Ways of Reappearing
the Art of Kendra Smith
”If you get intimate with a piece of land you get super attached to its well-being. Part of the culture I experienced here is having this large piece of land, more than 30 acres of wooded hilly stuff and a very small part of that is dedicated to humans, the rest is dedicated to whatever life belongs there – from owls to salamanders to whatever Earth Spirits you might believe live in nature. Old gods retreat to places that are uninhabited so we leave most of it alone except to walk it” ~ Kendra Smith
A month or so ago I was in a conversation with fellow metamusicologist Duane Zarakov about the shoegaze revival, or rather about the way that once you notice it, there are hints of the shoegaze sound in everything today, and Duane pointed out that there were traces of this Limey sound on the other side of the Atlantic, in the work of Mazzy Star and their precursor band Opal, whose song ‘Magik Power’ he shared with the note “kinda crypto-shoegaze with t rex & hawkwind elements”. Which led me to close examination of Opal’s LP Happy Nightmare Baby, which does in fact meet that description, Marc Bolan’s choogle is present on several songs, which stretch to space-rock dimensions; Happy Nightmare Baby is an organic North American synthesis of UK psych and krautrock influences, rendered into desert hippy drone jams that turn out to be songs, like the Doors on a ritual trek through Area 51 on the hunt for a saucerful of secrets. The motherlode, then, of US post-psych psych. It was then 1987. Kendra Smith is the singer of most of the Happy Nightmare Baby set, sharing centre stage with Dave Roback’s heavy electric slide guitar. The album has a live-in-the-practice room vibe, because the instruments aren’t especially separated (maybe why it has that shoegaze sound), the synth, coming up from under the arrangements, sounds like the 60’s instrument Dorothy Moskowitz described as “an instrument on its own terms, not a means of duplicating the sound of something else”, and the keyboard sounds include a very cool, somewhat witchy electric harpsichord towards the end.
Kendra Smith left Opal during the Happy Nightmare Baby tour, throwing her guitar down on the stage and making her exit. Somewhere on YouTube there’s an earlier video of Smith and Roback looking very awkward on a beach, and they don’t seem like people with any requirement for the limelight. They were therefore free to make music for its own sake, and for the sake of community, and I’m guessing Smith liked to keep it that way. After her departure Roback brought in Hope Sandoval, whom he’d recorded some years earlier, and whose laconic, druggy voice was a reasonable match for Smith’s; there’s a video of this lineup playing a satisfying version of the Happy Nightmare Baby set, plus a cover of Slapp Happy’s ‘Blue Flower’ (given her tastes, this obscure song was probably brought into the Opal repertoire by Smith) which will appear on the band’s album once they’ve renamed themselves Mazzy Star and adopted a softer, more Americana sound. The rest is history, by which I mean that Mazzy Star enjoyed a brief fame in indie circles, and that ‘Fade Into Me’ is probably a song you can sing on karaoke night if you want to; if you’re reading this, you’ve probably heard it.
Prior to Happy Nightmare Baby Smith had played bass in the punk band Suspects (making her subsequent work post-punk, a surprising concept in US terms but one we’ll need to return to) and the Dream Syndicate, who alongside Dave Roback’s band the Rain Parade (whose albums Smith had sung on) were part of the “paisley underground”, a US psychedelic revival scene; to my British-tuned ears the “paisley underground’ acts sound more like Byrdsy folk-rock than psych, expect for Opal, who hit the mark so hard with that one LP that it’s still ringing. After Smith left Opal the band’s early singles and EPs and unreleased recordings were released as Early Recordings (1989).
Happy Nightmare Baby was, admittedly with a great deal of hindsight, a hard act to follow, and Mazzy Star wisely didn’t try. At some point Kendra Smith began living off the grid in the forests of Humboldt County in Northern California, the area represented in the 2018 film Leave no Trace. Smith’s most recent recording, ‘Moon Boat’, credited to Kendra Smith and the Magician’s Orchestra, plays over the end credits of Leave No Trace.
Smith has only occasionally emerged from deep forest obscurity post-Opal, first in 1992 with Kendra Smith Presents the Guild of Temporal Adventurers, a mini-LP on the Fiasco label, which probably few heard. The lyrics on Happy Nightmare Baby, a mixture of Smith’s and Roback’s writing, aren’t very audible, but Kendra Smith Presents the Guild of Temporal Adventurers is a collection of gentle love songs, including a cover of Can’s ‘She Brings The Rain’, which matches Smith’s own lyric to the Velvety ‘Waiting in the Rain’.
Why don't you relax your mind
go with me down the streams of time
leave your little girl world behind
then you'll seem too dark to shine
oh
you are so beautiful you're so strange
you leave me waiting in the rain.
Five Ways of Disappearing, which Smith released on the more famous, better-distributed UK label 4AD in 1995, is something else again lyrically, a song cycle of sci-fi fantasy lyrics and spiritual messages, set within, mostly, simple post-punk chord changes played on a mix of unusual acoustic instruments (Smith’s pump organ, M. Ali Yassemi’s Turkish drums) and sparingly, brilliantly deployed electric lead guitar and synths (the former on some songs mysteriously credited to “axis”; one wonders if this is a pseudonym for Roback, who was certainly capable of creating those sounds, but 1995 is a kind of information blackspot today, with magazines in decline, CDs dominant, and the internet in its infancy).
