Estrangement, Isolation, and Doubt:
Deforming Tantrums, Awestruck Manicures, and Queasy Audibles.
Why Silence Camp is the greatest band in garageland and Soundless Glove Camp is the once possible future. Part 1.
Some little holy grail found in the gutters of a thrift store in Lancaster made my nose bleed. Fuck 'em today! As funky as the moldy magazines folded over the shoebox arc of what is now clearly the lost covenant, this is genius. Well, not exactly, but Silence Camp slogged out of some Junior High School somewhere and shot the collective CD collections of the enemy. How? That dirty nose-ring that now holds the music buying-stealing-mainstream-esoteric loving-whatever-whoever millions was yanked out in a shower of bloody redemptive music. Or is it? When I stumbled across this CD--replete with homemade decoupaged toilet paper cover and literally screwed on liner notes--I knew it was over. I will never buy another CD again. That is unless The Head and Little Tooth decide to make another Silence Camp recording. Or if Glove comes out of hiding. That is highly unlikely if their 27 page manifesto is to be believed.
No. No. There are no classical pointers here. No pictures of "the band". No biography. No production credits beyond two names and credit for hidden tracks to a third, an illusion to a Junior High School, and a thanks to Connor's sandwich shop. There is no city mentioned, no instruments mentioned (for good reason as we shall see), and no lyrics. But there is the manifesto, which starts with these words, "This is the blind". See?
Silence Camp are The Head and Little Tooth. Maybe that means two people, or maybe two bands, or maybe two personas. I can't tell you. It doesn't matter. That's another thing the small tome that is screwed to the back of the Cd jewel case says. "It doesn't matter. This garage is abandoned. We left for good. Eat." Okay so nothing is clear? Right? Wrong. The music on the Silence Camp CD is perfect. Don't believe me? Go into an isolation tank nude and listen to what it is. Polaroids and minuscule offshoots, lunchbox slogans, come-one-come-all unreasonableness from the high desert.
I won't describe the music, that is exactly what The Head and Little Tooth expressly forbid with this creation. But I will list the running order of the songs. First, I have to say that I have spent the last three months talking to anyone and everyone in Lancaster about who Silence Camp is--or was. It's blind alley. The woman who runs the Thrift Store where I found the CD says that it came with a bunch of boxes dropped at the back door a couple of months before I went there. Are you sure? Oh yeah. There were a number of porcelain figurines which she had sold on Ebay. And a number of LIFE magazines from the late sixties which were rotting, and therefore useless. But that's exactly what I was looking at when I found the Silence Camp CD. The mags fell apart as I gently tried to pick them apart in hopes of finding some sweet bit of ephemera. And underneath, deep in a box, was the best thing I have ever found, heard, possibly owned.
Silence Camp:
side you:
1) plastic glow in the dark eel
2) cross references and letter boxes
3) never noticed before
4) a blessing to be ignored
5) the same vein
6) I'm existing, I'm invisible
7) swapping goodies
8) 30% of the overall output
side me:
9) exist in our midst
10) fairly unlikely
11) prefer silence
12) listening back, I'm there and I can't
13) looking out across the garden
14) power lines via magnification
hidden tracks by Soundless Glove Camp:
15) ?
16) ??
17) Fuck 'em Today!
18) Mr. Connor's sandbox
19) We're done, we're going to High School
Silence Camp rules.
My next post will talk more about Glove...I have a lead...maybe.
