’t even know why my almost-wince.
He nodded, whatever his name was. The Cal Arts kid had seen them before in LA, “something special” maybe he said.
I suppressed the temptation to rant.
What I was tempted to babble:
How Gang Gang Dance are THE music of our time. How they capture, no, CHANNEL, the zeitgeist, as we reel in the mass mediated shockwaves of the global financial crash, desperate to ignore the cusp of peak oil and watching the icebergs collapse ahead of schedule into the arctic blue. How this “music” compresses 15 years of Moontribe techno raving in the desert and millions of human hours of psychotropically drenched utopian apocalyptic cavorting, dancing and prancing known as Burning Man into a classic rock band format: voice/drums/guitar/keyboards, and a few CDs.
The last of which titled, “St. Dymphna.”
Per Wikipedia: “[St. Dymphna’s] feast day is May 15 and she is the patron saint of those who suffer from mental illnesses and nervous system disorders, epileptics, mental health professionals, happy families, incest victims, and runaways.”
And how GGD may be the best approximation of the soundtrack to the ‘Gaia Mythos’ I’d been seeking, and hearing in my head for years now–but unable to find on the dancefloors.
Such was my agenda: a soundtrack to the Gaia Mythos (give me a few minutes to explain).
I came down to the Smell – LA punk dive of some renown– fortuitously having gotten wind of the last-minute, secret gig. Excited like I hadn’t been in a long long time. There was no way I was going to miss this. (Thank you T&C!)
In my personal musical cosmology, Gang Gang Dance are to the Aughts (2000-2010) what Future Sound of London’s epic Life Forms double-LP was to the mid-nineties, and what Floyd’s UmmaGumma was to the early 70s.
I won’t say there aren’t others – the number of cliched psytrance and neo-psych rock acts out there is near infinite. But these are the landmarks for me. Exemplars of the visionary travelogue transcribed into beat, melody and texture; not just “trippy music” but the inner narrative of the great psycho-social events, archetypal/mythical matrix of the day.
As bad as my <musical> infatuation already was that night at the Smell, it only got worse over the next few hours. Little did I know I would come out the other side of the show, covered in sweat, wanting to bail out of my demi-corporate job of 7 years to become a Gang Gang Dance male maenad (groupie, in other words), following them across Europe in a beat-up hippie van – at the late age of 47!
And yes, their singer, Lizzie Bougatsos is cute, and her voice is even more adorable, that is, when its not downright demonic, mantic, prophetic and angelic, all rolled into one, divine child speaking in tongues. But I think who I really fell in love with was someone not even there.
But someone who spoke through their music, standing over it, guiding a downdraft of archetypal storylines, glimpses of almost-was, What Really Is, what might almost be.
Someone who had died already 7 years before. Someone I wish I knew. Someone I may yet meet in my dreams, ….
The lightning strike image was all too appropriate, but most likely the kid in the queue wasn’t quite as obsessed as I with this foursome, and hadn’t bothered to trawl the internet for obscure infobits about the life of one Nathan Maddox, as had I.
Who was Nathan? And why do I feel he’s still around? Why do I want to get know someone who is no longer here?
Nathan was a founding member of Gang Gang Dance. He died in ‘02. Killed, by a bolt of lightning, on a rooftop in Brooklyn. “Dancing in the rain.”
* * *
I was dj’ing for a friends birthday. I took a break and when I came back in, my housemate Gary Roar, was on the decks, playing an intriguing noise. I caught only a few minutes of it, before shutting the system down for the night. I asked what it was, he said “Gang Gang Dance.” Something stuck.
Not long after, I stumbled across an oversized art rag with a story on IUD, a NYC female drum’n’noise duo. They sounded pretty rad, and I kept the rag. Mentioned was the fact that 1/2 of IUD was also a member of an “up and coming” “artrock band” Gang Gang Dance.
I brought the rag home, showed it to Gary. Gary had seen them play back East. “They were so good it scared me.” Not only that, but he had been friends with Nathan.
He proceeded to unreel a series of reminiscences about Nathan, when they both lived in DC.
“Nathan was the most unusual person. He had this amazing hug. He hugged everyone like that. He was known for his hugs. Just coming back to DC one night, I was in this dance club, totally pitch black, he somehow found me in the darkness and gave me a big hug. It was weird. I couldn’t name another time that happened. It was like welcome home, you couldn’t even see it was so dark, like shadowland. That really touched me. … He was beyond reason… The reason Gang Gang Dance is still going is exactly because of Nathan…. He’s the kind of person people make religions out of.”
