Worst Spills - Hum Death
CD
Worst Spills' second album "Hum Death" delves into a noirish blend of spoken word,
skronk grooves and witchy soundscapes that expand on the "southern nightmare jazz"
of their debut (featured in Bandcamp Daily's Best of Experimental, March 2022). The
new record arrives hot on the heels of their collaborative album with Johnny Coley titled
"Mister Sweet Whisper," released by Mississippi Records & Sweet Wreath to favorable
reviews from Pitchfork and others in November 2024. Whereas "Mister Sweet Whisper" foregrounds Coley's poetic narratives within nimble lounge themes, "Hum Death" focuses on tone and textural grit to evoke mundane terrors tempered by wry humor.
Vocalist Jacquie Cotillard talks about the opening track, Gadfly:
"The melody of the lyrics was derived from a chromatic inversion of “L’internationale.” Title, from Plato, and also Ethel Voynich’s play of the same name. After reading about Scott Walker’s unsettling metonymic techniques (Deines, 2007), I attempted to employ them to sketch my complicated feelings on leftist public protest in the United States from something of a paranoid, generational standpoint.
In the aftermath of extensive displays of brutal government response to protest during the Obama and Trump administrations, the tension between the extensive surveillance powers that hide in our plain view and the imminent danger we are in as citizens in a failing nuclear state bring us to bear in a suspended, precious way that, at least for the visible norm, leaves us waiting for bloody proof of our oppression before we realize that all acting has become invisibly perilous. Will we fall for the protest-trap when the bloodthirsty regime takes hold, and hand ourselves to them in droves, and in support of what messaging in particular, to leverage what?
Will there even be a need for secret police in the coming decades, or will the oligarchy further rely instead on information warfare to neutralize threats to public perception as they incubate and spring up? Does this hesitancy to take to the streets make me complicit? Hegel, albeit on a slightly different topic, well-colors my fear— not of protest, but of a larger, more permanent failure, the horizon of which seems to be drawing nearer all the time:
'of absolute freedom… its negation is the death that is without meaning, the sheer terror of the negative that contains nothing positive… the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water…individuals are sacrificed and abandoned.'"
________________________
Jacquie:
Hum Death. I believe that stands for Hermeneutic Uronologist: My Dead Evangelical Aunt's Tombstone Hawker......or something else. Worst Spills and Hum Death are what Worst Spills are like in my head...and what they've always been like are these angular figures, that gesture at jazz. But it's a take on a take on what people think of jazz. For me, Mister Sweet Whisper is a departure from what we normally do. We are kind of a band in two places. We're two bands at once, dressed as another guy or something...
Joel:
It is totally that. Yeah, it's interesting. The more traditional stuff is a reflection of a newer version of what Worst Spills has become. Mister Sweet Whisper is, funny enough, the most tame and most digestible by...probably the most amount of people, you know? So that's the thing, you know...Hum Death is the leftovers. All of this stuff is the leftovers of being inspired by the Bay Area and the experimental music that I was getting into at the time...the music of Roscoe Mitchell and Anthony Braxton and how they fractured a lot...like they took jazz, they took classical music, experimental music, avant garde, free jazz and mixed all that stuff together, made their own languages. And I realized I could do that...you can take all of these little bits of things and start putting them together. And then the most important part for me I realized is the people that you get to play that music and how they interpret it.
Jacquie:
So we have a group dynamic that's based on constant, contextually updating decision making. The music place where that happens is a zone where this constant intangible opportunity to make decisions is there. You get a feedback loop of: "my decisions make sense to me, change, get reevaluated." And we don't get a lot of those [opportunities], especially not totally dominated by spoken language...
________________________
Hum Death's lushly intricate cover art is a painting by Birmingham artist Julianna Richey (who also plays & sings at times with Vernal Scuzz and Mother Harmony, among many other things!) We spoke about Julianna's process in this painting, and what some of the imagery alludes to, starting off with a dream that Joel had:
Joel: I think we were in a sprinter van...driving down this dirt road in the woods, you know...it was like an unfinished road, but it had been worn and the grass was growing up in the middle of the road. And I think it's wintertime because there's no leaves on the trees. It's barren and dark. A very Cormac McCarthy kind of scene and the earth below just starts to slowly crack apart as we get closer to a city...
(MayMay is sneaking around on the kitchen counter, trying to lick a stick of butter...)
Julianna: Oh, oh, oh, oh. Now, put down the butter. I'm going to need you to get out.
Jasper: How much have you been licking tonight?
Julianna: Been down at the butter shack, MayMay? Yeah...And what do I see? A bumper sticker for Ernie's Butter Shack. And you look to be about three, maybe four years old?
Jasper: High as a kite. Ever spent the night in a jail cell?
