THE WINGDALE COMMUNITY SINGERS “S/T”, 2005, Plain Records
Photo: Alec Soth Cemetery, Fountain City, Wisconsin, 2002
Rick Moody is one of the most known and appreciated contemporary American writers, author of The Ice Storm (1994) and Purple America (1996). In the first of his two albums released under the band Wingdale Community Singers, he is the author of beautiful lyrics, also playing and interpreting the songs of the album. With him are Hanna Marcus on piano and vocals and David Grubbs on guitar, piano and vocals. Former Squirrel Bait, Bastro and Gastr del Sol with Jim O'Rourke, Grubbs is one of the key figures in the Chicago music scene. Collaborator of Red Crayola, Brise-Glace, John McEntire, Bonnie Prince Billy, Niobe, Tony Conrad and Mats Gustafsson, he recorded solo short masterpieces in balance between melody and experimentation. In recent years he developed collaborations, in the context of sound art, with important media artists such as Anthony McCall, Angela Bullock and Doug Aitken. He also became the director of the Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) at Brooklyn College in New York.
The fifteen songs that give the album a country-folk array echo the great American musical tradition, from the Basements Tapes of Bob Dylan to avant and post rock lightings, making this record full of intimate tones, confidential and sensitive. The cover shot, taken from Alec Soth’s “Sleeping by the Mississippi” series, concerns about America itself, its spaces sometimes boundless, sometimes intimate and gathered; a service station in the snow with its back to a cemetery, a ray of sun touching the mountain, too shy to heat up. They are from the cold, silent and snowy landscape of Minnesota, to the crossing of Wisconsin, Iowa, Kentucky, Illinois, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Mississippi and Louisiana. Among these places there is the house where Johnny Cash spent his childhood in Dyess and the river where Jeff Buckley dived for the last time in Harbor Marina, Memphis. The book, which was very successful, tells the modernity that emerges, crosses and retraces the centuries old course of the strong verbal and visual tradition of this country. Alec Soth, author of this reportage on the “social” landscape made during several journeys along the great river, documents the everyday and the extraordinary story of these areas of the United States. Almost like a sad dream projected into the coming days.
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LINKS
Wingdale Community Singers
Rick Moody
Rick Moody (The Ice Storm, Garden State) reads during Walt Whitman Writers Series at St. Francis College
Video interview 'BOMBsessions: Wingdale Community Singers, Willing Sense of Disbelief', 2010
The Return of the Wingdale Community Singers, Music performance and discussion, 2009
Alec Soth (website)
Little Brown Mushroom (LBM)
ASX Interview with Alec Soth, 2015
Still from the video interview 'BOMBsessions: Wingdale Community Singers, Willing Sense of Disbelief', 2010
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