story and photo by S.R. Aichinger
On Long Division
Ross Turpen didn’t talk much between songs. “Thanks for sticking around,” he told the audience early in his set at the Side Door Lounge on Saturday night. His performance was in promotion of the release of Long Division, the debut album from his solo project, International Creeps.
“I love listeners who passively come across my music,” Ross Turpen told me the next morning. I have been talking to him about people’s active and passive encounters with music.
“These types of people are often the most honest with their feedback,” he continued. As a writer, I agree with him. Mom and Dad are proud of my artistic endeavors, but they’re Mom and Dad. They love what I do no matter what: because I did it. I suspect the passion that leads a person to do art, and the joy of doing it, though, isn’t a passion for staying put. It seems instead to be a passion for finding a voice, one that is unique and worth hearing.
Writing often is a lonely enterprise, common to songwriters and essayists, but it is not without its own anxieties. Take, for instance, the anxiety of writing — in my case an essay, in Turpen’s a song — about family. Particularly about those episodes our families consider private. “Playing some of these songs for people I know can be really weird,” he says, “especially the song ‘What Keeps Us Up,’” a song influenced primarily by his family.
The crucial difference between his art and my own is in the ways we perform. In the age of digital dissemination of music, artists make less and less on album sales. Often goose eggs. So Turpen must put himself out there and play his songs live if he hopes to establish himself. Essayists rarely read publicly for money, so when Mom and Dad encounter my work, I can hand them a stapled stack of paper and run for the hills. Turpen has to stand there through the whole thing. He has to perform his art while wondering what people are thinking. I’m glad for the solitude of prose writing.
He played “What Keeps Us Up” at a different show once with his parents in the audience. “Nerves were definitely firing on all cylinders for those three minutes,” he explained. “It's good to get those kinds of personal struggles off your chest.” But with self-expression comes the likelihood of running into a few awkward moments. “It just comes with the territory.”
It was at the Side Door where I accidentally encountered International Creeps. I went there not to experience music but to see friends and wish a farewell to my roommate, who would be moving to Oregon a few days later. I brought my camera and my notebook just in case.
As it happened, Turpen had scheduled International Creeps’s album release show for the same night. Long Division, as Turpen’s Bandcamp profile displays, is a collection of songs that “didn’t work out or weren’t tried” with his primary band, Flying Kards.
“I’ve been playing guitar and writing for about six or seven years now,” said Turpen, who studied psychology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. I see the influences of his academic work throughout the deeply personal album, particularly in “Mr. White.” He struggles to apply scientific inquiry to love — “I hypothesized that you’d never feel lonely, but figures won’t hold you in the dark” — but sees the methodology fall apart, asking, “Why can’t science make sense out of love?”
The best I can do to answer this question is to ask my own: If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around, does it make a sound?
On Passive Encounters
If I wanted to sound sentimental, I could say, “Music is all around us.” A great many of us who find ourselves interacting with Hear Nebraska frequently make decisions about music. Which show to attend on a night full of shows. Which album to play for whatever reason at whatever time. (I tend not to shuffle but to play music by album, from beginning to end.) We make music a large part of our lives by putting ourselves in the path of music’s trajectory. We stand before the firing squad, and we do it gladly.
Instead, I want to state a fact, and I can say the same thing. Music is all around us. I don’t think I’m revolutionizing anyone’s thinking by saying this. Case in point: A friend wrote the exact sentence in a Facebook conversation two days after I had written it here twice. But there’s music all around us that I suspect we often miss.
Turpen pointed to the same fact, saying, “[Music is all around us] in more ways than we realize. Inspiration comes from everywhere, especially when you're not even looking for it.” It’s the kind of music that shaped Lars von Trier’s 2000 film, Dancer in the Dark, the rhythm of train wheels against the railroad that sends Selma into the song “I’ve Seen It All.” It’s part of our lives whether or not we pilgrimage to a venue, press a button, put needle to vinyl or touch an instrument. We hear our jams coming from the ceiling-mounted speakers in coffee shops, restaurants and bars, and we comment on the music we hear at big-box stores and while we wait to be taken to a room for appointments with our physicians.
