This article originally appeared in our December/January 2015 print issue.

The Green Mountain State’s most famous musical product is almost certainly the jam band Phish. If that quartet, formed in Burlington in 1983, earned a reputation for playing extended improvisations and working in the spiritual and musical wake of the Grateful Dead, MV & EE took shape largely in the twenty-first century, in the southern end of the state around Brattleboro, still playing off many elements of the Dead’s legacy but with drastically different results.

Valentine and Elder are also a couple. Unlike Phish, MV & EE are unlikely to sell out Madison Square Garden anytime soon, but the duo operates on a whole other level, making deeply psychedelic, small-batch, boutique, esoteric folk music that’s tinged with noise. Or maybe it’s indie rock tinged with folk. Either way, their recordings and performances are highly improvisational and experimental. The music of MV & EE embodies a thread of the reality of their home state: it’s both earthy and spacey, and it’s all propelled by a spirit of intrepid self-reliance.

This year was a big year for Valentine and Elder. A new MV & EE double album, Alpine Frequency, came out in the summer, at about the same time Valentine released a solo double album as well. “They were both pretty large records,” says Valentine. “We try to make a record that someone ideally is going to go back to and revisit. So we try to make the album have a certain depth or trajectory. There were several years of work on both of them. Hopefully that will tide some people over for a while.”

Photo by Paul Specht

Valentine’s new record is called Midden Mound, which, if you’ve forgotten some of the terms from your college anthropology class, is basically a prehistoric trash heap made up of shells and bones and other stuff. It’s a meaningful pile of refuse, dense and old, yielding secrets to those patient and learned enough to sift through it. The title seems to fit right in with the concept of “sonic agriculture” Valentine has spoken of, a utilitarian, plow-sow-and-reap vision of music making, with natural forces and human labor producing fertile results.

“I can’t get out of the underground,” jokes Valentine about the record’s title. But then he adds, “I thought [the title] worked for that body of work specifically; it’s definitely the remains of a certain sonic settlement of mine.”

That’s not all just talk. Sound attains something close to physicality in Valentine’s solo work and in the music of MV & EE. The music and the recordings are more about textures and resonance than melody, lyrics, and song form. The attention to the physical extends to the packaging and marketing of the music as well. Both new records were pressed on vinyl in addition to being available in other forms, such as CDs and MP3s. The duo often creates limited-edition original artwork to go along with some of their small-batch releases or to bring to shows, to make each record one of a kind.

Valentine’s connections with recorded music—with vinyl in particular—go back to his formative musical experiences.

“I’ve always been around records,” he says. “My parents collected records. They had a record library. They encouraged me to use the turntable. I heard a lot of music growing up that was interesting to me. I worked at record stores since I was a teenager. I stayed working at record stores. I was a lifer, a record-store casualty.”

Selling records has never been the most remunerative line of work, and surviving by playing DIY avant-garage folk presents challenges. But Valentine and Elder approach the work with a flinty Yankee ethos. They are impressively prolific, releasing an average of two records a year, which brings their total to something like 32 since 2001. They also run a boutique record label that releases limited pressings of live recordings, packaged with original artwork. Oh, and they have a two-year-old daughter. So they keep pretty busy.

Elder does work as a freelance graphic designer, and she says their living space reflects the creative multitasking that goes on there. “You should see our house— it’s part house, part workshop. It’s all blended together,” she says.

MV & EE possess a particular kind of twenty-first-century musical eclecticism, drawing on the Old, Weird America of Harry Smith’s epic Anthology of American Folk Music, steeped in old-time music, country blues, and field recordings (the duo was asked to contribute a song to the highly regarded 2015 tribute record to English singer and folklorist Shirley Collins), and yet their work is also in conversation with some core ideas of contemporary classical music, minimalism, and free jazz.

Photo by Paul Specht

“That’s very natural,” says Elder. “If you look at our record collection, we’ve got our Carter Family and our Sonny Sharrock records right next to each other.”

She grew up in Virginia, where singing was a regular part of her extended family gatherings. “I kind of brought the Appalachia to the table,” Elder says. “I grew up thinking that everybody just got around the piano on Sundays and played different songs.” That included folk songs and plenty of religious material, sources that MV & EE have returned to.

“I played sax in elementary school,” says Valentine. “I got kicked out of the school band for trying to play like [keening iconoclastic saxophonist Albert] Ayler. I got booted.”

