Three Six Oh
The Olympia Scene. DTA.
There were different facts and myths and rumors that cropped up the longer I lived there. It was the early-mid ’00s and Olympia was past its prime, but in that exciting way where the earth felt scorched clean and ready for something new. Stick around Washington’s capitol long enough and you’d figure out that the sushi place with the cheap handrolls was actually incredible, that if you navigated around the crust punks sharing store bought vanilla cakes with their dogs, you could drink from a spring of fresh water that bubbled up right in the middle of a shitty parking lot. Word was, doing that made you a true Olympian, so I avoided the water even on the hottest day because I didn’t want to feel like my fate was tied to a small town. I’m not and was never superstitious about anything, but it didn’t seem worth the risk. Put up a ladder and I will walk under it. Watch me.
There was the dentist who bought five houses and painted them black and everyone at Old School Pizza was always saying you could trace the houses on a map and it would create a pentagram. Also the dentist drove a hearse or used to drive one, or drove one once. The story changed. Legendary guys in bands lurked the Brotherhood. It was easy to accidentally have a beer with someone from Unwound. To catch an impromptu Microphones show. To see an underground rapper at the coffee shop. You could take a kayak to a house party.
Still, Olympia was mostly frustrating for me—a place that I respected. A place that meant something before me, and meant something different that I couldn’t access in the brief years I lived there. A place that I found overly homogenous and cut off because I was young and wanted more. I’d appreciate it now, I’ll bet. One time, interviewing Khaela Maricich from The Blow, I tried to commiserate about why I thought Olympia kinda sucked. She didn’t agree. It was awkward. One time, interviewing Phil Elverum, he accidentally punctured a hole in the nostalgic mythology I’d built up around Olympia—the place where I discovered The Microphones’ The Glow Pt 2 and listened to it constantly as the fur trees bent long and low under the weight of dark winter—by agreeing with me that Olympia had its faults. Safe to say, I came out more on the Courtney Love side of Olympia discourse. From Hole’s “Rock Star”: “Well I went to school in Olympia and everyone’s the same. We look the same. We talk the same.” Safe to say, Olympia was/is better than Courtney and I remember it, even though we weren’t there at the same time.
One thing: Olympia cranks out a lot of great music. Bad music too, but that’s beside the point: this small town with a college, a capitol, and a small but robust center, has been home to a frankly shocking amount of genius artists, visionaries, and brilliant music makers. It never changes. Recently, the band Daisies released Great Big Open Sky, an album of trip-hop accented PNW folk that manages to evoke the foggy mornings of Olympia while also making what basically amounts to ’90s pastiche. It veers a little too theatrical for me at times, but the album’s opening track is, for my money, about as good as music gets.
“Glistening” is a melancholic, tense and nervous track that manages to be expansive instead of tightly wound, pairing whispered vocals against brushed drums—it sounds intimate, close, but carefully written too: little guitar lines drop in and out, digital sonar pings beep over the top. This is a song that has been labored over. It has been constructed. It feels completely apart from the purposefully naive, consciously sloppy music that Olympia made its name as a musical town off of. Instead, this is dark, half-lit introspective music. Lonely and paranoid and gorgeous.
If you like black metal that sounds like watching a cloud cross an extremely bright moon on a damp, cold evening, then you’ll probably dig Desolation’s Flower, the new album from Ragana, the Olympia duo who layer guitar crust on top of furious drums and layers of sculpted feedback. (Not for nothing, it’s easily one of the best albums of the year). If you don’t like black metal at all, you’ll probably still like Ragana, who approach the genre from a textural standpoint, not unlike the years where Phil Elverum experimented with lo-fi black metal—think his Black Wooden Ceiling Opening EP or 2009’s excellent, under-discussed Wind’s Poem, as well as the work of another Olympia black metal duo: Wolves in the Throne Room. The common thread (besides the fact that they recorded the album in Anacortes, where Elverum is from, and borrowed a gong from him) between these acts is the way they use the black metal genre as an exploration of tone and texture and how we relate to the natural world. This is music that is murky by design: individual elements blend in to each other, and instruments lose their specific characteristics in favor of a general sense of propulsion. Even on the quieter dark folk tracks, there is a real sense that this album exists in communion with nature, with the relentless drive to keep going, keep evolving. To keep moving at all costs. I hear it as an album about the end of humanity, but rather than sitting with static frustration, Ragana make it clear that the natural world will exist long after we’re gone. In the meantime, though, DTA.
I was JUST talking about the dentist painting houses black!! I forgot about mapping the pentagram. Someone did tell me that one of their friends lived in a house the dentist bought, and how she woke up one morning to a phone call from the dentist where he just said “welcome to the dark side” and then she went outside and saw that the house had been painted black overnight. Sadly I had seen enough houses painted to know that you can’t paint a house in the dark and you also can’t do the job in one night HOWEVER it is a great story. Thanks for this Sam, such a joy to read