Gary’s story reverberating in my head, I found them on Myspace and Youtube, and soaked myself in their sounds the next few days, until I got hold of a new copy of St Dymphna, which hit me like …. dot dot dot
I got ‘Gods Money’, and was even more stunned, listening to the CD on loop x7 in a single headphone-enabled evening.
I dug further, for more tales of Nathan.
Alas, there is relatively little to be found – I’d been pointed to some artistic traces of Nathan that might still be found on MySpace, and there were three obituaries. Most of the references were in interviews with Gang Gang Dance, and even then fairly passing. I tried to read between the lines. His face appears on the cover of God’s Money. His voice is on a track on the RAWWAR EP.
* * *
So, how does the Gaia Mythos fits into all of this?
I’m inside the Smell, waiting for GGD to come on, and poking through a bookshelf of DIY punky zines and random books. I’m thinking about how I’d like to write something about Gang Gang Dance, but so uninterested in standard music review format.
On the shelf, a title pops out: In Search of Duende, Federico Garcia Lorca – little black paperback. The “duende” is old Spanish folklore, a mischevious spirit. But the term was also used for people that “had duende,” flamenco artists transported and transporting their audience in a moment of out-of-control magic. It became the crux of Lorca’s poetics. As I’m reading, I’m shocked to find words in Lorca that touch the marrow of Gang Gang Dance music. I wonder if I should give them the book, or keep it for myself (even though the books were meant to stay at the Smell).
Almost lost in Lorca’s poetics, I look up to see Pablo, owner of a local small press, Brasstacks, publisher of James Mathers, notorious Poet Laureate of the Topanga Rodeo Grounds. Chit chatting, Pablo doesn’t know Gang Gang Dance, is there for one of the other bands. With time on our hands to kill, I go off on a shpiel, sharing my burst of teen-spirit for this band:
“I’d been obsessed by the phrase ‘Gaia Mythos’ since discovering the writings of John Lash on the web. It was 2004, Vault of Heaven theme at Burning Man. My project that year was a sort of interactive art book, a bricolage of quotes and images. An inventory of ideas about planetary purpose, the Gaia Hypothesis, visions of an emergent global–scratch that–planetary(!) culture. Lash’s phrase, I stumbled on it googling “planetary cultures”, and it SO clicked. It seemed to crystallize what I’d been digging for. Lash was out to reconstruct the Gnostics not as Christianity Lite but as a sophisticated urban shamanism, pitching their Great Goddess Sofia as nothing but the living intelligence of the planet, aka Gaia in our current lingo. He thinks we need to take the cosmic origin myth of Sofia and reinvent it for today.”
(Serendipitously, I had first encountered the word ‘duende’ in one of Lash’s sign-offs. It wasn’t till tonite that I learned the word’s source, in Lorca, and what it meant.)
Spinning off of Lash’s writings, that Burning Man and after, I envisioned the Gaia Mythos NOT, or not primarily, as a new VERBAL story, but as something to emerge through performance from an iterative group process–perhaps a touring festival, like Burning Man, but different, prioritizing performance and ritual instead of oversized mad art objects.
Knowing the trendy critiques of myth and myth-making, the snotty postmodernist skewering of Jung & Campbell as but “naïve de-historicizing essentialists,” I debated friends and myself about what role myth could really play for us, here now.
Gurdjieff hatched a new cosmic myth, but left it intentionally unreadable; Tolkien spent 50 years blending a synthetic origin myth for the English; before them, Blake illumined his demi-Gnostic tales of Urizen and Albion and whatnot. Jack Kirby’s New Gods series, a few notches down the scale. Science fiction is full of it, sort of, bad and less bad. Cheesey flicks like Star Wars and Indiana Jones have been spun out of Campbell’s template of “the Hero’s Journey.”
And sure you had the obvious films – 2001 maybe leader of the lot, Solaris, Stalker – but there was another level. In our time of moneygrubby, ain’t real-if-you-can’t-quantify-it, rationalistic consciousness, the multivalent, elusive, ‘numinous’ realm of myth might perhaps be found hiding out in . . .
MUSIC.