Valentine got one strand of his musical education for free by auditing classes in the Conservatory of Music at the State University of New York at Purchase, where several pioneers of experimental and computer music taught and where the homemade instruments of maverick composer Harry Partch were housed at one point.

Extended drones, ominous echoes, alternate tunings, dub effects, and spooky war whoops all make appearances on Valentine’s new solo record. Two-chord vamps attain a mystic density as they’re prolonged. It fits right in with the MV & EE oeuvre. The DNA of much of MV & EE’s material seems like it can be traced to either “Dark Star,” the Dead’s epic interstellar exploratory vehicle; “Cortez the Killer,” Neil Young’s mythic caveman-like protosludge masterpiece; and “If I Could Only Remember My Name,” David Crosby’s haunting and beautiful comedown opus. Those are good genes, at any rate.

Valentine and Elder make the most of what they call the global I-91 corridor—a joking way of referring to their spiraling network of friends, fellow musicians, and collaborators. And the town they live in, outside of Brattleboro, is something of a magnet for other creative people.

“We’ve been here for 13 years,” says Elder. “Everybody who lives in this area whom we’re friends with is here for the energy. It’s still a very important reason why we’re here.”

But the actual I-91 connection links them to likeminded artists from New Haven, Connecticut, through western Massachusetts and up through Vermont. Contributors to the new batch of records include J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. and Pete Nolan of art-noise trio The Magik Markers. And the band has recorded on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! record label, based in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

For MV & EE and for Valentine’s solo album, recording isn’t just a matter of heading into the studio with some tunes, some guitars, and rolling tape. Bits are recorded in Valentine and Elder’s home studio or sometimes at a friend’s place, or while traveling; then sometimes layers are added on elsewhere. Some tracks might take shape in a living room and others in a fancy studio. The setting needs to be conducive to improvisation, which is central to much of the duo’s work.

“I have pretty elaborate recording techniques deployed that we use now,” says Valentine. “And they’re primitive, too, in some cases. There are techniques used to sometimes make one performance sound like multiple ones. The mood of the moment was more important than the technicalities.”

MV & EE balance the raw and the refined, the overstuffed and the stripped down. “It’s sometimes very minimal, sometimes very maximal,” says Valentine.

Photo by Paul Specht

For all of their folk tendencies and pedigrees, MV & EE can also sound like a stoner rock outfit, with lumbering bass lines and bruising drumbeats anchoring their unison singing and slashing guitars, like on “Susquehanna (Sole Art Trample)” from 2007’s Gettin’ Gone. Though the deep psychedelic connection is clear, there’s also a classic rock aspect to some of MV & EE’s eclecticism. “Susquehanna (Sole Art Trample),” for instance, is followed by a song called “The Burden,” which has gentle finger picking and high, atmospheric pedal steel guitars. It’s a pairing that might be at home on Led Zeppelin III, where the howling stomp of marauding invaders gives way to soothing and dreamy acoustic songs rooted in traditional folk music. “I’m in such a trance state usually when I’m playing,” says Elder.

That textural and tonal perspective is what helps the music withstand repeated listenings. “We try to keep it interesting for ourselves as much as for people who might be hearing it,” says Valentine.

But—as with something like a Fela Kuti record, an Indian raga, or a piece of music by La Monte Young— sometimes the music of MV & EE and Valentine’s solo work are meant to possibly scramble one’s sense of time: to transport the listener into a slow-drip mindset, where a pattern repeating for 15 minutes somehow becomes more gratifying and meaningful than one that stops after 3 minutes. Sometimes that aesthetic can be at odds with the demands of the marketplace. Valentine had originally planned on making Midden Mound a triple record, but he decided to settle on a double album.

“I kind of peeled that concept back,” he says. But he will be releasing the material that would have been that third record as another single solo album in 2016.

Valentine and Elder don’t have an elaborate promotional machine behind them. They do much of the behind-the-scenes logistics themselves, booking and publicizing shows. So if people are possibly starting to hear their music more and know their name after years and years of productivity, it’s because the world is beginning to come around to them. The combination of heavy rock, obscure folk, and experimental music is perhaps less of a head-scratcher than it was 20 years ago. “People are a little more ready for what we’re doing now,” says Valentine. “People are catching up to the sound.”

