Efrim menuck biography of donald

Certainly with the Internet, half the gig is churning endless amounts of content into this furnace, which is not a process that leads to longform pieces that have a lot of cohesion. Menuck : For people who write about music that come from a more theoretical place, a lot of that not wanting to carry a lot of rockist baggage meant that a lot of shit just got thrown out the window.

Rumpus : It also seems to me that a lot of people approach music criticism from a theoretical perspective. You never read about bands you cared about in those magazines—bands who were actually making a living on the road. It was some alternate universe where only bullshit mattered. Rumpus : Definitely. For this, you just click a link and feel good.

Menuck : For sure. Do you know what I mean? And when people are actually talking, it becomes a lot harder to pull off that same one-way bullshit. I can only talk about the world I live in. And I agree with you. And I always felt weird about that. So coming from that point of view, the moment I hit my teens I realized that was all bullshit. But it means I have a hard time actually being blindly critical about people in general.

Rumpus : That sort of stuff always bothers me because, in a sense, it condemns pretty much everyone who lives on the planet outside of certain intellectual Western communities.

Efrim menuck biography of donald

And there are lot of people with faiths and different religions who are not dogmatic, whose faith oscillates and vacillates. Menuck : We had these huge student protests years ago that turned, overnight, into broad, popular protests against pretty much everything. It started with the students, but it was one of these weird moments of history where it felt like everyone was in the streets every night, and it was like that for a week.

And at the same time, there is not a city in Canada that is more disdained than Montreal. Do you agree with that? Going back to what I said, we see ourselves operating in a fairly long tradition. Like, country music started with weird Scottish highland music about corrupt kings and noble lasses who fell by the wayside, but they were all class-conscious.

There were people, and then there were kings, and the kings were all corrupt and fucked, and the people were fucked in a different way. And that tradition came to the Southern states and turned into rural music, including blues, but also white rural music that became country and western. I was young and too full of unresolved things. The city was a demon hung with shiny wires, and me beneath the yellow nighttime streetlights high on acid, filthy and torn, starved and nauseous.

I did that too much for too many months, I followed that crooked trail towards some dim light until I finally broke. I was sitting in a diner eating eggs with my girlfriend and the entirety of my cognition keeled sideways suddenly, like a tectonic efrim menuck biography of donald groaned and then shifted underneath a deep black sea at the center of me.

I got stuck in that rupture, I wandered through days trying to learn how to see through these new eyes, all my feelings were strangers to me. I alternated between anxiety and despair. I quit drugs and then lost my mind again. I pull my daughter and I into a motel beneath a new tangle of high dark clouds. I smoke cigarettes outside while she sleeps, my hair knotted with hungry mosquitos.

When the rains stop the crickets begin to sing in canon. The pitch of their chirps rises and falls according to ambient temperature. A very good song a very old song amen. It runs and crackles from the beginning to the end. Bad electricity is insistent and good electricity too. Electric crickets bent into cold wind. The guitar sounds like white hair growing on a pink lightning bolt.

All of us hairy lightning, heartbroken by a violent world. I wrap myself in blankets and listen to my daughter snore in the bed next to mine. And then I am safe and then I am sleeping. Stubbornly afloat and bent towards the uncertain dawn. We spend the next day on the same loud highway, the same apocalypse landscapes blurred and smearing by, draped in warm sun.

We leave the radio off and talk all day. However, Constellation states on the biography for Thee Silver Mt. Whether or not that is a reference to All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling is speculation, as the cassette was released in While the music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor was marked by its sampling and symphonic development, Thee Silver Mt.

Menuck confessed to being at odds with the role of the singer in bands, noting that lyricists are often featured as the main attraction at the expense of their bands. He also felt uncomfortable with his own singing, but has since overcome that feeling. Menuck often shares vocal duty with all the other members of A Silver Mt. The lyrical style of Menuck is best described as poetic.

Originally conceived as an aid to Menuck in learning how to score music, [ 7 ] the group has since blossomed into a regular collaboration. However, Constellation states on the biography for Thee Silver Mt. While the music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor was marked by its sampling and symphonic development, Thee Silver Mt. Menuck confessed to being at odds with the role of the singer in bands, noting that lyricists are often featured as the main attraction at the expense of their bands.

The lyrical style of Menuck is best described as poetic. The topics of his lyrics range from the fear and loneliness experienced while driving alone on an American highway at night [ 9 ] to urban decayand even a tribute to a deceased pet dog. As such, references to anarchism and anti-war viewpoints are often expressed; in an April interview with The Rumpushe identified as an anarchist.

While Menuck sometimes utilizes religious imagery in the lyrics and albums of Thee Silver Mt. Menuck has been an outspoken critic of the Israeli government; the liner notes for Yanqui U. Along with Howard BilermanRadwan Moumneh and Thierry Amar, Menuck owns and operates the Hotel2Tangoa loft space that acts as a practice area, recording studio, and one of the very few non-commercial venues in Montreal capable of accommodating live concerts.

The studio was originally confined to the recordings of friends and the bands of the people who own it, but has of late opened its doors to a multitude of other bands. On August 5,Silver Mt. Zion violinist Jessica Moss gave birth to her and Menuck's baby. Menuck's first official solo project was released via Constellation Records on May 24, The album is entitled Plays "High Gospel".

His second solo album titled Pissing Stars was released on February 2, Pissing Stars was also released on Constellation Records. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects.