The Toronto-based artist on the spellbinding power of a 70-year-old composition.
The premise of One Track Mind is pretty simple: I ask artists to pick one track that means a lot to them – either something they’ve discovered recently, something that’s been with them for years, or one that reminds them of a specific time in their life or career – and tell me what makes it so special to them. I get to talk to the artists I love, and they get to talk about the artists they love. Love all round!
Formerly known as Clara Engel, Avi C. Engel is a prolific and multi-faceted Toronto-based artist whose music has been described as “folk noir,” and “minimalist holy blues from another galaxy.” Their influences span genres and media, amongst them Vasko Popa, Virginia Woolf, Theodore Roethke, Jim Jarmusch, Arvo Part, Robert Johnson, Gillian Welch, and Jacques Brel. In their own words, “I’m not writing the same song over and over so much as writing one long continuous song that will end when I die”, which is about as beautifully bleak a statement as I can imagine.
Their latest album Sanguinaria marries equally poetic lyrics with sparse instrumentation, building atmospheres that move beyond ‘haunting’ into territory that is almost unbearably raw and unsettling, but with a lightness of touch and attention to detail that draws you in completely.
For their One Track Mind selection, Avi has dived back into the movie vaults to the soundtrack of a nearly 80 year old noir classic.
Avi C. Engel on “Pearl’s Dream” written by Walter Schumann and sung by Betty Benson
“An orchestral swell hovers like a dark cloud as two children set sail in a little rowboat. A boy of about eight puts down his oar and curls up to sleep. His little sister sits quietly at the back of the boat holding a rag doll as black water dances with light all around her. The water and the music both brim with dream-like animation, and emanate a profound stillness. She sways slightly side to side and begins to sing a melody that is both sorrowful and full of wonder:
Once upon a time there was a pretty fly
He had a pretty wife, this pretty fly
But one day she flew away, flew away
She had two pretty children
But one night these two pretty children Flew away, flew away
Into the sky, into the moon
“As the song unfolds, our view expands and we see her brother still asleep at the helm of the boat. Cut then to a view of the boat as it glides past jagged windows fashioned from the fibrils of an illuminated spider web, and then as it drifts by an enigmatic and stately toad, foregrounded, resting on the riverbank. Black water shines and morphs constantly, mercurial in the moonlight. The song’s melody is spare as a nursery rhyme or a lullaby. The orchestra erupts again in lost careening swoops and swells, and the little girl’s song ends in a searching upward motion, heart plunged in mystery and uncertainty. It leaves an ache, like watching a bird soar up into darkness and out of sight. Flew away, flew away/Into the sky, into the moon. River reeds glowing with moonlight shiver in the wind as the dream draws to a close.
“I’m describing a musical scene from the film The Night of the Hunter (1955 dir, Charles Laughton), which I first saw almost twenty years ago, but has never left me. I dislike the word “favourite” but if I were forced to have a favourite film, this might be it.
“I don’t have synesthesia, but I do have what I would describe as very permeable boundaries in my mind, which is wonderful when it comes to making art and music, but sometimes makes other parts of life more confounding. What is a poem, what is a song, what is a film? For me they are mingling all the time, and they are all part of the same whole. I’ve been just as marked and changed by novels and films as I have been by songs. Maybe what I find so enduringly spellbinding about this song and scene is that they encompass the poetic in so many realms: language, visual imagery, melody, and harmony, and all the elements are working together to create something otherworldly and transcendent.”
Avi C. Engel – Sanguinaria is out now
The Predatory Wasp 