Zach Thompson recently released his new EP, Algebra Parable. It’s a stunning collection of songs, and to find out more about each track we asked Zach to go behind the scenes of each one.
Be As It May
I was walking through Manhattan the day Roberta Flack died. The window man had been long dead. I remember seeing the candlewax pooled in the dish. We walked around the sculpture park and drank overpriced tea packaged in synthetic parcels. The painter, the seamstress and myself. One man had a look of Allen Ginsberg. His eyes burned in a way that operated at the adequate standard required to receive the dream. Another had a black plastic walking stick that turned into a one-legged chair. I was looking at people looking at Warhol. It was tomorrow now, half past two and three in the morning. I’d got that fingerpicking pattern off a fisherman in Wolverhampton. Time passed again and I found myself walking through the sculpture park with the window man. We embarked upon the bass clarinet to cure our equivocation.
Heart of Stone
Today, the forces of disorientation are so easily felt. Our contemporaries and peers are the modern mythical ghosts. Heroes get lost along the way, find themselves dragged beneath the chasms, screaming at god and love and war. They wear a thousands faces, appoint a cavalry of masks. They become strangers, disappear into a nether region for a moment, resurface elsewhere gesturing toward the answer after having pressed their fingerprint against the earth. Perhaps you are the one who has disappeared, great disciple of the ode machine.
Ireland’s Child
I was meant to be doing something else. The little drummer boy was hanging cymbals from the ceiling. The air was grey and dense with a particular form of Spring. Someone was preaching Bible verses through a distorted speaker on Rye Lane. Another was squeezing juices out of a fruit with red skin. Everywhere someone was thinking of the past, counting vicissitudes in a vacuum. The Sunday painter was shadowless in the corner of his gallery, peering into my songs. I had to leave quickly, attempting to locate the placeless form of the anam. We were in a vermouth bar where people told tales of men being walked home by their dogs. There were a few hours in the clouds overhead and songs by the McPeake family emerging from the corner. Nations multiplying their mythos. Legends and false prophets. The sludge of earth and ocean gathering at Carlingford bay. Ancestral remains buried beneath Slieve Gullion, their paper faces peeling. Always somewhere between Dundalk and Dewsbury. And there in the midst of it all, a great enchanter of myth, a heroine with red lips and a camera, emerging from the residual murmurs of the lock-in, the night kept alive by the organs of tomorrow.
Titled
It was one of the quickest songs I wrote. It was written one line at a time, sequentially, in one sitting, through one gesture, like a sermon or a riddle, where each constituent part informs the next. If one were to remove any single element the whole thing would collapse. When you’re writing like that you’re penetrating a particular charge, tracking the movement of thought, inhabiting a cadence, one that is in a perpetual state of unfolding, where a moment for resolution is uncertain and suspended. An unanswered question, a probing speculation, always overlapping, multiplying and germinating until those moments of release.
Often I’m learning about what it is I’m writing about through writing. As it took on flesh, it became this really expansive lyric, governed by the sound of the words, the meter and the rhyme scheme, a lyric which is not fixed on any specific centre or object, but one with many centres. I like that each of the couplets contain a different idea which, when taken as a whole, embody a multiplicity. The whole thing is constructed around a handful of binary threads, a back and forth movement, a kind of yin and yang, toing and froing. Something always zooming in and out of this growing mass.
The new EP by Zach Thompson is available here.
