Soulever
This summer I attended a
reunion of some dear old friends and the recording project I
mentioned has finally borne some fruit; In
August, Joel Pace (Gabriel on the blog), went into the studio to record some of
Dennis Sampson’s music.
I’ll drop my moniker policy
for the moment, because I’d like to do my small bit to share Dennis’ music and would
like to credit the people who have made that possible. The recording group (including many of the
Ants in the Cellar) is named Soulever: Mike Adamowicz, guitar & vocals;
Jamey Chan, Drums; Robert Clarkin, Bass; Manny de Mello, Keys; Joel Pace,
Vocals (tracks one and three) & Trumpet, and Babatunde Thomas, Vocals
(track two) & Sax.
It’s pretty damn cool to
hear all of these songs again. Some of
them are now 15 years old – and it’s hard not to be a bit nostalgic for those
days. Hanging out with my friends in
Joel’s attic with it’s mounds of canvasses and sculptures, or at David Wish’s
place. Usually that involved a heady mix
of talk and making – at the risk of sounding trite, it was a tremendously
creative atmosphere. We had our native
interests (everyone was somewhere in both the musical and writing spheres), we
were being systematically exposed to the great works of western civilization –
free enough to pursue what we found interesting, and we had each other. If I had a novel I might be able to thread my
way through all those intersections of people and ideas, but short of that I’m
left with the broad and weak statements and a few suggestive images: Mike
looking up from his guitar to where Matt and I were debating something about
Spinoza (of all people) and asking us for our thoughts on some lyrics he needed
to fill in. What kind of emotional tenor
did he want? – “Something between ‘Creeps in this petty pace from day to day/To the last
syllable of recorded time’ and ‘De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da.’” Dennis, in one of his loose white shirts,
smiling in the background, fingers precisely plucking at his bass, the tendons
on his forearms snapping into sharp relief, as though the strings had bridged
his hands and were running deep into his body.
I’ve posted three of the songs as attachments here – feel free to download them.
In many ways, you can hear Dennis in all of them – his recurring concern with spiritual authenticity, family, the tensions between them, his themes of journeying across divisions, isolation, the tensions between what is innate and what can be learned (or transcended) and, of course, always, hope.
The encoding is a bit odd, but they all play in Quicktime as
audio clips. Right click and download them to your hard drive, then simply use Quicktime to open them. If there are any savy audio types out there (Jes?) who could painlessly convert these to more-easily-played mp3s (or knows how to do such a thing) please shoot me an e-mail.
Is now available at 
Comments