In the last days of an Iowan winter, Carlisle Evans-Peck took a microphone out into the snow. “You can find the advancing edge of the snow melt…advancing at walking speed,” he says. And as the snow turned to water before his eyes, he began recording, capturing the perpetual trickling sound, the crunch of twigs beneath his feet, and his own voice describing the spring thaw. “It was like seeing the planet going through a transformation,” he says, speaking from his home in Minneapolis, “It’s like a canvas being painted over.”
The resultant recording became “Interlude I – Dervernalization”, the fourth track of Evans-Peck’s 2016 album Ekphrasis. Ekphrasis refers to the practice, originating in ancient Greece, of depicting a work of art in another medium so faithfully that a viewer may as well be in the presence of the original work. It is a form of faithful adaptation, or in Evans-Peck’s words, a “chain of artistic transference”.
“How does this sort of ‘artistic transference’ happen?” I ask Carlisle Evans-Peck, “Does it happen through collaboration with other musicians?”
“It’s partially about collaboration and partially about how one kernel of an idea can have multiple incarnations,” Evans-Peck replies, “A song can exist in many different forms at once.”
“Multiple forms through rewriting songs?” I ask.
“Right,” he replies, “But this doesn’t invalidate the existence of the ‘original’. A song is not static.”
A song, Evans-Peck would have us believe, can exist in multiple media, be it music, visual art, poetry, or even lived experience. Ekphrasis is thus a multimedia project, incorporating Evans-Peck’s piano-driven music with the vibrantly fluid paintings of Vatina McLaurin. However, the visuals are not an adaptation of the audio, nor vice versa. Ekphrasis springs from life, not from another work of art. The inclusion of spoken word dialogue and found sounds – wind chimes, footsteps, dissecting tools – suggests that the act of making art, composing music, or writing poetry inspired by life, is fundamentally an act of adaptation and of artistic transference. I ask Evans-Peck to elaborate on what Ekphrasis means to him.
“An underlying theme of the songs is wrestling with being a queer person and teasing apart all that baggage,” he replies, “The person I was in high school is an incredibly different person than I am now. I saw that as a metaphor for ekphrasis, that there is never a completion. It’s one chain of artistic transference between all the people I’ve been.”
This idea of that people, like songs, are dynamic forces subject to ekphrasis allows Evans-Peck to blur the boundary between art and life. The artistic impulse shapes life, and the subsequent life experiences inform art. For instance, a chance encounter between Evans-Peck and a pheasant lead to a taxidermy project, which lead a new sense of identity, which in turn lead to the sixth track of Ekphrasis, “Interlude II – the Pheasant”, but it’s better to hear the story from Carlisle himself.
“I found the pheasant on this farm in Iowa and I was driving to visit Vatina [McLaurin] in St Paul and found this pheasant on the side of the road, frozen solid,” he says, “I scooped it up, put it in the deep freezer. Vatina was like, ‘We should taxidermy it,’ and I went back to Decorah and met a taxidermist the next day. Through the taxidermy process, I learned the new agey meaning of pheasant. One recurring symbol is as an expression of sexuality because the male pheasant is so flamboyant. I got goose-bumps when I learned that because, this whole album is, on one level, all about learning to claim being gay.”
Carlisle Evans-Peck’s synthesis of life with art and art with life produces an album that is at once spiritually rich and profoundly centered. And even though many of the songs on Ekphrasis are piano-driven, Carlisle Evans-Peck resembles not a rock pianist like Elton John or Billy Joel, but a Laurie Anderson-like artist, a modern prophet-songwriter or a singer-mystic whose songs are nevertheless rooted in life and experience.
Recently, Carlisle Evans-Peck has also found inspiration in the works of Annie Dillard and Sarah Ruhl. I ask him to comment on these two writers and he seemed to find visions of himself in both their works..
“One of my favorite pieces [by Dillard] is called ‘Living Like a Weasel’, prompted by an experience she had where she encountered a weasel and had an encounter like how Sartre talks about the gaze stealing someone’s consciousness,” he says, “Then she found a dead eagle, on a different occasion, and the eagle had a weasel skull latched to its neck. The only thing that could have happened was that the eagle tried to eat the weasel, and the weasel turned around a bit the eagle. The eagle was able to eat the rest of the weasel’s body except for the skull. So we should live like a weasel, and lash out and latch onto the things that hurt you.”
Concerning Ruhl, he connects to a view of art not unlike his own: “In her play In the Next Room there is a character who is obsessed with unfinished works of art by the old masters. He has a long monologue about how an unfinished painting is so much more interesting because it’s a snapshot of dynamism. It is in some ways more lifelike because it captures the dynamism of being a human.”
The music of Carlisle Evans-Peck reminds us that we, too, are not static beings. We, and our creative works, are all subject to flux and that is beautiful. A song, poem, or painting, may never truly be finished, and likewise the construction of the self is continuous. For listeners who grapple with problems of identity, or with problems of finishing creative projects, this idea may provide comfort. Ultimately, Carlisle Evans-Peck says it best in his track “Fledging”, the closing track of Ekphrasis:
If you were painted in the image you were promised
Would you finally feel happy? Your life polished?
Well I’ve been painting over brushstrokes and thick lines
And I know I won’t be finished in a lifetime.
You can hear Carlisle Evans-Peck’s album Ekphrasis at where you can also hear his 2012 album Pulled By Too Many Currents in Endless Circles and his 2015 EP Lintlesse. You can also catch him on tour this September and October in the western US with Ginger Bones.
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Painting by Vatina McLaurin
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| Read more of Vernon's work on Floodmark. |
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