Please introduce yourself

I’ve been Amanda as long as I can remember, and my main project for the past 20 years is The Floating World. I have a new album on Fiadh Productions called Impermanence.

Deep Fade is my new very noisy thing, done in collaboration with Neddal Ayad (the does, Solar Tongue) and Grey Malkin (The Hare and the Moon, Widow’s Weeds). We’ve all been collaborating for a very long time, Neddal and I for 20 years, and Grey joined the posse something like 10-11 years ago. The first album, Line of Flight, was released on Fiadh in February and is now getting the CD treatment for the UK/EU courtesy Reverb Worship. I did most of the music on this one, and me and Grey made a zine based around the idea of Paramnesia—the distortion of memory, confusing a real memory for a dream or fantasy, things like déjà vu. Reverb Worship also did a Floating World album 10 or 11 years ago, and a Spectral Light one, too—that’s a noisy, dark, more guitar-based band me and Neddal have going, with some help from Grey.

There’s a new Deep Fade called Further that I’ve just sent off to Cruel Nature, who will be releasing it late summer/early fall. Neddal did most of the music for this one, and the sound is a lot more Spectral Light. I recorded all but one vocal in or at various lighthouses in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and even two in the UK. Our friend Sonia Merah did a beautiful painting of a lighthouse for the cover. We’ve kind of decided whoever starts the songs determines the sonic direction with Deep Fade, rather than have 50 projects under different names. Now we’ll just confuse people by sounding extremely idiosyncratic album to album.

I also have an abrasive, loud in-progress collaboration with Roy K Felps (Korperschwache) that we’ve been talking about and slowly working on for an eternity, another with Grey and our friend Peter from Ashtoreth. Not long ago I sang on a thing called Cruxis that Chris from Primitive Knot made the music for.

Where did you come from and where are you going?

I emerged from the rusted husk of the American dream we call Detroit, Michigan some decades ago. Since then, I’ve moved around the US for a bit thanks to my mom’s job, and then took myself to a few other countries to live before ending up back in the US to do my PhD. Right now, I’m writing this while sitting in a cafe in Liverpool, England. I came here to have some peace and quiet to write my dissertation, and I’ve had almost too much of both now. Where I’m going is a good question. I’ll let you know when I get there.

What preoccupies your mind these days?

I was thinking about time as I walked around today. Time slips and loops and feedback. That question about whether the past or the future works on us more, influences and shapes us in this infinitesimally small moment we call the present. Temporal entanglements we do and don’t see, can and can’t unravel. It all makes less sense to me now than it used to when I was young enough to think it just went on and on.

Then there’s this story I have in my head about Lemmy and Michael Moorcock and David Bowie and probably some other Hawkwind people all hanging out together at a pub and either performing Hobbit-Lord of the Rings themed music or collaborating on the same. But I can’t ever confirm this. Maybe someone out there can finally lay this to rest for me.

Brutalism has been taking up a lot of space in there, too. I mean the architecture but also, I’m reading socio-political theorist Achille Mbembe’s Brutalism. For him, Brutalism is a framework to describe how all life, especially human life, has been reduced to brute matter, stuff to be extracted, exploited, datafied, and discaded.

And how unbelievably fucked up it is to see Nazis marching in Israel supporting the genocide of Palestinian people. It’s Mbembe’s Brutalism right there in front of you every day. The total discarding of human life on a massive scale that we watch in real time, yet governments sit on their hands doing nothing. Unless it’s to arrest a bunch of college kids for pointing out that this is, in fact, deeply fucked up.

I think about the wind a lot, how it howled and sang when I walked out of a different town to some standing stones last month, Susan Sontag’s erotics of art over hermeneutics—that your first response to art is a feeling, and hopefully an intense one, not an analysis. There’s this lake I knew well when I was very young and not a day goes by that I don’t think about its haunted shore.

And Celtic Frost, which I’ve been listening to as I write my dissertation. It helps.

Name a favourite taste, touch, sound, sight and smell

Honey and chocolate. The feel of fresh sheets, the warm sunlight on my skin. The wind at night or during the day, trains passing by, slow footsteps on wooden floors or dirt pathways or passing by outside the window at night, the opening of doors, birds singing unexpectedly in the dark. The sky, the sea, a barrow grave, the lake, this dream I keep having but don’t really want to, but also want to. Lilacs carried by a gentle breeze through an open window in the springtime, tree bark, meadows and fields and again always the sea.

Describe one of your most vivid dreams or nightmares

I’m standing on a rocky outcrop on the side of a cliff overlooking the ocean. The water is wild, waves smashing into rocks below. The sky is alight with colors, reds and purples, and the fast-approaching deep grey black of storm clouds, eerily reflected in the water below. The wind is tearing at me, I’m holding onto the side of the cliff and my feet keep slipping. The waves get bigger as the clouds rush towards me across the vast open waters and then one wave rises in the distance, towering overhead, blotting out my view of the sky. I try to climb up the cliff, but every time I find a foothold it crumbles under me and I’m back on the tiny outcrop, the apocalyptic wave closing fast. At some point, I stop and watch it coming, I think that it looks beautiful and I’ll never see the sky look like this, so intense its colors or the waves rise up so high to swallow the land again. Right when it hits the side of the cliff and I feel the frigid water on my arms and hands and face, I wake up. The first time I had that dream I was 16 and I have it still. I can never fall back asleep after it.