One senses that being creative and productive is just the way Valentine and Elder live their lives, and they’d be playing music every day and handcrafting one-of-a-kind art to go with it whether or not they had fans and a career. “I just like to make things,” says Valentine. “It’s probably why I like living up here.”

MV & EE–musicians from Brattleboro, Vermont
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The post Small-Batch Mystical Folk Noise appeared first on Take Magazine.

On a brisk and sunny winter morning in Turners Falls, MA, sculptor Fafnir Adamites is at the beloved local spot, the Five Eyed Fox. She is tucked away on a bench, holding her morning cup of coffee, enveloped in sunlight. “It feels like spring in here, I can’t get enough,” she remarks. Adamites has lived in Turners Falls with her partner, sound artist Neil Young, for over a decade, collaborating together on installations, and embedding themselves amongst local artists. Her place in the community is evident, as residents coming in and out of the coffee shop greet her by name, often remarking on her recent work or upcoming events in the community.

The Unwitting Reception of Someone Else’s Secret, 2016 | paper, handmade felt

Adamites has lived in New England her whole life, outside of a two-year stint in Chicago to complete her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “ I went to UMass for undergrad,” she says. “I think just the depth of different art and music communities that are specifically in Western Massachusetts is a lot of what kept me here after high school, and after college.” She notes that collectives like Flywheel Arts in Easthampton, and the plethora of galleries, artists, and weirdos in the region, have given her little to no reason to leave. In fact, they keep her alive and creative.

Since returning from SAIC in 2015, Adamites has unleashed a prolific amount of solo and group exhibition work. While traditionally engaged with felt making to create various shapes and environments, Adamites has recently turned to paper to construct her most recent installations. “One of the things that makes felt and paper so similar for me,” she explains, “is that both have kind of a physical appeal and a conceptual appeal, too. I call felt and paper chaos structures, because they are not made like a textile is made, in terms of weaving and having a rigid rib, a woven piece. Felt and paper are just chaotic masses of fibers. The paper pulp and the wool, and that idea of having a chaotic mass come together into something usable that can be a surface or a structure in some way on its own, is beautiful to me.”

“Impediment Series” “Impediment 2” Detail Image, 2016 | paper, steel, wood | one of a series of five | 17x7x7

For Adamites, the lure of creating felt and paper is the collaborative process of skill and surrender. Utilizing a “wet process,” she agitates wool and other fibrous material in hot soapy water. She utilizes wool with other wide-weave fibers such as muslin, silk, or burlap to create a unique struggle between the fibers during the felt process. “Wool shrinks and you get this really beautiful surface texture that is very wrinkled and kind of unruly. It takes the sort of rigidity out of the grid. That one material can overtake another material in that way feels empowering.”

The texture of Adamites’ pieces ebb between dark smooth lines of black, sooted paper, where the beauty lies in an up-close examination; and disordered tangles and crumpled masses forming shapes that are both alien and familiar. Her installation The Unwitting Reception of Someone Else’s Secrets feels ghost-like and haunting; her most recent installation, Cryptonyms, at Deerfield Academy, looks strangely post-apocalyptic and alive.

“Supporting Materials 3”, 2016 | paper 5x3x3 | one of a series of 20 small sculptures, detail

Woven deep within her material processes, Adamites meditates “on trauma, memory, and the legacy of emotional turmoil inherited from past generations” to conceptualize her own experiences and to create conversations amongst those who interact with her work. “I like the idea of creating physical spaces or physical pieces that can be sort of a placeholder for those invisible things,” she explains, “like depression, mental illness, and so forth. Whether it is the things we do not want to talk about, or the traumas that are invisible, I want to have a monument to those things now.”

Adamites creates work with the hope of offering a space for individuals “to have conversations with each other about difficult subject matters…the psychic burden and triggers all around us. And that is one of the few things that I can offer to help people, or at least to open some kind of space for dialogue for people to grapple with things that are so hard.” The focus of recent and upcoming work has been in creating “isolation spaces,” where a single person can enter into one of her sculptures and infuse the depths of their own emotions and experiences into her work. “It is not just about me and my grandmothers,” she says, “or whomever from my past. I want it to be something that more people can find their own place in, to tell their own story if they want to.”

