Infinite Jest
For me a man’s meaning, the reason he has to keep on living, is that were he to live thousands of years he would never fulfill all his possibilities, never communicate or create all that he is capable of. So he must use what time he has creating now for the future and utilize the past only to help the future, not as a razor strop for guilts and fears that inhibit his very being.
Nat Hentoff, writing to Charles Mingus in the late 1950’s, quoted in Mingus’s Beneath the Underdog, 1971
Once upon a more boring time, a time in which boredom, an emotion now all but extinct except in a figurative sense, held long sway, there was a long morning TV show, of the type known as a magazine show, hosted by Mary Lambie and, unless you had a boring job, there was nothing else to do all morning long but to watch it.
A highlight was the interview with a lonely man who, while dying of boredom, had been visited by aliens. He had even taken a polaroid photo of one of the aliens, which he showed to Mary Lambie and the cameraman, and it looked like nothing so much as a very blurry picture of his thumb. The brightest spot of all those long years was the appearance of a two-piece band called Cassette, which provoked thoughts of “how did this slip though” although the alien photography episode had already made clear that the show’s producers were not too particular as to how they filled the long long hours of morning; all such mornings now gone forever it seems. Cassette’s music was a bit wonky but there was something there, a hint of good songwriting, too much originality – the signs of promise.
Later I learned that Vorn Colgan had been half of this duo. And by that time, I was already a fan. I was introduced to Vorn’s work by Andrew Matai when I launched my own work on Andrew’s Powertool Records label, the place you go when you have no idea how to promote yourself or distribute your work and have given up trying. Andrew has long given loving attention to the waifs and strays even other indie labels won’t take in, and Vorn has been his finest catch. Some song of mine appeared on a Powertool sampler CD alongside Vorn’s ‘Black Forest Clocks’ and I was struck at first listen by the songwriting (and the great guitar solo). ‘Black Forest Clocks’ fills out the common adolescent fantasy of you and some otherwise unattainable love-object being the sole survivors of some event that kills off the rest of humanity.1
Welcome to Dystopiaville, population us
All the boys you used to fancy now are particles of dust
Finally this quiet earth is ours and only ours
Trash and tumbleweeds are blown between the corporations’ towers
Oh honey, would you wait
Honey, would you wait for me?
The album this appears on, Vorn and The, is one of my and my family’s favourite albums, and a most-played CD on car trips when the kids were little (when you finish playing it, don’t be impatient, wait for the hidden track behind ‘Hidden Sky’) full of clever and funny, but never flippant, indeed often quite trenchant, angry or sad, songs, played with great skill across multiple genres; these include the classic rap ‘I’m Wicked and Everybody Else is Shit’ which is up there with the best of Scribe, the sci-fi parable ‘We Were So Proud Part 1’, and two songs about the Kiwi culture of bullying, something every nation of the world practices differently, but imposes on the same minority – the misfits, extra marks if they happen to be intelligent. In ‘You Throw Like a Girl’ we get the basic schoolground form of this art:
When I was young, the evil children used to laugh at me
Because I could not catch a ball that they had thrown
Now I can catch a ball with one hand tied behind my back
And all those cunts have evil children of their own
And you may tell me that I chose a stupid reason not to breed
But I would rather have no child than have him meet their evil seed
Vorn is a serious student of Kiwi culture, using culture in the snot-in-a-petri dish sense of the word, and the most touching song on Vorn and The, ‘Stop Crying (and drive the van Jefri)’ shows how bullying can become internalized till its tropes become a language of love between misfits who have found each other.
I recorded that version of ‘Stop Crying’ with Fray Mysterioso in 2020 when it seemed likely that Vorn himself, diagnosed with a brutal and thoughtless terminal cancer, might not make another album or another year, and Andrew Matai organized some fans on Powertool to record a tribute album, Vorn: They Don’t Know You Like We Do, by way of encouragement. It seemed to work, when supplemented with some advanced medical treatments.
With his life extended indefinitely, but probably not nearly as indefinitely as yours or mine, Vorn continued to write and record songs with his bandmates Thomas Liggett (violin and vocals) and Nick Brown (drums and vocals) – playing everything else himself with a Prince-like degree of proficiency – and in December 2023 released the results as The Late Album, his first album release in nearly a decade, and it’s not only a worthy sequel to his best work, but also an engaging concept album about his relationship with death Death. Vorn’s métier is the humorous song, so it’s a black comedy, but black comedy has long been a feature of his work and he has no trouble showing us round his current, and our future, prospects while making the kind of wisecracks that are how the light gets in.
The Late Album opens with a proper classical fanfare, a short composition of rising themes (curiously, less versatile than falling ones in human music composition) once used to pump up the mood on occasions of state. For comparison, here's a very short modernist example; 18 seconds, counting the fade, of piano music composed early in 1940 by Vitezslava Kapralova (1915-1940).
And here’s Vorn’s ‘Fanfare For An Album That Beat Terminal Cancer’, which introduces The Late Album’s theme in 1 minute and 13 seconds of rock band arrangement.
This flourishing classical nous is consistent with the occasional touch of prog grandeur or abnormal time signature, which sit alongside forays into grizzled folk shanties (‘Ballad In G-Sharp Minor’), motoric post-punk (‘The Unbearable Dumbness Of Being’), some satisfying metal riffing on the long coda of ‘Somebody Wrote A Prog Song About The Internet And It Is🔥’, classic Kiwi indie rock (‘Drug Friends’), and more than one perfect pop song (‘Safe Pair Of Hands’, ‘The Future is Trash’).