This is the dream I keep having that I both want and don’t want to have.

Have you ever had an uncanny experience?

That lake I mentioned was an uncanny experience. I remember hearing stories about it being haunted, and the lighthouse just down the beach, too. Flickering lights shining out of the lantern room, and a story about a woman whose man went out to sea and never returned. She wandered the shore the rest of her days, looking for him, his ghost, or maybe listening for him in the waves. One time when I was about 8, I was out walking one of our dogs and I met a boy around my age who said he was staying in the house next to my grandparents’. Don’t ask me why my parents and grandparents let an 8-year-old girl walk a dog out in the middle of nowhere bordered by a lake and a deep forest all by herself, it was the 1980s. But we started talking about our families and what they were doing up there in northern Michigan while we walked the dog down the beach towards the forest. Then we walked back, and I got one of the other dogs while he hid behind the woodpile so my family wouldn’t interrupt the walk with “who’s this” questions. We walked to the lighthouse end of the beach then and hung out on the sand until the sky was getting dark and we knew at that point someone was going to come out hollering for at least one of us.

When we made it back to my grandparents’ house and it was time for him to go on to his, I asked if he’d be around the next day and maybe we could go walk the dogs in the woods. I can never remember what he said then, but I do remember having the idea that was our plan. When I went inside, my grandparents and my dad and stepmom were all ready for dinner and asking where I’d gone. I told my grandmother I’d been walking with the boy whose family lived in the next house over and she told me that no one had lived there for a while. Some tragedy that I again don’t remember the specifics of had hit the family, the death of a brother or a son.

I never saw him again, though I went out the next day and walked up and down the beach with the dogs. That time and the next and the next until at some point I decided it was just some strange fluke that another kid my age had been up there. There weren’t any then, except my sister and me. It got eerily lonely at times.

This is the one I think about the most. I’m sure either my grandmother was mistaken about the house being empty, or I got the house he said he lived in wrong. Or it could’ve been a vivid dream, like my Lemmy Hobbit music thing probably is. It’s still nice to think there was something ghostly about it all.

How does your sense of place affect the way you express yourself?

I think I’m haunted by places, or by places I knew as they were fixed in some time past. That kind of came from moving around so much when I was in my teens because of my mom’s job. Place memory has a very large effect on how I express myself in music. Every place, at different points in time, has a sound to it, something that expresses what it’s about. Line of Flight was heavily inspired by Detroit, as a place and by its history. When I was back in Michigan for a while, I’d get to the city as much as I could. It was strange to see the new developments going on in the downtown core, which juxtaposed so sharply against my memories of the city. While I’m sure there are positive aspects of new development, it’s also a sign of displacement. Where did everyone who lived there when it was economically depressed get pushed out to? And of course, none of the new development is ever reserved for the old residents. So, you have lofts, apartments, and repurposed warehouses all gutted and remodeled that my friends and our families lived in rented to the new tech people working at Microsoft or Google, who now have offices downtown. There’s your high-end Prada and Gucci shops where the party store, thrift stores, and other small businesses owned by community members used to be.

If you wander just outside the downtown core, things are vastly different, all the ruins of homes with few residents left on each block in some areas. I think about how much money these megacorporations have, and how none of it ever seems to make its way into the communities around their sleek modern offices. Communities where sometimes garbage collection doesn’t happen, streetlights go unlit, because the city doesn’t have enough money to keep up services in areas with few residents.

Then there’s the context in which this is happening, the long history of unrest and uprising in the city by Black residents who were treated unfairly and abused by everyone from cops to the city government who completely ignored what was happening, to the auto manufacturers who exploited their labor until unions like the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement formed and people collectively refused to be taken advantage of. Every uprising in the city’s history was because of unjust racist practices that favored white residents. And watching what’s happening now, seeing people who used to stay ensconced in their suburban homes as far away from those neighborhoods as they could, standing in lines wrapping around city blocks to have brunch is, like I said, a sharp juxtaposition to the scenes I grew up with. Walking along the streets I knew, seeing them as they are and envisioning them then is disorienting. It all made me wonder how this will play out, this current version of gentrification where they’re using tech as the pretext for running people out of their homes, like the way building new highways that cut into and separated neighborhoods was in the past.

When you go for your little daily walk there, you walk through the history of America. Maybe its future, too. Bleak gore capitalism all around, but there are still people making it their home, pushing against that gore capitalism, with little to no support from the city and its megacorps, as ever.  

What has particularly touched or inspired you recently?

All the amazing art people I know and don’t know create, looking out a rain-splattered window at the church rising up over parking structures and buildings, watching the light change throughout the day as it hits the spires, waking up to the stillness of 3am even in the city. How clouds move and mutate, portending changes in weather. Long gone futures, wanders through unfamiliar places. Unlooked for and unexpected kindnesses. My kitten, and the absurd and endearing things he does.

Tell us a good story, anecdote or joke

The anthropologist in me listens to people talk as I walk around or sit in a café or wherever I am. Because there are so many conversations going on, all different, I tend to hear people speaking like you do if you flip through radio stations, in and out, full of different voices. That means I’m mishearing things, or putting different speaker’s words together. Sometimes I write the things I mishear in my little notebook. The best one recently is, “so you want me to name it? That’s like speaking it into the fire, so it disappears with the smoke.”

My Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/synthemata/

The Floating World Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/riverofflowers/

Deep Fade Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deep__fade/

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