Julianna: Oh, gosh. What did Joel want? Rothko, David Lynch's paintings, and Nightmare Jazz? Southern Nightmare Jazz? He said something along the lines of combining those things. Yes. Yes. I think he gave me a lot of license. It's been a while because he gave me this prompt during the beginning of the plague, I think even in March 2020, because I was temporarily staying in this house in Southside. When I listened to that first album the first time, I was walking around in the backyard of this house that I would probably never return to again.
I'd found the canvas on the side of the road in Southside, outside some apartments. The canvas had previous textured layers of blue slathered on it, with some chipping. I didn't think of it until 2021, when I was working on the painting; but Jacquie had told me the story of Joel's aforementioned dream, and I severely mis-remembered it, rather, as: Joel had had a visionary experience in waking life, of a visible crack crawling across reality as he could see it. Not knowing what kind of paint and possible medium had been used on the previous painter's layers, I had considered that there could be chemical disagreements when I laid acrylic over it. After one of my first nocturnal sessions with it, I found that, the next morning, it appeared (and my mind could have fooled me, but!) to have cracked and chipped a little, overnight. Sometime that winter, still working on it, and thinking of it as breathing and alive in that one-time tectonic phenomenon; I remembered my mistaken concept of Joel's dream, and was struck with the idea that the force of the cracking dimension was following him through the doorway of the canvas. I remember being awed and seriously tickled about it.
I was looking for stock images...I found the Mud Men and this one series of a man covered in mud in a few different poses. So, you know, the upper and lower mud men are that guy. And then the one coming out of the vertical column of darkness is made up. He's a bit more spirit like and subtle than the agonized mud men.
Jasper: The figures portrayed from different perspectives makes me think of movie posters. It gives this sense of narrative. Vignettes of different moments...
Julianna: You get impressions. The main thing after that, you know, was really trying to take the prompt of Southern Nightmare Jazz as well as the most prominent threads of intensity and energy and just tones of the music. So I'm glad there's a screaming guy. I'm glad Upper Mud Man by the propane tank looks like he's in some sort of struggle of exertion and maybe a little agony as well, because there's a lot of screamin', honking, wailing, loud, noisiness.
Otherwise, it's kind of the whole synesthetic process that I'll do. And I don't mean, you know, the literal synesthesia that I have. I only usually see that when I'm playing an instrument and we get rainbows. But in the sense of just listening to it over and over, closing my eyes, seeing what just slipped through the cracks of impressions and images. I usually get a lot that way, then make some lists and search for reference images. A few of the reference images are from Larry O'Gay, a local photographer who did a series of city explorations looking for wild textures and found designs in weathered materials and industrial spots. Lots of sides of buildings, cracked windows and paint and asphalt doing cool things.
So I believe the...what is that thing called...the sewer cover? That looks like an eye. Looks like the eyes are on up there. Yeah, I think that was from Larry. I think maybe the cracked glass windows above him are from Larry. The stripes, although they're very abstracted, were like some corrugated metal, like a panel of a warehouse. So I think that was Larry. Bottom right is an abandoned church with a vulture in it. Real fucked up, you know, dilapidated shit thrown everywhere.
Jasper: Have you ever been an abandoned church?
Julianna: No. Have you?
Jasper: Yeah...It was in Hale County.
Julianna: Oh, Hale yeah.
Jasper: Was the house from somewhere in particular?
Julianna: I don't remember.
Jasper: It looks so familiar.
Julianna: You know, it looks like something that you see driving anywhere in a rural area. Yep. That's what I wanted to give; was all the ghostly impressions of shit that we've seen just driving through the country in Alabama. Because, otherwise, I really just meditated on what would be the distillation; what images would be the holy trinity of precision to whack the senses with Southern Nightmare Jazz. Southern gothic-ness, that kind of familiarity of, you know, childhood rural sights...going to see relatives and things that evoked a bit of mystery or intrigue mostly and still do. Things that carry that thread through of particular characteristics or personality traits of this region and so many places that you'll see outside of the metropolitan area here.
Jasper: It really evokes that through the different vignettes; fragments of different places. I get the sense of traveling through a haunted wasteland...you see parts of the road and the asphalt texture and things in passing that you just get glimpses of.
Julianna: And that, I think is in part because you never get to know their story thoroughly when they're just picked up in passing. They always stay in this land of the unknown, like a ghost story that has a real impact on you and really gets to hold a lot of space in the imagination. They get to be a real image container for it. Even the propane tank. I spent a seventh of my childhood up on Lookout Mountain in Gadsden, with my hillbilly side of the family. And I mean, whereas the propane tank was a fun thing to climb on and ride, it was one of those continually curious images as a child running through the country. Out there, everybody's got one of these things; and that's so unique from growing up in Birmingham...that even though it was explained to me...the propane tank's mundane domestic use...there is just something about the structure; the fixture of it that is unique and curious and mysterious to my child mind.
