Joke // Nice Days When Misremembered TAPE

アメリカ・ポートランドのコラージュジャズ作家Jokeが2021年4月に100本限定でリリースしたカセット。実験要素が極めて強いジャズ4曲を収録。DLコード付属。

Edition of 100.

From the artist:

"I put together whatever these sounds and ideas are while I was working at a park for a city years ago. I call myself a park ranger now when I speak about this job with others (which rarely happens) but, to put it simply, it was a situation similar to that of the film character Paul Blart (I’ve never seen the movie), where I was hired by a city to sit in a room in a park and tell people to stop doing things every once in a while (“Please put the turtle down, moving them is disorienting”). I had no real authority other than a uniform I never wore, so people didn’t really know why I was telling them what to do. The park itself was fairly empty because no one in the city really knew about it. It was a missile detection site during a period of geopolitical tension a while back, over time trees took over and the city turned it into a park.

Luckily for me, the park required an attendant be there at all times because two sad teen boys unsuccessfully tried to burn it down at some point and its close proximity to houses forced the city to hire one person at minimum-wage salary to sit in a ranger room in order to discourage arson. There were no real duties that the job required, I didn’t even have to maintain anything because, in a tediously Krasznahorkai-like twist, everything in the park rapidly began dying around the time I started working there. There was nothing to maintain or protect. All of the many trees were infested by some beetle due to prolonged drought, all the fish in the pond died due to an unkillable algae bloom, even the artificial streams that the city added back in the day had broken pumps, so they sat dry. Itinerant ducks would come and go because there was still one pond filled with water. People would bring pet turtles that they didn’t want anymore and throw them in the pond. That was pretty much it, as far as things I had to keep an eye out for. Other than that, I just worked on music in the ranger room. If there was an actual problem, I would ignore it or call someone from the city to fix it. There was a maintenance man who worked for the city, an old white guy in his 60s or so, who would come by every now and then when there was something to fix. He’d show up once every few months and we’d continue one long conversation that we’d been having.

He was originally from Mississippi (I’m originally from Louisiana) and he had a swamp lunatic vibe that I found extremely endearing, probably made even more endearing by how he would constantly talk about driving out to the desert, getting on ATVs, and rifling through burial sites to collect pottery. He collected all kinds of pottery, but prized what he got from burial sites the most. I was happy to hear about his pottery theories (“You gotta find this oily grass, it’s oily, that’s where they buried their people and their pottery, right there in the oily grass”). He was also into prospecting for gold, which was why he was closely following the mass beetle infestation killing all the trees in California. With never-ending fires there was a high likelihood that larger and larger swathes of dead tree land would be burned down, and if followed by intense runs of rain (again, highly likely), the land would be burnt, then washed, making it possible for him to step in and see if anything was glinting once the sun came out. He had this dream of doing something special with the money. He wanted to buy a specific drone (he told me the model but I don’t remember) and set it to fly over a point in the ocean that he knew was favored by whales, then have the drone film the whales. This footage would be livestreamed into his sunglasses while he was doing all of his maintenance duties, or while prospecting for gold after he retired. One day he said to me, with what can only be called a faraway look in his eyes (he was wearing sunglasses), in a thick Southern accent: “You see, this way, I can have the whales in my eyes at all times.” He said this to me while I was in the middle of working on a number of musical pieces in the ranger room, most of which were discarded because they weren’t much good, but I’d like to think that the misguided, unhinged yearning of this phrase of his carried its way into every part of the work that I thought was good. That’s generally not how these things work, but one can only hope.

The only other noteworthy person working for the park was much less interesting, a dying old man with the same position at the park that I had (the city, like most employers at the time, kept a lot of part-time employees to cut down on paying benefits). This guy had extremely serious health problems and, from my perspective, would just silently sit in a chair all day decomposing. Every time I saw him, there was some new and horrible physical ailment that he was peacefully sitting with behind a desk, in a chair, in the ranger room. He was a nice guy. I would say hello and then he’d tell me how he’d been, get up, leave, I would sit in that chair, take a laptop out, put it on that desk, work on some music, and then leave the ranger room. There were other noteworthy things that were happening in my life, in the park, in the city and in the world at large at the time this project was put together, but when I think about whatever these sounds are (which happens less and less as time passes), I think about this tedious, quiet, dying, sparsely attended space, staffed with maniacal or useless employees, a place whose inexplicably stupid and unnecessary existence gives it a totemic presence in my mind."

Artist : Joke

Label : Preference Records