Black Fungus Redux
Artifical intelligence told me my music is steampunk. Could this robot be right? Considering the myriad of musical influences from my early days, there might be some logic to it. There was punk, with Joe Strummer of the Clash as a major influence on me. I also went to concerts by the Swans, Billy Bragg and bought vinyls of the Exploited and the Slits. As for industrial music, Michel and I flew to a concert by Einsturzende Neubauten because we cared that much.
Once upon a time in the early days Michel and I formed an improvising duo we named Black Fungus. We were eating delicious hot and sour soup while thinking up a band name and that ingredient stood out to us. Because it’s dark and it grows. Our purpose was punk at its core, to confront the negative and expose it, aiming to free ourselves from it. A good example is Wild Howls that appears on Opera of the Unspoken: Island of Unrest, a cathartic release of nightmares from ancestral trauma that took me decades to understand fully.
And as for the Victorian part of the steampunk label, I spent much of my youth engrossed in Victorian literary classic novels written by women. I sing the poetry of the Bronte sisters with free jazz improvisers because the juxtaposition feels right to me. In these days of tags, playlists and genres and ai tools perhaps there are more slots to fit into.
Now, after the horrors of the pandemic, the climate crisis and with the disturbing rise of right wing movements worldwide, especially just south of the border, it feels important to state our shock again. So we are embarking on a revival of our duo, aided now with new technology to rattle out even more sounds than before, steamy or punk or what have you. We tried to come up with a new name, new colours, new organic elements, but Black Fungus Redux is the most accurate description.
Our first new track, Ocean Anthem, is inspired by a dream I had after kissing a dolphin. That gesture opened floodgates of communication in another realm. The dolphin and the whales that appeared had dark stories to share. You can listen to that here!
Our second track is titled Languages Lost and you can order it at my Bandcamp page!
In this new piece I’ve revisited music from the past and twisted and turned it into something new, at the same time as collaborating along with it and continuing a conversation and ideas that were shared at that time. So often in music performance we presume to operate in a very linear fashion, writing music then performing it and then listening back to that recorded performance. But in working with samples, snippets, pieces of music and then reconstructing them we can take that original energy and shape it in new ways with infinite possibilities.
The central concern within this piece is the loss of ancestral languages and honouring them. How many languages have been lost between a few generations? In my family, nomadic and multi-racial, it numbers about five languages lost between three generations. They are not lost to the world, just to our individual family members although certainly a few of these languages are endangered.
And what are the forces in our lives that contribute to these losses? The internal layering of languages, one upon another, feels like colonization and perhaps that gives us a clue as to how to decolonize ourselves. As I walked through the snowy city of Montreal, between the albino squirrels and patches of ice, I considered this question and whose land I was treading upon. And which languages I might using while asking that would honour the answer. Michel’s drum beat flows beneath, fluid and eternal, in reply.