This article is based on this Dutch article of Martijn Benders
I can’t recall having ever worked harder on something than this album by the Stoss. Currently, I am adding a poetry section to the album, which is turning out to be downright fantastic—poems by me, Marc van der Holst, Roethke, Ritsos, and Berryman, set to accompanying music.
It’s a sort of poetic audio drama at the end of what is already a highly literary German album.
The question remains where I’ll be able to go with this. In the Netherlands, you can forget about achieving anything musically (or poetically). The music world here is governed by bald heads and thicknecks who, like horseflies on the canals, suck everything dry with flavorless garbage. I pointed out to Buma Stemra that these kinds of people won’t need musicians for much longer and will soon be able to fill the channels with their own AI-generated tracks, but, of course, no response came. The same thicknecks are in charge there.
I genuinely have no idea how things are in Germany.
Here’s a poem by Roethke that feels very relevant to these times:
Faces turn gray faster than soil beneath a plow;
Children, their bellies swollen like bloated paper bags,
Eyes bulging like plums,
Staring out from the news,—
These images haunted me day and night.
I imagined the unborn, starving,
Curled in their mother’s womb.
I pleaded: May the blessings of life,
Oh Lord, pour down upon the living.
But when I heard the drunkards bellow,
Smelled the stench of carrion at the doors,
Saw women, their lids like tattered rags,
I spoke: Death, descend upon them in mercy.
Theodore Roethke, translated by Martinus.
(What a beautiful word that is… mercy.)
However, I actually think the interpretation above might be too conventional. The poetry section, in fact, highlights the psychedelic side of the Stoss. One rarely sees a cross-pollination between New Wave and psychedelia, which makes it interesting to explore that direction.
A gothic poem of mine became a convincingly psychedelic track:
**Schädelbingo**
At nine years old,
In my cave on the Algarve,
Hiding from the old men
With binoculars on the cliffs,
Who spent their days
Inspecting the nude beach,
I found in the sand
A human skull.
A bleached skullcap.
I didn’t dig it up further.
Capela dos Ossos, in Évora.
“Because the cemetery was full,”
Monks built a church out of bones.
People believed in sacred ground,
That a burial near the church
Would enhance one’s chances for a spot in heaven.
At the foot of this oak of dead stone,
You lay in the earth, waiting
For the black hands of Monk João,
Who walled you in, and now you stare
Eternally naked at tourists’ faces,
A mandatory stop for the horde,
A wavering order of the dead,
Laughing without eyes.
****
The track naturally deserves a spot on the German album for the nude beach reference alone.
Regards,
Martinus Benders