New EP Trilogy
This year’s music project is a 3 EP trilogy based on old pagan archetypes and how they persist in the modern world. Maiden, Mother, Crone is a set of EPs to be released in April, July and October 2014. Pre-orders opened on Feb 4th on Bandcamp, and anyone pre-ordering will be posted their copy before the actual release date. Order yours at bandcamp and support indie music. Click on the player below to listen.
The Music
The
“Crone” EP is the first release in the trilogy. It is a collection of
songs made from vocal loops and tribal drums, and told from the
perspective of a character I have used before, and call “the old
woman”. It’s deliberately unimaginative as a name ;) as it is meant to
show how we lump all “off the radar” people into one generic category,
without giving them the chance to become a specific self. “The Old
Woman” first appeared in the ghost story / murder mystery “Remembering
the Dead” and does actually have a very distinct character. it is this
character I take onto the EP. The Old Woman is political because she
can be. She is often ignored and marginalised, but because of that, she
feels free to speak her mind. Sometimes speaking her mind gets her
attention. Sometimes it results in further marginalisation. She is also
somewhat angry: angry that she feels she has as much life in her as she
ever had, but that her own face and body betray her - by inviting
opinions to the contrary from others.
The themes of
assessment, moral judgement, and body alteration have all been magnets
for me in choosing which songs go on which EP. Some of the songs are
sung as a male protagonist, from his view on the central character and
what she means/ represents to him. Others are sung from the
protagonists perspective themselves, or other women reflecting (with
various degrees of insight, or lack thereof) on their own situation in
regards to their life stage.
Background - Your Mum is a Wealth of Info and
Experiences.
The
Maiden Mother Crone trilogy is 3 sets of songs grouped according to how
women are perceived at their various life stages. The Maiden Mother
Crone motif is an old one, but in talking to my mother about her
experience of old age, I realised that whilst images of women over the
years may have shifted, ways of viewing and constructing women are
still very tied to old age-based ideas.
Two comments from my mum were the catalysts. The first was when she
said:
"Every
day I get up, still feeling like this same self I have dragged around
the planet for decades, and then I look in the mirror and think ‘WHo
the f’##k is this old woman? Is that seriously me?’".
For
me, her comment says that her own physicality is confusing to her. She
herself sees old age as invoking certain ideas on how and who one is
meant to be. If we have wrinkles, we are expected to be a different
kind of character than if we don’t. If we don’t feel old (and my mother
is certainly one of the most alive people I know) then our inner ideas
of who we are come into conflict with what we are led to beleive the
facts of our physical age imply.
The second comment my
mother made was about visiting the supermarket, where she had to return
an item only minutes after buying it. It broke on the way out of the
store. On returning to the sales clerk (a man in his early to mid 30s),
with the item, barely 2 minutes later, my mother said
"I just
bought this a minute or so ago, and it broke on the way out of the
shop. Could I grab another?". The man looked at her blankly, then
replied that he didn’t remember serving her at all.
"It was like I was invisible or something", mum told me.
Hello Every-Body
What
my mothers experience shows - and she said this to me herself - is that
once our attractiveness in societal terms diminishes, we actually fall
off the radar for many people. Her own invisibility, my mother noted,
was a direct product of her being uninteresting to the sales clerk. Her
being uninteresting was quite likely linked to her not being
“attractive” to him. If she had been a woman his age, with a slim
figure and styled hair, he would far more likely remember her. For him
however, she was not memorable in any way at all. She didn’t get to
even register as existent because she was not first attractive.