The relationship between the fragility and impermanence of textiles, and the invisibility of trauma in everyday life, coalesces in multiple spaces of meaning for Adamites. “The idea that your work may break down and completely disappear seems scary for many people who want to archive their work. I embrace the devalued nature of these materials and their ephemeral state. For me, to work with materials like this is a kind of lesson every day in impermanence, and needing to be flexible and roll with unpredictable changes. It expresses both my conceptual explorations of what may not be seen and the reality that my art can be both fragile and present.”

Fafnir Adamites is a sculptor living and working in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Her work will be on exhibition at the A.P.E Gallery in Northampton, MA beginning in February 2016 and at the Boston Sculptors Gallery in Spring 2016. For a more intimate look at her work, check her website and news page.

All photographs courtesy the artist.

Top photo:“Dead Reckoning is Subject to Cumulative Errors”, 2016 | paper, MDF panels 16x2x1.5 | part of the “Groundless Wayfinding” exhibit at Greenfield Community College, February 2016

The post Finding the Meaning in Making appeared first on Take Magazine.

Scene: Busy coffeeshop just after dusk. Location: Northampton, MA. In walks a bedraggled, white-bearded, black coffee-swilling, grump-meister named Tom Pappalardo. His laptop is scratched, stickered, and held together with a clamp. He looks like Liam Neeson about to do someone some very serious damage. “I used to be a semi-professional curmudgeon,” he says, “but now it’s more of a persona. I think I’m actually much nicer than I used to be.”

Pappalardo, an Easthampton, MA-based graphic designer, musician, and longtime comic book artist (Everything You Didn’t Ask For, 2014), has written, designed, and, through his new press, Object Publishing, self-published One More Cup of Coffee (2016), an observational compendium of his visits to coffee shops throughout Western Massachusetts. The book really doesn’t have anything to do with coffee, except insofar it’s the liquid folks gather around to talk life, death, and pretty much everything else in between. Tom visits these spots, gets himself a cup of their darkest coffee, sets his back to the wall and just listens. The locales range from classic New England coffee shops like Shelburne Falls Coffee Roasters, to supermarkets (Trader Joe’s), to the most ubiquitous of middle-America coffee sellers like Dunkin’ Donuts and a Starbucks inside Barnes and Noble.

“It came about as a way for me to get out of the house,” Pappalardo explains. “I made a list of places, some of which I’d been a regular at for years, then others – hey how come I don’t go there?” He developed a following writing weekly Facebook updates of his observations, which became about 90% of the book, “though,” he promises, “the book is much better edited.” The book’s subtitle, “In Which the Author Barely Talks About the Coffee” was by design. “A lot of the Facebook fans thought they were café reviews. I’ve lived in the area for 20 years, I knew a lot of the owners. I wanted it to be clear that this wasn’t an extended Yelp review.”

Instead, Pappalardo reviewed the customers inside the shops, telling their stories through his story, which is most often full of rage at the base foolishness of our entire culture. With lines like “I’m trying to be less of an asshole,” it’s clear that Pappalardo enjoys being a character in his own book. It also allows him to offer up some wickedly brutal assessments of the most mundane or overwrought conversations.

Behind Pappalardo’s umbrage is the sense that we’ve lost touch with being, and feeling, part of a larger community. “Even folks our age or older are blindered and not mindful of what’s going on around them,” he says.” A big part of this book was a mindfulness exercise. I’m going to a place just to observe. I try to make it as funny as I can, because that’s the genre I work in.”

Tom Pappalardo | Photo by David Nielsen

Though it seems the antithesis of his old-school coffee shop haunting, Pappalardo also made One More Cup of Coffee available on Kindle, a move that strips it of its design, physicality, and character. It’s a sign of the times, one he acknowledges with a wince. “I’m more interested in the object  of the book,” Pappalardo explains. “I just wanted to make a nice book. It’s the same with albums vs MP3s. I’m certainly from that era where I remember growing up and buying a cassette at the mall. You’d sit and listen to it and read along with all the lyrics. You build a connection to the album. I’m also a graphic designer; you can’t have an album without a cover. So yeah, to me this is the closest I get to art, whereas the Kindle version is the raw data. If someone wants to consume that, that’s fine—I’m not going to stop them. But the book is way cooler.”

Follow Tom Pappalardo on-line, on Instagram, and multiple Facebook pages:
personal | graphic design | writing & things, etc.

Illustration by Tom Pappalardo

The post Sit. Sip. Scrutinize. Scribble. appeared first on Take Magazine.