It’s those passive encounters I want to feature in this column. Each week I’ll reflect on a moment in which I was unexpectedly confronted by music and consider the roles of these encounters in our lives.
They are often subtler encounters, perhaps less likely to resurface in our memories, but they are there nonetheless, working quietly to impact our moods. They’re little flecks in the tapestries of our lives, overshadowed by the dazzlingly embroidered nights we planned for weeks in advance. So I’m challenging myself this summer to wear my headphones less and keep my ears pricked more, to pay attention to the music I have for too long ignored. I do this with the hope that I can begin to more consciously appreciate the music I happen upon in the midst of my daily activities.
On the Accidental Audience
“It's kind of like this cool feedback loop of good vibes,” Ross Turpen laughed. I’m interested in finding out how the accidental audience affects his performance. “They come in with no expectations,” he continued, “and when you see those types of people digging your music, it adds this extra kind of energy that you can put into your performance and give back to the audience.”
He’s noticed the difference between playing for an accidental audience and playing for those who know him and his music. “Friends will always be there to pat you on the back,” he explained, but they already have his back. The support is valuable, but the artist wants his work to reach new people. And he needs that presence at his shows: “As a relatively unknown musician on the Omaha scene, I rely on passive encounters to get my music out there.” Playing for his friends and fans is rewarding, he seemed to say, but establishing his name as an Omaha musician requires exposure to new people, growing his fan base. Friends inviting friends to his shows works. People accidentally encountering his music works, too. What matters is that Turpen isn’t a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear him make his sound.
To reach passive listeners, he’s worked to write songs that are worth paying attention to. Songs that make it worth our while to head into the forest and accidentally encounter his music. There’s something rewarding for Turpen in playing these songs to an accidental audience.
“I try to write about personal experiences in ways that other people can relate to,” he said. “If somebody stumbles across one of my songs and goes, ‘Damn, I totally get where he’s coming from,’ then I’ve done my job.”
I knew where he was coming from when he played “Mr. White” at his show. I imagine myself to be a fairly logical person, but what I know about the world can’t be measured.
On the Sound of Music
I trust the imperfect logic of internet memes. I say “imperfect” because often the points they make follow paths of flawed logic based on assumptions and feelings. And I trust them because often I, too, make connections based on how I feel, and how I assume what I feel relates in some way to others. These images are little fragments of ideas, simple and safe, allowing me to retract my agreement with a shrug. “After all,” I can say, “they’re just memes.”
Taped to the side of my file cabinet in the office space I shared in the English Department at the University of Nebraska at Omaha was one of my favorite memes. The image is a still from the opening sequence of Robert Wise’s 1965 film, The Sound of Music. There’s Julie Andrews in Salzkammergut, the Lake District of Salzburg, Austria, singing the title song with the Alps at her back. Her arms are spread open, embracing the hills on which she stands — the hills that are, she sings, “alive with the sound of music.” The white block text over the image reads, “Look at all the fucks I give.” The particular power of this meme and others like it is their ability to capture in a few square inches a vast array of insights and conclusions linked inextricably to the circumstances of the viewer. The particular power of a good song is its ability to do the same in only a few minutes.
I look at the Julie Andrews meme now, and in it I find the fragments of a fresh connection. I think of all the music laid out for me. I think particularly of “Mr. White” and “What Keeps Us Up” and International Creeps’ set at the Side Door, all of it confronting me only because I shook off the daze that accumulates from a life of tedium, of necessary but only practical obligations. The meme and Ross Turpen remind me of a favorite book, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and her answer to the question of the tree falling in the forest: “Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
What I want is to wake up so I can be there, to slough off the delirium of moving always toward goals and results, to put my ear to the ground, and to find the quiet pulse of Nebraska. It’s this pulse upon which the music around us is built, and I can’t bear to think about what dreadful and graceless silence I’d find if science made sense out of love.
S.R. Aichinger is a Hear Nebraska intern. Check back each week for a new installment in his column. Reach him at sraichinger@hearnebraska.org.