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CD
Worst Spills' second album "Hum Death" delves into a noirish blend of spoken word,
skronk grooves and witchy soundscapes that expand on the "southern nightmare jazz"
of their debut (featured in Bandcamp Daily's Best of Experimental, March 2022). The
new record arrives hot on the heels of their collaborative album with Johnny Coley titled
"Mister Sweet Whisper," released by Mississippi Records & Sweet Wreath to favorable
reviews from Pitchfork and others in November 2024. Whereas "Mister Sweet Whisper" foregrounds Coley's poetic narratives within nimble lounge themes, "Hum Death" focuses on tone and textural grit to evoke mundane terrors tempered by wry humor.
Vocalist Jacquie Cotillard talks about the opening track, Gadfly:
"The melody of the lyrics was derived from a chromatic inversion of “L’internationale.” Title, from Plato, and also Ethel Voynich’s play of the same name. After reading about Scott Walker’s unsettling metonymic techniques (Deines, 2007), I attempted to employ them to sketch my complicated feelings on leftist public protest in the United States from something of a paranoid, generational standpoint.
In the aftermath of extensive displays of brutal government response to protest during the Obama and Trump administrations, the tension between the extensive surveillance powers that hide in our plain view and the imminent danger we are in as citizens in a failing nuclear state bring us to bear in a suspended, precious way that, at least for the visible norm, leaves us waiting for bloody proof of our oppression before we realize that all acting has become invisibly perilous. Will we fall for the protest-trap when the bloodthirsty regime takes hold, and hand ourselves to them in droves, and in support of what messaging in particular, to leverage what?
Will there even be a need for secret police in the coming decades, or will the oligarchy further rely instead on information warfare to neutralize threats to public perception as they incubate and spring up? Does this hesitancy to take to the streets make me complicit? Hegel, albeit on a slightly different topic, well-colors my fear— not of protest, but of a larger, more permanent failure, the horizon of which seems to be drawing nearer all the time:
'of absolute freedom… its negation is the death that is without meaning, the sheer terror of the negative that contains nothing positive… the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water…individuals are sacrificed and abandoned.'"
________________________
Jacquie:
Hum Death. I believe that stands for Hermeneutic Uronologist: My Dead Evangelical Aunt's Tombstone Hawker......or something else. Worst Spills and Hum Death are what Worst Spills are like in my head...and what they've always been like are these angular figures, that gesture at jazz. But it's a take on a take on what people think of jazz. For me, Mister Sweet Whisper is a departure from what we normally do. We are kind of a band in two places. We're two bands at once, dressed as another guy or something...
Joel:
It is totally that. Yeah, it's interesting. The more traditional stuff is a reflection of a newer version of what Worst Spills has become. Mister Sweet Whisper is, funny enough, the most tame and most digestible by...probably the most amount of people, you know? So that's the thing, you know...Hum Death is the leftovers. All of this stuff is the leftovers of being inspired by the Bay Area and the experimental music that I was getting into at the time...the music of Roscoe Mitchell and Anthony Braxton and how they fractured a lot...like they took jazz, they took classical music, experimental music, avant garde, free jazz and mixed all that stuff together, made their own languages. And I realized I could do that...you can take all of these little bits of things and start putting them together. And then the most important part for me I realized is the people that you get to play that music and how they interpret it.
Jacquie:
So we have a group dynamic that's based on constant, contextually updating decision making. The music place where that happens is a zone where this constant intangible opportunity to make decisions is there. You get a feedback loop of: "my decisions make sense to me, change, get reevaluated." And we don't get a lot of those [opportunities], especially not totally dominated by spoken language...
________________________
Hum Death's lushly intricate cover art is a painting by Birmingham artist Julianna Richey (who also plays & sings at times with Vernal Scuzz and Mother Harmony, among many other things!) We spoke about Julianna's process in this painting, and what some of the imagery alludes to, starting off with a dream that Joel had:
Joel: I think we were in a sprinter van...driving down this dirt road in the woods, you know...it was like an unfinished road, but it had been worn and the grass was growing up in the middle of the road. And I think it's wintertime because there's no leaves on the trees. It's barren and dark. A very Cormac McCarthy kind of scene and the earth below just starts to slowly crack apart as we get closer to a city...
(MayMay is sneaking around on the kitchen counter, trying to lick a stick of butter...)
Julianna: Oh, oh, oh, oh. Now, put down the butter. I'm going to need you to get out.
Jasper: How much have you been licking tonight?
Julianna: Been down at the butter shack, MayMay? Yeah...And what do I see? A bumper sticker for Ernie's Butter Shack. And you look to be about three, maybe four years old?
Jasper: High as a kite. Ever spent the night in a jail cell?
