Sitting in a bustling coffee shop in Seattle, it occurs to me that Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn — simply Mirah for the purposes of her records — has nothing to prove.
Since her full-length solo debut, You Think It’s Like This but Really It’s Like This, she’s carved out a niche for herself as a much loved and respected member of the Northwest indie elite, winning accolades for a series of lo-fi albums that have met with broad critical acclaim.
I’m also talking with cellist Lori Goldston and accordionist Kyle Hanson. They don’t have much to prove either. They’ve made their marks in Northwest art music as founding members of Black Cat Orchestra, Spectratone International, and the duo The Shifting Light; they’ve scored silent films and collaborated on dance, music, and theatre projects. Goldston has played with artists like Nirvana, David Byrne, and John Doe.
Though Goldston and Hanson have, in fact, already once collaborated with Mirah by way of Black Cat Orchestra — on To All We Stretch the Open Arm, a collection of politically-minded covers of works by Kurt Weill, Stephen Foster, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and others — Share This Place is a whole other animal.
In addition to being a whole cycle of new compositions culled from the works of Jean Henri Fabré (an eccentric autodidact considered by many to be the father of modern entomology) and The Insect Play by playwright Karel Capek, Share This Place was also performed live with a series of specially-created, stop-motion animated shorts by filmmaker Britta Johnson at the Seattle International Children’s Festival on May 14, 2007.
I’m almost obligated to ask…Jean Henri Fabré?
[The research] was about being infused with a certain sense of language, and then trying it on like a costume, myself, as a writer.
According to Goldston, “It was a tip from our friend, who’s a writer. We had dinner with her, and I mentioned that I’d been reading about insects, and we talked about Fabré.” So the initial fascination was about insects? How did that come about? Lori chuckles. “My life is a series of passing and permanent obsessions.
“I would say that it coincided with Kyle and I having this not quite… like, a few-month-old baby, and I was sitting around in the yard a lot and thinking about insects. You know — watching them. You have to sit around a lot when you have kids. As adults, most of us are running around too much to sit around and watch insects for hours a day.”
With all that said, Share This Place wasn’t a strictly entomological endeavor. “Because it’s about the lives of the insects, and Fabré is all about the lives, and the dramas, and the personalities of the insects, it’s much, much bigger than any particular insects,” says Hanson.
“It’s anthropomorphizing them, really,” adds Mirah.
Capek’s work certainly wasn’t a particularly scientific influence, either. Goldston notes, “Those are crazy plays, very early 20th Century. I don’t think he was a capital ‘D’ Dadaist, but I think he was a small ‘d’ Dadaist. It’s definitely in that vein.”
And were the songs culled directly from this material? “A lot of it was adapted from the sources — the tone of a lot of them,” says Mirah. “It was about being infused with a certain sense of language and then trying it on like a costume, myself, as a writer.”
The result of this research is a series of micro-narratives, twelve tracks of surreal, unforced whimsy that make their subjects seem both more and less like us — concerned as they are with eerily anthropomorphized interests and obsessions, yet mired as they are in a material world completely alien to our own.
The CD was issued in August; a DVD that will include Britta Johnson’s animated films is coming shortly thereafter. How such a thing comes into being is a story unto itself.
“We live in different cities,” Mirah explains. “Lori and Kyle live in Seattle. I live in Portland, so a lot of the initial part of the collaboration was these long distance meetings — telephone calls and e-mails. They were working primarily on music composition, and I worked on lyrical composition. I had this whole room full of all these papers and books that were my source materials. So I was immersed in a way.”
“She was very immersed,” Hanson chimes. “Mirah was able to pick and choose from a lot and kind of shape things.”
Mirah adds, “And some of the melodies, or even a few that were more like completed songs that they had composed, which were sent to me, I could label them, like, ‘Oh, I think that’s the dung beetle.’ It was sort of like a puzzle, working this way.”
Kyle agrees: “I think you were able to, being immersed in those things, pick insects or pick stories, and be able to identify emotional states or kind of dramatic qualities that we needed to put in the music, or that we could create the music around.”
“It’s interesting how giving myself a language and influence in reading all these books,” Mirah continues, “and then sometimes I would get what was more or less a completed piece, like ‘Emergence of the Primary Larva.’ That was basically what it was, musically, when you gave it to me, and it just fit so well — the feeling of the music with the moment of the life of the cicada that I was reading about.”
The music Mirah was receiving came by way of CDs and MP3s sent via mail and e-mail (respectively). There was some travel, allowing the musicians to play, write, and brainstorm together. Of course, this kind of work takes time. How much time?
“[The process] was actually kind of lengthy, but it wasn’t constant,” explains Mirah.
“It stopped and started,” says Goldston. “The first half of it was in the 2005 TBA Festival in Portland. We wrote and performed half the songs for that festival.”
“Six months later we recorded those songs,” offers Kyle. “Six months after that, we recorded the rest of the songs. Well, two years since we started talking about it until the album was all recorded.” Hanson giggles. “Did any of us mention Mirah ran a marathon in that time?”
I laugh, but he’s serious. Mirah relates the story.
“There was a several month period where we had a recording date set for Seattle in December, and we hadn’t written the final six songs that we were still planning on writing. And I kept saying,‘Well, as soon as I just get this marathon thing over with, then I can focus.’
“And literally the day after I ran the marathon in Portland, I was like, ‘Okay! Time to get to work!’ And I set up all my books again. I couldn’t concentrate. I can only do one thing at once for some reason. But as soon as I did the marathon, the next day I got out all my materials and recordings, set up all my stuff, and knocked them out. It was amazing!”
Does Mirah commonly run marathons? “No, I’d never run a marathon before. I just wanted to try it.”
Nice. And her time? “Four twenty-seven.”
Not bad. “Well, I wasn’t trying to qualify for Boston. I was…I was on a vision quest! That’s the only goal I set for myself: to finish it.”
She impishly adds, “Which is the same goal I set for myself on this project: to finish it!”
Oh, so that’s how it’s done.
– Lyam White