A Citizen's Guide To Getting Into Natural Snow Buildings (Part 4)

In the Natural Snow Buildings universe, the Moon seems to represent light and the Sun seems to represent darkness.

Disc 1 of NSB's 2006 album, The Dance of the Moon and the Sun, subtitled Moon, was filled with (mostly) melodic and pretty sounds, although there were some dark and spooky passages.  Overall, despite its subtitle, the tone of the second disc, subtitled Sun, is darker and more sinister than the first, although occasional rays of light emerge at times. Most of Disc 2 could serve as the soundtrack for a horror film.  There's even a track titled John Carpenter, the horror director who scored most of his own films.  

The Sun disc opens with the track Tupilak.  Inuit lore and superstition play a role in a lot of NSB albums and song titles, and in Greenlandic tradition, a Tupilak is an avenging monster given life by ritualistic chants, and then placed into the sea to seek and destroy a specific enemy.  The beast is fabricated by a witch or shaman using various objects such as animal bone, skin, hair, or sinew and even body parts taken from the corpses of children (recall that the first extended drone on Disc 1 was titled Cut Joint Sinews and Divided Reincarnation).  The spooky Tupilak is followed by the song Wandering Souls and then an extended drone piece, the sinister-sounding but impressive A Ten Guardian-Spirits Motherfucker.  

The sheer quantity of NSB's output - the number of albums and the length of so many of the tracks - is the first roadblock most people have to overcome to appreciate Natural Snow Buildings.  The dark, spooky, and even occasionally ugly tracks such as those on the Sun disc are the second.  After the pleasing, pastoral drones like Wisconsin on the first disc, it can be a bit disconcerting for the casual listener to encounter these darker pieces - it's like discovering half-way through that what you thought was a romantic comedy was actually a slasher flick.  The track Whose Eyes Are Flowers isn't a soundtrack for an imaginary horror film, it is a horror film in and of itself.  I don't know the context or the background for the spoken field recording in this track, but I'm confident that the less I know bout it the more comfortable I am.  It's some pretty dark shit.

 

This is part of the allure of Natural Snow Buildings.  They don't pamper the listener or try to seduce with lots of soothing and pretty sounds (this ain't no new age band), although there no no shortage of such, but instead occasionally shock and awe the listener with abrasive textures, jarring and abrupt changes, and dark, spooky themes.  Witchcraft, Inuit legends, and film fandom all play major parts in the NSB universe.  If instead of being turned off, you approach these dark materials with an open mind and appreciate the originality and diversity of their craft, it makes their discography more, not less, enjoyable.  

Miles Davis used to title some of his compositions after people, especially in his electronic, On The Corner period, usually for musicians in his bands (John McLaughlin, Mtume, etc.) or musicians he admired (Billy Preston).  NSB follow suit, but instead of fellow musicians, they title their songs for movie characters, horror-film directors, and fringe personalities.  In addition to John Carpenter, there are tracks on Disc 2 titled Mary Brown and Gary Webb.  Recall that 2003's The Winter Ray had a track titled Mae Brussell for the radio talk-show conspiracy theorist, and a song title on Ghost Folks referenced Harry Powell, Robert Mitchum's character in Night of the Hunter.

Mary Brown was a character in The Blair Witch Project (1999).  A fictional resident of Burkittsville, Maryland, Mary Brown claimed she once saw the Blair Witch near Tappy East Creek in the form of a hairy, half-human, half-animal beast (a tupilak?).  Mary was considered crazy by the residents of Burkittsville, and her claims to have been both a ballerina, a historian, and a scientist who does research at the Department of Energy lent credence to the residents' accusations.

Gary Webb was an American investigative journalist and the subject of the film Kill The Messenger (2014).  Webb was best known for his Dark Alliance series, which claimed that the Contra rebels of Nicaragua played a major role in creating the crack cocaine trade with the knowledge and protection of the CIA.  The series provoked outrage and there are many conspiracy theories about his alleged "suicide" in 2004 (not one, but two bullet holes were reportedly fired into his skull).

Which is not to say Disc 2 is not without its pleasures.  There are, in fact, many pleasures to be found in Disc 2, including the dark and sinister portions if you adjust your mood and expectations.  This applies not only to the second half of TDOTMATS, but to the rest of the extensive Natural Snow Buildings discography as well.