Music, because it’s the realm most divorced from any expectation of normative truth-telling, of staking Claims about the Real Nature of Reality, Self, History, God, Whatever. Music, because it is still closely tied to the body, to dance, to sexuality, ecstasy and altered states. Music, because it moves.
Unlike film or novels or poetry, its relatively resistant to dissection and debate. When music is powerful, what it truly means to people is not something that can easily be dislodged, if at all. You can’t say, “is it true?” “is it not true?” “where’s the evidence?!” “it’s a lie! Scam! Disinformation!”- at least not in the same way as with a verbal, discursive artifact. Bla bla bla.
In any case, Pablo had a neat summary:
“So you want to enlist Gang Gang Dance in your cult? I wonder what they’ll think of that.”
What does one say?
“Sure, I’d love to enlist Gang Gang Dance in my cult. Why not?”
Except I don’t have one. And I don’t believe in cults anyway. Or not the contemporary kind, anyway. OK, the Gnostics had cults. They weren’t just organized around charismatic male leaders though. Women had equal sway. And they worshipped a Goddess, not a God.
(You know. It’s tough, in this day and age, not having your own personal cult. I mean, even a post-modern start-up cult with a distributed leadership. ;-))
And so, I have to catch myself here. As a writer and sometime explorer of mythic memes, I can see the allure and danger of concocting an Ian Curtis-like halo around someone like Nathan. It wouldn’t be hard.
[Shift forward a few weeks: I doubt that’s something the members of Gang Gang Dance would really want. I’d already raised the possibility of writing something about Nathan with their active help. Lizzie Bougatos aka ‘LZA’ was open to it, but their keyboardist Brian DeGraw, an old time friend of Nathan’s, seemed more guarded, in email exchanges. Understandably.
[They’re a band. Their deal is to make badass music. Why muck it all up with someone else’s ego and Big Ideas?
[Why indeed. I’m certainly thankful that they exist, and I thank Nathan, in his mortal moment of cosmic zap, for helping them congeal to share what they have with us.]
* * *
I’m dancing to their music now, in the middle of the crowd at the Smell, barely able to move, its so packed. I have to keep my hands in the air, conjuring strange hand sigils, vibrating, shaking, mesmerized, running in place, as I hear the haunted desert wind at dusk pour through Lizzie’s vocal shards like unmoored prayerflags, tom toms ensnaring, unwinding rainbow arcades and stops and starts, worlds spinning, catabolic collapse and claps of thunder, whipped by rain, beauty growling in guitar – the air is clear and bracing like after a hurricane. I know they are channeling the same primordial rapture that captured Jimi and Janis and Jim and Syd and Sandy, and I know its been worth the wait, letting go of the machinic dj dancefloors in search of something new.
Little do THEY know I have in my pocket the Lorca book, and behind closed eyelids, shaking and sweating, I hear Lorca’s ode to the Duende:
All that has black sounds has the duende. … These ‘black sounds’ are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire that we all know and all ignore, the fertile silt that gives us the very substance of art. “A mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher can explain.”
But there are neither maps nor exercises to find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned, that he smashes styles, that he leans on human pain with no consolation.
..
And the duende? The duende does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible. The duende must know beforehand that he can serenade death’s house and rock those branches we all wear, branches that do not have any, cannot have any, consolation.
With idea, sound or gesture, the duende enjoys fighting the creator on the very rim of the well. Angel and muse escape with violin, meter and compass; the duende wounds. In the healing of that wound, which never closes, lie the strange, invented qualities of a man’s work.
We have said that the Duende loves the rim of the wound, and that he draws near places where forms fuse together into a yearning superior to their visible expression.
Behind those black sounds, tenderly and intimately, live zephyrs, ants, volcanoes, and the huge night, straining its waist against the Milky Way,
This “mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains,” is, in sum, the spirit of the Earth, the same duende that scorched the heart of Nietszche, who searched in vain for its external forms on the Rialto Bridge and in the music of Bizet, without knowing that the duende he was pursuing had leaped straight from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cadiz or the beheaded, Dionysian scream of Silverio’s Siguiriya,
The duende… where is the duende? Through the empty arch comes a wind, a mental wind blowing relentlessly over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents; a wind that smells of baby’s spittle, crushed grass, and jellyfish veil, announcing the constant baptism of newly created things.
* * *
Nathan, I will meet you in my dreams.
— Cinnamon Twist, April 5, 2009
(First published in Avantoure magazine – avantoure.com. This is the original, unedited version.)