Society,
for men and women alike, still structures our characters primarily in
terms of our physicality. For women, our physicality also dictates
whether we will be paid attention to or not. To be considered a person,
or competent at what we do, we must first be considered attractive
enough. It’s like the admission test. If we don’t make that first
hurdle, we simply do not register as being. We see this in politics
where women politicians are criticised for their looks (before their
competence is even considered), whilst men are criticised only if they
do something unpopular in their actual jobs. We are, by commenting on a
woman’s looks first, asserting that women should not enter into areas
of competence unless they meet the criteria of attractiveness. In
short, women are still meant to be attractive first and foremost. Men,
these days, have a massive pressure to be attractive too, but what they
do can still count even if they are not good looking. An “unattractive”
man still gets to be visible.
There is actually a positive
side to my mothers story. Being deemed invisible has another edge to
it. It gives you a certain amount of leeway. As an inherently shy
person, my mother often bottled what she felt for fear of being told it
was not acceptable to disagree. Nowadays, she relays stories of a
new-found confidence to say whatever the hell she thinks. Loudly. Being
outside “the gaze” in everyday encounters, she can voice opinions she
didn’t dare utter before. She will tell the local government
representative doing his pre-election speech that his talk is “A bunch
of useless waffle with every tired old trick of rhetoric in it”. She
will tell the pompous ex lecturer in her book club group that he is
“full of sh#t”. All things she would never have done before.
Why?
"Cos
I know he doesn’t care what I think", she says, "He will probably just
write it off anyway, and it feels so good to actually be able to say
it. I get to be myself more if I say it. So I say it".
Where Facts Meet Fiction (yup, it’s always been my shtick ;)).
Physical
change with age is an unavoidable fact. What isn’t an unavoidable fact
is set of symbols and narratives we tie to physical age. Our society’s
beauty ideal is very homogenised (thanks to the all pervasive nature of
advertising) and it happens to be young - as evidenced by the massive
success of beauty products that offer “anti ageing” effects. Seeking
eternal youth via altering our faces and bodies means we do not have to
face invisibility, or the moral/ public narratives placed on the mother
figure. Persuig eternal youth is, of course, a futile pursuit. I used
to wonder why people bothered, but as I too get older, I realise that
the ageing itself is not the key issue - it is the set of narratives
and symbols (old and new) with which people assess our value and
character based on that age:
In capitalist culture, the idea
of constant and full control over the body is a multi million dollar
industry. We are told that the body can be altered, if we only work
hard enough. This “working hard enough” has the added effect of linking
looking attractive with being hard working, and therefore “good”. In
other words, our physical appearance also has a moral element attached.
If I have worked hard to attain my looks, I am therefore “good” in some
way. The belief that science and personal perseverance will not fail us
results in the idea that there is no excuse for not looking good. We
can therefore make something of a moral judgement on those who do not
look attractive - they are “not trying hard enough”.
As
someone every bit as effected by pressures to be a certain way in order
to be “visible”, I think we all owe it to each other, as people, to
look more closely at why we feel a certain way about some people over
others. Why do we not take person x seriously? why do we think person Y
is of “weak character”? Why are we more inclined to personally tell the
pregnant women that it is not OK to slap their child than we are to
personally tell the football hooligan that punching someone in the
teeth is somewhat antisocial?
At some point, age and death
catch up with us all. It is something we cannot control. What we can
control is our assumptions - if we look closely enough at them.
Eventually too, we will be the ones on the receiving end of the
marginalisation of the elderly. Our daughters will have to go through
the assertions of their worth or worthlessness based on impossible
beauty ideals.
To finish, an often repeated joke - but one that fits.
"If you ever need to remember how to spell the word "assume" - remember
it makes an "ass" out of "u" and "me".
Previous Releases
All 8 of Jordan's previous albums can be heard on Bandcamp in full.
The Annihilation Sequence
(2013)
A limited edition physical release (unlimited digital) of industrial,
EBM and darkwave tracks. Twisted, melodic and you can dance to it.
Signed and numbered by the artist. .
Children of a Factory Nation (2012)
Set in the crowded streets of London in the time of the
industrial revolution Children of a Factory Nation is the tale of
people straining to hold their lives together in a country turned
upside down by the invention of new machines.