I recently met Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt through Facebook. During our chat he referred me to his NoiseWiki page and, holy hell, is he ever prolific. I’m talking Sun Ra level prolific. While it’s nice to have a lot of music to explore, it’s also overwhelming to figure out where to start. Well, since SDCM was also nice enough to send me links to a couple of his albums I decided to start there, which is how I ended up listening to “Black Unicorn.”
On the surface, this record can be summed up as lots of well done and increasingly challenging spoken word and experimental noise. But, for me, I am also hearing ghosts all through this. Sometimes they are the ghosts of places, sometimes the ghosts of people from the past, and perhaps at times even an actual ghost providing narration. And sometimes it’s some combination of the three together.
The spoken word parts were mostly not crystal clear. The first track (“Soul Survivors”) is ethereal and a little troubling at times. The narrator may be talking about someone who was lost, or more likely is the ghost. “The Trees of Brooklyn” features some beautiful piano and spacey noises in the background; the words are very low in the mix. The narrator could simply be reminiscing about life, but may also be reminiscing about an old acquaintance, and that acquaintance might be an old neighborhood. I believe I heard the words “we met only once in this life,” but which life is that? The rest of the way the music gets stranger. On the surface “A Verse In The Digital Age For A Camenita” could be words of tenderness, but it seems to get more spiritual; I think I heard phrases “time stays with us forever” and “please go your way.” Are these the musings of a spectre?
Oh, wait…did I mention the Selena Gomez cover? Well, it’s sort of a cover of “Kill Em With Kindness.” While it seems to have some of the familiar music in it, the words and many of the noises are different. Again, the words are hard to decipher but I believe I heard things like “long before I was told to vanish,” “waiting in a room,” “counting down,” and “wider and wider until the centuries accept the confessions of the soul.” Words from the spirit.
The last track is the title track and is a long one, clocking in at 16 minutes. It sounds like it was recorded at a party or busy club and is mostly crowd conversation noise, but there’s music off in the distance seemingly fighting for attention. It makes occasional forays but ultimately fades out repeatedly. I was so ghost-conscious at this point that I concluded the music represented a soul, maybe still trying to hang on to this world before moving on, but unable to break through.