One of the writers who inspired me when I set out to write Songs From Insane Times was Paul Morley, for his love of seemingly preposterous comparisons, his interest in the streaming ecosystem, and his willingness to take every train of thought again and again, in case it took him somewhere else, as it usually did. In A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love with Classical Music (and Decided to Rewrite Its Entire History), Morley described the classical stratum of near-death music – Strauss’s Four Last Songs and Mozart’s Requiem being well-known examples – in rock there’s Bowie’s Blackstar and Cathal Coughlan’s Song Of Co-Aklan2 – this is all top-shelf stuff, musicians can respond well to threats, as Stalin discovered, and some folk give us their best work in extremis, and on that theme; Vorn has risen to the challenge of describing the life he’s in, as he always did, now that there’s a shark in his tank and he knows that it’s sniffed him out.
This terror – foreboding is hardly the word - is the theme of ‘Safe Pair Of Hands’.
It’ll eat you
In the depths below the calm upon the surface
It is lurking, looking hungry
And if you let it
It’ll beat you
In its beady little eyes
A look of cold determination
Shines like steel
It’ll have you
Though your puny little limbs
Will thrash the water into foam
There ain’t nobody gonna save you
‘Safe Pair of Hands’ has a simple, yet sophisticated melody, one that easily stuck in my head after only a few listens, because Vorn has chosen to make the music the objective correlative of, not the terror in the lyric, but everyman’s unpreparedness for it; musically, it’s a song of hope, or at least of blissful ignorance. If Vorn’s lyrical flow has any match, it’s that of Courtney Barnett; another self-deprecatingly humorous examiner of the contradictions of ordinary slacker life, and I can imagine ‘Safe Pair of Hands’ in her voice – RIYL.
Faced with the imminence of death, what assumes an importance it didn’t before? On the evidence here, guilt for even the ordinary evils of a fairly decent life, tormenting our hero in the wee small hours, for example (there are others) these lines from ‘Somebody Wrote A Prog Song About The Internet And It Is🔥’
Remember all the bad things you said?
Remember all the bad things you did?
Well it’s 3 a.m. now
And they’re back to haunt you
(Which may have been written before Vorn’s diagnosis, and really be about the commonplace experience of finding that you’ve lost it on the internet at 3 am and nothing more, which only goes to show how all we experience - attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Mt Victoria, beams glittering in the dark near the ferry terminal - and all we create will get swallowed up by this big album concept one day.)
Also expressed on The Late Album, Vorn’s regrets for all the lives left unlived by perversely pursuing a doomed career in indie rock, because, face it, music is the biggest Ponzi scheme ever - you suckers all bought The Beatles, but The Beatles are not buying you.
And you build and you build and no one comes
And you build and you build and no one comes
And the days grow short and the nights grow long
And you build and you build and no one comes
A theme Vorn addressed previously, when in better shape physically but, quite possibly, not mentally, on ‘Stop Making Bedroom Albums’ on 2011’s Down For It:
And you’re probably not that good
Cos if you were you’d know by now
And there’s still time to get a life
But it’s surely running out
And the girls don’t like the boys
Who can’t afford a car
The girls don’t like the boys
Who’d rather starve to death than hang up their guitar
Down For It was indeed a downer of an album (far more so than The Late Album really) and contains one of Vorn’s gems, ‘Mental Health Issues In Newtown Part II’ which shows him in possession of a fine falsetto and a just-off-pop melodic sensibility that makes him at odd times New Zealand’s answer to Robert Wyatt.
Given all the fears and regrets swarming over him, as they will swarm over us all, what the heck can Vorn do?
Keep making bedroom albums!
Vorn’s long been an accomplished producer on his shoe-string budgets, and his bedroom albums are not scruffy or lo-fi things, but they are doggedly honest and authentic, which is what sets them apart, for good and ill, from the music people will actually pay for, the sounds of memetic desire, with their stodgy beats and their harmonies of lies. Even so, if it’s lies you want, and you probably do, buy a copy of Vorn and The for ‘I’m Wicked and Everybody Else is Shit’.
The Late Album looks at life, ordinary life in Te Motu, as often as it looks at death, and ‘Drug Friends’ is the best example of this, a clever parable about connection and finding the right way to value the people you know.
As I hinted earlier, Vorn is a hopelessly eclectic songwriter, and this presents a neat problem; variety is the spice of life, its pursuit is an artistic adventure, but at the same time, switches of genre threaten dramatic unity, the spell that the artist’s personality casts over our own. I was just getting into your jazz metal and you want to throw calypso at me? Who are you and why am I listening to you? A good artist gets away with this because their voice is strong; they don’t try to slip into characters that don’t exist within their psyches, and their instrumental colour maintains its constant threads; here, that’s Thomas Ligget’s violin, Vorn’s reedy, polyphonous voice, and his choice of synth tones. A particularly nice, example of this late Vorn sound is found on the off-album track ‘Double Grammar Zone – North’, the B-side of ‘Safe Pair of Hands’ – how endearing that someone is still tucking B-sides away behind their A-sides!
Vorn Colgan has been New Zealand's best-kept musical secret for so long now that it seems almost a shame to spoil it. – Simon Sweetman
But spoil it we must, if we can. Vorn has a better work story now, and he’s been moved into an even less privileged demographic; he’s the hero we need right now. I hope he sells enough downloads of The Late Album to pay for immortality, or at least the recording of another album, and so on, ad infinitum.
Algorithms of Immortality - My Child Is Alive! by Cathal Coughlan
See M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud for a novel-length version of this fantasy.
“The existence of death seems like such a glammy toy when you're 25. Now, not so much.” - Cathal Coughlan