Wired For Sound: Clash Meets Merchandise

"There’s a part of me that’s given up explaining thought processes..."

When I met up with Merchandise backstage at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds it was only a few days before Donald Trump was declared President-elect of the United States. Like a particularly sinister and obnoxious storm cloud, the state of world affairs seemed beyond anybody’s control or comprehension. There’s a hysterical flavour to our times that feels like it surmounts anything that came before it – no doubt exacerbated by a nauseous everyday flood of content, hyperbole, and misinformation. When last I spoke to Carson Cox and David Vassalotti almost two years ago we asked them if they were cynical of modern life. They laughed at me.

As a music fan, I’d been listening to a strangely small amount of music prior to this recent interview. Mostly, my recourse from the storm clouds had been found through listening to Dusty Springfield, Eno’s ambient work, and Merchandise’s second LP for 4AD: 'A Corpse Wired For Sound'. They all felt dependable, and arguably there’s very little that separates the three bodies of work. Most obviously there’s a transcendence that processes the negativity of quotidian life into something beautiful. But more precisely, the love songs of Dusty, Eno’s ambient suites and 'A Corpse Wired For Sound' don’t make any strenuous demands on the listener’s attention. When you listen to Drake you’re forced to listen to a persona that serves as a mouthpiece for his ego.

Miss a word of Nick Cave or Kendrick Lamar and you’ve lost the narrative thread for the remainder of the song. With Dusty, Eno, and Carson & Dave you can afford to tune out, buoyed by the effect of the ensemble, or you can hone in on the individual bricks that and uncover fascinating and obsessive detail. The point is this: there’s even music for the times when you can’t listen to music; Merchandise play it.

“There’s a part of me that’s given up explaining thought processes,” Carson says at one point over the forty five minutes we talk shop. It’s a remark that both characterises and contradicts our conversation as he vacillates between long stretches of creative free-association and the occasional offhand remark about how “this is all stuff no-one will give a shit about.” A few years ago, as hype in the UK built around them between the release of their second LP Children Of Desire and third effort Totale Nite, they seemed excited to be given a platform. Now, three LPs later, and with the monolithic international pop mill seeming more impenetrable to them, they’re feeling more reserved, content to remain a cult proposition.

“This album’s been a hard sell,” he admits, “I mean, not for any reason other than the fact we’re not a new band. It’s easier from a marketing angle to be like ‘this band is new and hot’ as opposed to ‘this band is thirty and they’ve done five records’, and whether they’re great or brilliant it really doesn’t matter. People are looking for flesh. They are not looking for whatever the fuck we do.”

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Perhaps in an attempt to make them more marketable, every album they put out is met with fairly predictable comparisons and their latest is no exception: The Smiths, Echo and the Bunnymen and Tears For Fears are some of the laziest offences. “We could put out a straight country record and we’d get the same thing,” David says. I suggest that there’s something nostalgic about their music that invites that, particularly on their second LP, to which he replies “I think the whole Smiths comparison is definitely the most apt for that record, but the three LPs we’ve done since then…” Carson adds: “But again Big Star and Scott Walker – stuff I feel I listen to a lot of, it’s still something that people in pubs don’t listen to and go ‘yeeeah!’ Last night there was a bunch of people screaming ‘Trump!’ at the show in Birmingham and then they all went upstairs to listen to The Smiths and dance around and it’s like ‘well there you go, this is the new reality!’ I don’t get it. But I also think I don’t have a part to play anymore. We never really had a part to play in it to begin with. We just were a band that did our own thing and I guess we continue to do it. Maybe there is a lot of nostalgia but I think it’s running out, especially this year.”

Towards the end of their last tour for their 4AD debut 'After The End' I tell them that they looked a little tired and boxed-in, almost like they were keen to get off the road. “We made a record in an effort to be a professional touring live band and it didn’t really work out,” clarifies Carson. “We spent years making records in conceptual places and just putting a bunch of sounds together. It was a big lesson that we can play live. We can tour as a band, but the idea that we’re going to be part of the conveyor belt of indie music doesn’t really work out. We tried it because we didn’t believe in punk rock dogmas that you can’t try other things, especially when we didn’t feel like we were aligned with that by our first or second record. There was no reason why we couldn't take it into pop territory.”

“We thought we’d try and make a record that we can play and we kind of did but we kind of didn’t. We weren’t really interested in that. It’s weird that we have that record behind us and we have a new one. It’s much more fun to play because we get to play discography sets and that’s actually a lot of fun, but that was the tour where we learnt we’re not meant to be consumed. We only have die-hard fans. We shouldn't expect to be in the Thanksgiving Day parade on a float singing and waving to people… sorry Leo!” he indicates jokingly to Leo Suarez, the band’s drummer and free jazz aficionado. “Lo and behold culture turned over again and we saw how fucked up and evil the world is yet again and I see all these parallels between our failures and my inability to see myself fitting into the world in any capacity. We were fucking tired. It was really difficult.” At this point Carson pauses to gather his thoughts. “We just had to learn a lot of things in a short period of time, publicly.”

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This idea that culture is not in constant flux but in constant revolution is something that Carson returns to throughout the conversation. Much of the group’s preoccupation this album has been with non-musical artists like Joseph Cornell and William Burroughs. Situated somewhere between sculpture and collage, Cornell’s method of ‘assemblage’ relies on taking trinketry and ephemera out of their contexts and re-contextualising them as framed ‘works’. It’s arguably not so very different from what Burroughs was doing to language through his cut-ups. It’s the idea that temporal or spatial contexts no longer hold much truth in a world where we can listen to Bessie Smith deep cuts from the thirties, wear paisley from the 60s, and browse Japanese film from the 90s, all at the touch of a button.

