MP3: Matt Bauer – “Don’t Let Me Out”
In 1968 a young woman was found dead along a dirt road near Eagle Creek, north of Georgetown, Kentucky. For thirty years, she was known only as ‘Tent Girl’, the name given to her by the Kentucky Post & Times Star because she’d been found wrapped in canvas resembling a tent bag. This album is a series of overlapping narratives inspired by her story as re-imagined to incorporate imagery and locales from Matt Bauer’s rural Kentucky upbringing. These songs explore what it means to be home and to be lost, what it means to pass from life to death.
The Island Moved in the Storm takes its name from a stretch of gravel and shale in a bend of Triplett Creek where Bauer grew up. After a hard rain, the island would “move” and change shape, adapting to the new flow of water. The album reflects this vision of impermanence and fleeting beauty not only in the songs that take the island as their setting, but also in songs that expand into the wider world: The woods have “scatters of deer tracks frozen in the mud” and wild horses are glimpsed for a moment before they scatter into the trees along a shoreline. Human hair is spread around a garden to keep out rabbits only to be woven into bird nests and carried away on the wind. Girls jump from a river bridge and “their hair floats up to heaven.”
But the world of this collection of songs is one of powerful indifference as much as passing beauty. A blacksnake crawls headless through grass and dandelions, perhaps the same white dandelions that later find a breeze “blowing off their heads”. A soldier lies wounded on a battlefield, imagining a mysterious figure with a string of bluegill, still gasping for air, hanging from her dress. As her mascara runs “like downed telephone wires” he asks her “are you the one / who has come to sew me up / and send me back out?” A boy likens the meeting of his parents to a spider trapping a fly, an image that insinuates an unbalanced relationship, but also, as is often the case in The Island Moved in the Storm, a sense of inevitability and natural order that is beyond judgement.
The musical arrangements retain the economy and space of Bauer’s previous recordings while expanding the palette of sounds and instrumentation. A range of musician friends from Bauer’s current Brooklyn base, and from the San Francisco Bay Area, contribute to the recording. These include Angel Deradoorian (Dirty Projectors), Alela Diane, Mariee Sioux, Greg McMullen (Chris Whitley), Elizabeth Dotson-Westphalen (St. Vincent), Nathan Wanta (Last of the Blacksmiths), Angela Webster (Rhett Miller), and longtime collaborator Frank Floyd.
Recorded in closets, living rooms, kitchens, attics, bathrooms and studios from San Francisco’s Mission District to Greenpoint, Brooklyn to Fayette County, Kentucky, The Island Moved in the Storm is none of those places and all of them at once: It is a moment of beauty, stolen from a fleeting world.
MATT BAUER
Fri 8/29/08 Union Pool Brooklyn NY
Thu 9/4/08 Johnny Brenda’s Philadelphia PA
Fri 9/5/08 Golden West Baltimore MD
Sat 9/6/08 Eaglewing Farm Chapel Hill NC
Mon 9/8/08 Pilot Light Knoxville TN
Tue 9/9/08 The End Nashville TN
Fri 9/12/08 Opolis Norman OK
Sat 9/13/08 The Cavern Dallas TX *
Sun 9/14/08 Emos Lounge Austin TX
Wed 9/17/08 Plush Tucson AZ
Thu 9/18/08 Hotel Cafe Los Angeles CA
Fri 9/19/08 Primary Concepts Davis CA
Sun 9/21/08 Luigi’s Fun Garden Sacramento CA
Wed 9/24/08 The Crepe Place Santa Cruz CA
Thu 10/2/08 Sunset Tavern Seattle WA +
Fri 10/3/08 Holocene Portland OR +
Sat 10/4/08 Yakima Sports Center Yakima WA
Thu 10/9/08 Vaudeville Mews Des Moines IA
Sat 10/11/08 AV-Aerie Chicago IL
Mon 10/13/08 Cinemat Bloomington IN
Thu 10/16/08 Al’s Bar Lexington KY
Fri 10/17/08 Cafe Bourbon Street Columbus OH
Sat 10/18/08 Club Cafe Pittsburgh PA #
* = w/ Evangelicals
+ = w/ Horse Feathers
# = w/ Woven Hand
The Island Moved In The Storm
(La Société Expéditionnaire)
Street Date: Sept. 2, 2008
1.Sheltering Dark
2.Barn Owl
3.Don’t Let Me Out
4.Rose And Vine
5.As She Came Out Of The Water
6.Blacksnake In The Carport
7.(He Asks The Figure) Are You The One
8.Old Clothes
9.We Drove To Highbridge (Glass Insulators)
10.The Silver Cloud
11.The Island Moved In The Storm
12.Florida Rain
13.Foxgloves
14.Old Kimball
15.You Were Saying Goodbye
16.Corolla (The One You Love)
MATT BAUER LINKS:
Myspace: www.myspace.com/mattbauer
Press Materials: www.la-soc.com/islandmovedpreview.html