15 Years of Prattle and Din

by swampmessiah

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David McCooey It's impossible to pick a favourite here. Despite the title, this album stands a marvellously coherent whole. The music is edgy, dark, and extremely well done. The words and vocal performances sit perfectly in the musical context. If you like intelligent poetry+music, you'll love this.

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The album comes with a CD booklet with a brief history of those 15 years of prattling and dinning, plus tray art for a CD jewel case.

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1.	Music, the Beginning 05:53	lyrics	buy track
In the beginning was… the unimaginable. Not of time, not of space, not measurable by our senses— unimaginable. Mathematics is music for the ascetic. Even the most abstract is an extension of our senses, of touch and hearing measuring the pulses of the universe, counting and extrapolating, generalizing and naming, estimating the movements of the living universe. Motion is our perception. Motion is existence. Motion is what we can know. Complete stillness is imagined as the stillness of a chair is imagined, as the stillness of a mountain is imagined, as the stillness of the heavens is imagined. Human stillness is like floating on a current, like an electron in its lowest shell. Our stillness is moving just enough to take a step, to utter a word, to see and listen. But stillness after stillness is death. Without fighting the current, without rising to a higher level of excitement, we cease to walk, cease to talk, fail to see or hear, and drift into coma and death. Like the universe, for we are of the universe, motion is our essence. Whether mindless or planned, movement is our only certainty. Mathematics is the treadmill, tight-lipped from the burden, turning a tight spiral of utility. Or mathematics is a prayer or celebration of motion, a euphoric cry ticking along like the metronomes of chaos. Music is the animal’s analysis of the universe, rejoicing in the pulse of light, the pulse of air, the motions of water and of plants rising, the deepest vibrations of the earth and, most of all, an animal’s own pulse. Music is the cipher by which we comprehend the bonding of molecules and the birth of galaxies, the replication of cells, the shifting of continents, the migrations of birds, the ebb of tides, and, most of all, the only accounting of ourselves with the slightest hint of truth.
2.	Hello, Earth 04:19	info	buy track
3.	Evil 1 04:38	lyrics	buy track
Evil is a person, or a people, reduced to a black hole: the balance and dynamic of a star, the symmetry of a solar system, the gift of its radiance collapsed into an uncontrollable greed. Evil is a fragment, one little piece of a person, or a people, that grows beyond recognition of its source, that grows to dominate the whole, that grows until it is the person, or people. Evil is self interest, consuming, conquering, with no concept of any other self, no sympathy, no compassion, no friendship. Evil is the judgment in the name of the father, in the name of the mother, the children, the ancestors, in the name of society and propriety, in all the names that mask the inner truth, in all the names that hide bigotry, avarice and voracity, the rejection or punishment in honor’s name that’s really in my name. Or your name. Evil consumes. It does not give or take or ask any questions. It mutters no truth that can give peace— only words that ripen fear, putrefying doubts, turning difference into not wine but a flavorless poison masked by a heady aroma. Evil cannot be entered except the way a mouth is entered, a stomach is entered, an intestine is entered.
4.	Night Rain 10:48	lyrics	buy track
Whelmed low, settle me night sky. One drop, another drop; cold rain over the holds of thought. They fall, they merge, dispelling sympathy as well as fear. Distending to the beaten street, the hanging leaf, the fallen leaf pressed smooth to the pavement, the drifting leaf, the flowing dirt. I am flushed with quiet, hushed into words heard floating, and I ride the stream so smoothly.
5.	Coverage 08:00	lyrics	buy track
Light glides down your cheek the way rain sheets over glass in luminous, rippling descent, engulfing every curve of bone or soft flesh, penetrating folds and disappearing with your breath as it drops between parted lips. It falls in distorted cadence like a streetlamp through old glass enshrouding you in cold mystery. I could spread over you warm and embracing like the sunrise— let me be the light!
6.	Effigies 02:40	lyrics	buy track
These kisses of my hands, once so eager for your limbs, are but an effigy of the pain we made to finish ennui and the midnight lore of empty sleep. Their shadows linger in the refrain of their chance enclosure, gripping your enigmatic heart, whose memories have lain closed to my deeper gifts of embrace, leaving just kisses congealing on your surface.
7.	Passing 04:43	lyrics	buy track
Passing lightly through the air I begin to see things differently— I look upon myself without a care. I couldn’t really see the change or what had caused it but all that was normal was now strange. Many thoughts that were once right were now as inappropriate as my actions were not reactions to sight. Something’s here, I’m on the brink of a positive course of action, but to find why I must move I must think. Can I change these changes? Do I dare? Maybe for the moment it doesn’t really matter while I still pass lightly through the air.
8.	Work Yourself to Death 03:05	info	buy track
9.	Sunday Morning 03:47	info	buy track
10.	Miasma 06:14	lyrics	buy track
Black dogs upon my back, black fog rolling through my veins, siamese tom yeowling in my brain… trying to get out! …dripping into my mouth to sting my throat, burn my lungs with vitriolic fumes. Trying to get in… to get in… come in? Night gives no peace— darkness provides no asylum— abrasive nocturnal silence holds no hope of surcease, no comfort. I can still see… and I know.
11.	World Without Prayer 01:40	info	buy track

about

This collection was originally released in March 2011 to a few friends.

credits

released June 28, 2015

All words and performances by Michael Myshack (aka Swampmessiah). Most loops are original recordings by Michael Myshack, though some are from commercial loop discs.

license

about

swampmessiah Saint Paul, Minnesota

I was born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1957. I've been drawing all my life and painting since about 1975; I started writing poetry and rants in, maybe, 1976; since 1996 I've been recording those poems and rants, usually with a "musical" backing.
I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota. My partner and I have two children. I have a day job that is in no way artistic. ... more