We are the Spotify generation, glorious in our free-form fragmentation and more at liberty to be ourselves than at any other point in history, yet also far more privy to the rancorous tides of misinformation and popular opinion. More than at any other point in history we find ourselves through assemblage, through cutting up and rearranging the saturated world around us into a harmony that resonates with who we think we are.

Merchandise’s work on 'A Corpse Wired For Sound' is a kind of validation for these experiments of the mid-20th century. Cornell and Burroughs join Tenor Saw, Depeche Mode, Leonard Cohen, Type O-Negative, The Byrds, Anselm Kiefer, Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren are just some of the practitioners that form the hotchpotch of references which informs, either consciously or subconsciously, the new record. It’s a curiously eclectic assemblage of doom metal, beat literature, avant-garde film, krautrock, reggae, and many more – all distilled into something that is still recognisably a pop project, one centred on loneliness and the passing of time. The record’s sentiments are neatly summarised in a line from ‘Silence’: “It’s as if I was marching since I was a boy / The world that secretly ties us all without a word / It’s the silence sitting on top of us / Still we cherish the dust”.

Often the speaker throughout the songs (written by both Carson and David) feels a total estrangement from the world. It’s not an obviously political record, and many of the themes centre on love and sex, but the irony is that this loneliness is easily politicised: “There are pop tropes that are always there, not just in our music but in music in general” Carson points out. “When Roy Orbison sung about loneliness but wasn’t speaking about political loneliness, he was talking about his baby. He was talking about things in simple finite terms that everybody can understand.” This aspect of loneliness, whether it be the loneliness of romantic disappointment, or a more general feeling of isolation leads Carson’s speaker on ‘Right Back To The Start’ to long for the oblivion of sleep, the famous simulacrum of death “I guess I’ll have to move, leave the lions asleep / Stop playing my guitar and start counting sheep.” As Carson says to me: “It’s an emotional allegory as opposed to a direct one. At first we tried to make a political record and I had a few super over-the-top political songs that we just couldn't put on the record because they fell flat.”

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Putting 'A Corpse Wired For Sound' in the context of Merchandise’s entire oeuvre, they reveal themselves to be a group with a very literary approach to songwriting. Their frame of references change with the years, as you’d expect, but their all-pervasive conviction that the world gets lonelier the more conscious you get informs every record. It’s like the tension between unemployment and action in all the major plays of Chekhov, or the incessant maddening hum of a media-driven society desperate to repress its existential uncertainty in DeLillo. Perhaps Merchandise’s cult-ish appeal lies in their ability to communicate a certain poignant melancholia which always feels frank, unlike so many artists who purposefully affect a lugubrious kind of nostalgia to consciously invite the comparisons that Merchandise are so often burdened with.

Sometime deep within the conversation I can’t help but mention the anxious political climate. The single most striking recurring motif in my mind as a fan is Carson’s use of mirrors. Mirrors have been a modernist plaything since the days of twentieth-century psychoanalysis. On After The End, the mirror clearly represents nostalgia in songs like ‘Looking Glass Waltz’ and ‘Life Outside The Mirror’. It was something to get lost in – a deception that never shows things as they really were. In the Carson-directed promo video for ‘End Of The Week’ the mirror is smashed. His quote on the accompanying press release reads: “it's the broken image of humanity reflecting back at everyone when they read the news. Reality is an unbearable pill to swallow this year. Somehow the evil people that make up society can still wake up every day and look at themselves in the mirror.”

With a typically human urge to find continuity where there perhaps isn’t any, I tell him that to me the mirror still very much represents nostalgia. Both the UK and the US have recently ostensibly voted ourselves backwards several decades while riding a vision of the good old days that never really existed in the first place. The thought leads Carson on a tangent: “you have the idea that reality is reflected in the facts and it has no bearing on anything any more. In some ways the smashed mirror is a way for me to express my disgust but also it’s just a more poetic way than saying ‘this songs called fuck America!’. That's maybe how I've seen it done with other musicians or artists – there's like an all-knowing attitude – ‘we have the facts, this is fucked up…’ when actually you’re not safe, there’s no way to be righteous. But will anybody acknowledge that as a reality that’s more concrete? ‘These are the news organisations! Here are the polls! Here is the death toll!’. They don’t really feel like tangible things, but because we’re so obsessed with our own security we force ourselves to believe that these are the tangible things. These are the concrete things that we build our society on as opposed to just admitting we don't fucking know.”

“There's no way to be secure, and instead of cultivating a society where people have to be in control all the time, maybe… There was something lost with information when we left the primitive. We have this new kind of reality, and hundreds of years ago, not like anything was better, there was just an aspect of thinking there are things we don't know. And that was part of a spiritual side of primitive man that now we think we have all the facts we can’t think that way. In reality, it’s human nature to not know or to be uncertain, but again its dominant in western cultures where business and capital dictate everything. I own the land so I know everything. There’s things that you can’t control and there's things that you can’t dominate and we don't like that in the States, we don't like that in the media, we don't like that across the board. To acknowledge that is not allowed.”

Of course we all know how the story ends after this. The following week Donald Trump becomes President-elect and the post-Brexit feeling re-emerges in crapulous fashion. 'A Corpse Wired For Sound' becomes a strangely accurate title for describing how many people feel about politics. The carcass of optimism lies supine across our mind’s eye as our leaders rig it to a tannoy. Then the hysteria swells in: grating, cloying, white noise.

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'A Corpse Wired For Sound' is out now on 4AD.

Words: Tim Hakki
Photo Credit: Lotte Cunnell

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