The opening track, ‘Aurelia’, makes many of the album’s points, opening as it does with a fresh-sounding synth (played by Temporal Adventurer, and Smith’s co-producer on this warm and clear-sounding album, A. Phillip Uberman), before acoustic drums begin playing the tom tom patterns I associate with Joy Division’s Closer period, over which Smith is playing a doumbek, the goblet drum that’s a symbol of the ceremonial music of Egypt.
The crickets are mute as she's floating past them
Aurelia is sailing away
She descends into Egypt in search of the treasure
The brilliance that once was her own
They clothed her in adamant which can crush iron
And took from her the bright robe1
It's a tale of mystery and imagination that reminds me of Clarke Aston Smith. Karen Schoemer and Ira Robbins in their review of the album in Trouser Press say “to get to Smith from the sound of Nico, hold the accent and raise the room temperature about fifteen degrees in tone and passion”, and this is just as true of her viewpoint and style in the lyrics to ‘Aurelia’. It’s nice to hear Nico’s influence in music that doesn’t sound derivative of her, not that anything really does.
I’ve been starting to prefer songs that get into it right away and get it over with in around two minutes, the speed of today, but Smith is an expert in letting good things take time, like the hotcake and wah-wah, on-the-edge sustained lead guitar that accompanies ‘Aurelia’ for its six minutes and tips into florid psychedelic shredding by its end.
‘Drunken Boat’ is the Smith song that first wowed me, a confident rewrite of Arthur Rimbaud’s masterpiece over a bounding, jazzy bassline, another song in which a woman journeys downriver, with unusual lead guitar affects.2
Down to the sea in a drunken boat
No one can get to her tearing up the words she wrote
Down impassable rivers
What does she care for a crew
Light as a cork she is dancing
On the waves of the deep sunk dead
‘Temporarily Lucy’ has a melody that reminds me of 60’s US folk-pop act The Cyrkle.3 The magical live recording below would be released as a single, ‘Morning Becomes Eclectic’, with an interview with Smith on the flipside; then, she wouldn’t be heard from again until 1998, when she played a solo set at the Terrastock 2 concert (in three parts, accompanying herself on pump organ, bohemian tar ((a gourd lute)), and acoustic guitar) ; then, silence till 2017, when she sang the song ‘Kendra’s Dream’ for a reformed Dream Syndicate; ‘Moon Boat’ appeared a year later. Then, silence. Or rather, the sound of the birds and the insects, of rivers and rain, and the wind in the trees, and within that, more music, music that may, or may not, be recorded and sent to our hearing, some day.
The Joy Division homage I noted on some tracks of Five Ways of Disappearing is confirmed when one finds Smith, with the same band, covering ‘Heart and Soul’ on the tribute album A Means to an End: The Music of Joy Division, also 1995. The acoustic drums, replicating Steve Morris’s jerky pattern without any of Martin Hannet’s tricks, loosen it up and improve it.
I was surrounded by factories and nothing that was pretty, nothing. I mean, I don’t think I saw a tree till I was nine.~ Bernard Sumner
Slow post-punk style is formal, ceremonial, and serious and gives Smith’s lyrics, with their ritualistic elements, the gravitas needed; Joy Division’s derived from Ian Curtis modelling his delivery on Jim Morrison’s, Kendra Smith, who treadles a similar path on her pump organs, is also taking Morrison’s protégé Nico, into consideration. There’s an American Gothic tinge in her music, but positivity keeps working away in there and the direction is ultimately up. All of the traits, and some of the flaws, of post-punk songwriting are definitely present, but they’re redeemed by Smith’s unique inversion of priorities, producing music that’s sui generis and unmistakably real.
Judge Not
speak hardly at all love and Act
for that is your Will
abandon fruits of the work
Every action offering
Initiate to be transformed
Indicates Regeneration
Judge not speak hardly at all |
love and Act for that is your Will
self-conquest failures and
Disappointment and renewal
Abandon fruit of the work indicates regeneration
She said I have two perfect words
Perfect love and perfect trust
Know them truly if you please
Disregard them if you must
After listening to Smith’s music on YouTube the algorithm suggested Courtney Barnett’s ‘Depreston’, which makes sense in terms of tones and textures, but if AI ever learns to read the human soul it might suggest one of Martin Bramah’s bands, Blue Orchids or Factory Star, for further examples of nature mysticism in post-punk settings.
The vocal meter of ‘Aurelia’ also reminds me of Syd Barret’s ‘Swan Lee (Silas Lang)’ from the 1988 album Opel, the album Opal took their name from.
Arthur Rimbaud: French, boy genius, proto-beat, the supreme symbolist poet, lover to Paul Verlaine and Patti Smith, who quit poetry in 1875, at the age of 20, to run guns in the Horn of Africa.
Managed by Brian Epstein and named by John Lennon, the Cyrkle supported the Beatles on their 1996 US tour, and made frequent use of the electric sitar. Check out their 1968 song Red Chair Fade Away.