EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 7

DAY 7


Attila is from Hungary.

'Man, what are you going to have for breakfast?'

'Pancakes, I'm going to have some mother fucking pancakes.'

'Banana nut.'

Attila is looking out the window.

At the hotel yesterday morning everyone is inside getting coffee, but Attila is standing on the edge of the parkway in the center of the hotel's half-circle driveway. He is smoking and his spine is curved as would be a knife fighter's tossed from the window of a 3rd story dance hall to the muddy banks of the trash creek below. His rolled cigarette is between the tips of his first and second fingers and his thumbs, and he's looking up towards the tops of the buildings across the street with a half grimace.

'... So basically you are paying a buck fifty for the hash browns.'

'Man, I don't know.'

A tour has a funny way of colluding the inconspicuous and mundane elements of the daily routines of its participants in very pleasant and surreal ways. Same goes for this trip, here we are, the vanguard of Slow Music, the present's manifestation of New Music, card carrying members of one of Metal's most revered and radical party's, around a 3 tables pushed together by a very large woman with a leech-shaped hickey on her thick neck in a Village Inn on a Tuesday morning in Omaha, oversized plastic menus glaring up at our drooping faces the photos of Skillets designed by the Skillet Experts.

Attila is at the head of the table: 'Cool- I am Grandfather!' He nudges me with his elbow, and pegs a finger at one of the laminated omelette photos, 'You see the heart? That is for me.'

3 or 4 or 2 years ago began a striking and continuing trend in Western Independent Music: the exploitation (to great and to poor effects dually) of organ-timbres- Arcade Fire, Beirut, Ratatat a frozen fencepost full of others to which I am not hip. Parallely, dense, polyphonic voicings surfaced (and then engulfed in a synthesized firestorm keyboard hooks) the Industrial Pop Music Complex.

Overtone singing, also known as throat singing, overtone chanting, or harmonic singing, is a type of singing in which the singer manipulates the resonances (or formats) created as air travels from the lungs, past the vocal folds, and out the lips to produce a melody.

Throat singing is both a generic and a specific term. Generally, the term is applied to any singing style which entails the application of a harsh voice or some other constriction. Specifically, the term refers to a type of Central Asian and Siberian overtone singing

­So sayeth the interweb.

Attila, at the crowd-point of the Sunn O))) parallelogram, at the dark yawn of his cloak hood a bullet-form raven's mic in both hands, by means of overtone singing and the harsh voice, delivers the most rich, most full polyphonic organ-timbre in the business, hands fucking down. He actualizes his two, three, and at times four dimensional tree-groan with the exact pathos required of Sunn O)))'s nightly Great Musical Leap. His stage presence and execution call into question the capability of any other member of the human race to do any of this any better than himself.

'I will have this Award Winner.'

'Award winner?'

'Yes, this Award Winner.'

'The pie?'

'Yes, the pie.'

'You want that warm or with ice cream, hon?'

Attila pauses, looking at the menu. Then he looks up to her where she leers large and puffed over his shoulder, 'Warm.'