Julianna: Oh, gosh. What did Joel want? Rothko, David Lynch's paintings, and Nightmare Jazz? Southern Nightmare Jazz? He said something along the lines of combining those things. Yes. Yes. I think he gave me a lot of license. It's been a while because he gave me this prompt during the beginning of the plague, I think even in March 2020, because I was temporarily staying in this house in Southside. When I listened to that first album the first time, I was walking around in the backyard of this house that I would probably never return to again.
I'd found the canvas on the side of the road in Southside, outside some apartments. The canvas had previous textured layers of blue slathered on it, with some chipping. I didn't think of it until 2021, when I was working on the painting; but Jacquie had told me the story of Joel's aforementioned dream, and I severely mis-remembered it, rather, as: Joel had had a visionary experience in waking life, of a visible crack crawling across reality as he could see it. Not knowing what kind of paint and possible medium had been used on the previous painter's layers, I had considered that there could be chemical disagreements when I laid acrylic over it. After one of my first nocturnal sessions with it, I found that, the next morning, it appeared (and my mind could have fooled me, but!) to have cracked and chipped a little, overnight. Sometime that winter, still working on it, and thinking of it as breathing and alive in that one-time tectonic phenomenon; I remembered my mistaken concept of Joel's dream, and was struck with the idea that the force of the cracking dimension was following him through the doorway of the canvas. I remember being awed and seriously tickled about it.
I was looking for stock images...I found the Mud Men and this one series of a man covered in mud in a few different poses. So, you know, the upper and lower mud men are that guy. And then the one coming out of the vertical column of darkness is made up. He's a bit more spirit like and subtle than the agonized mud men.
Jasper: The figures portrayed from different perspectives makes me think of movie posters. It gives this sense of narrative. Vignettes of different moments...
Julianna: You get impressions. The main thing after that, you know, was really trying to take the prompt of Southern Nightmare Jazz as well as the most prominent threads of intensity and energy and just tones of the music. So I'm glad there's a screaming guy. I'm glad Upper Mud Man by the propane tank looks like he's in some sort of struggle of exertion and maybe a little agony as well, because there's a lot of screamin', honking, wailing, loud, noisiness.
Otherwise, it's kind of the whole synesthetic process that I'll do. And I don't mean, you know, the literal synesthesia that I have. I only usually see that when I'm playing an instrument and we get rainbows. But in the sense of just listening to it over and over, closing my eyes, seeing what just slipped through the cracks of impressions and images. I usually get a lot that way, then make some lists and search for reference images. A few of the reference images are from Larry O'Gay, a local photographer who did a series of city explorations looking for wild textures and found designs in weathered materials and industrial spots. Lots of sides of buildings, cracked windows and paint and asphalt doing cool things.
So I believe the...what is that thing called...the sewer cover? That looks like an eye. Looks like the eyes are on up there. Yeah, I think that was from Larry. I think maybe the cracked glass windows above him are from Larry. The stripes, although they're very abstracted, were like some corrugated metal, like a panel of a warehouse. So I think that was Larry. Bottom right is an abandoned church with a vulture in it. Real fucked up, you know, dilapidated shit thrown everywhere.
Jasper: Have you ever been an abandoned church?
Julianna: No. Have you?
Jasper: Yeah...It was in Hale County.
Julianna: Oh, Hale yeah.
Jasper: Was the house from somewhere in particular?
Julianna: I don't remember.
Jasper: It looks so familiar.
Julianna: You know, it looks like something that you see driving anywhere in a rural area. Yep. That's what I wanted to give; was all the ghostly impressions of shit that we've seen just driving through the country in Alabama. Because, otherwise, I really just meditated on what would be the distillation; what images would be the holy trinity of precision to whack the senses with Southern Nightmare Jazz. Southern gothic-ness, that kind of familiarity of, you know, childhood rural sights...going to see relatives and things that evoked a bit of mystery or intrigue mostly and still do. Things that carry that thread through of particular characteristics or personality traits of this region and so many places that you'll see outside of the metropolitan area here.
Jasper: It really evokes that through the different vignettes; fragments of different places. I get the sense of traveling through a haunted wasteland...you see parts of the road and the asphalt texture and things in passing that you just get glimpses of.
Julianna: And that, I think is in part because you never get to know their story thoroughly when they're just picked up in passing. They always stay in this land of the unknown, like a ghost story that has a real impact on you and really gets to hold a lot of space in the imagination. They get to be a real image container for it. Even the propane tank. I spent a seventh of my childhood up on Lookout Mountain in Gadsden, with my hillbilly side of the family. And I mean, whereas the propane tank was a fun thing to climb on and ride, it was one of those continually curious images as a child running through the country. Out there, everybody's got one of these things; and that's so unique from growing up in Birmingham...that even though it was explained to me...the propane tank's mundane domestic use...there is just something about the structure; the fixture of it that is unique and curious and mysterious to my child mind.
