The title to writer and filmmaker Guy Debord’s autobiographical film, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), appears across the screen letter by letter, on two separate lines, both forwards and backwards, slowly revealing the Latin palindromic riddle recounting a moth’s fatal attraction to the flame. Loosely translated as “we go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire”, the riddle describes a phenomenon that has long been debated among entomologists, with theories ranging from; a misguided form of celestial navigation and orientation; a survival instinct to fly towards light when surrounded by darkness; and an evolutionary short-circuiting of the correlation between a light source and heat. Yet, despite the nocturnal moth’s vulnerability, it remains extant, leaving us to meditate on its self-destructive nature, again and again. In Debord’s film, he draws analogies between getting lost in the labyrinth of this Latin palindrome, and a society constantly at war against its own possibilities. In it’s final frames, recalling the cyclical form of the palindrome, a sub-title reads: TO BE BEGUN AGAIN FROM THE BEGINNING.
Another example of the use of this ancient saying can be seen in Shakespeare’s late 16th century play, The Merchant of Venice, but more unusually, the moth to the flame is the subject of filmmaker Stan Brakhage’s 1963 film, Mothlight. Critic Ken Kelman describes it as a film that is, “on one level a parable of death and resurrection, but mostly really concerns the persistence of the essential form, image, and motion of being”. Brakhage made the film without the use of a camera, instead, collecting and gluing moth wings, legs, and antennae to a strip of 16mm film and re-animating the insect’s body parts through the very medium of its demise — light.
Listening to Moth — the latest album from the pop duo ChairIift a.k.a Caroline Polachek and Patrick Wimberly — I find myself thinking about the fateful palindrome of Debord’s opening title, the warning delivered by Shakespeare’s main character Portia, and the re-animated remains of Brakhage’s collage–film. Each one a wildly different take on a seemingly simple idea. Chairlift’s album is no different, drawing on the moth as a metaphor for beauty, vulnerability and fragility, in an emotional and personal response to the relentless energy of New York City. Two years in the making, the album’s beginnings are marked by the band moving into a new studio space in a former pharmaceutical factory – the remnants of which were left behind, acting as a memory of the building’s previous existence – and their daily commute through the city.
“I’m actually just walking into our studio now”, says Wimberly over the phone from Brooklyn. “We found this old building, and they had all this open space…there’s all these abandoned science labs, and this strange looking equipment, and locker rooms and cafeterias. It’s a massive building, and we were the only tenants on the second floor, so we just had our own little playground to run around in and make sounds. That’s where we started making the record.” The result is a texturally explorative and expansive album, particularly foregrounded in Polachek’s diverse vocal techniques throughout. She jumps in to further explain the significance and effect of having their own recording studio: “It’s interesting because when Chairlift first started, we really were a live band first and foremost. What became our first record was really our live arrangements of these songs that we’d been playing out for a year and had been touring”, she says, referring to their 2008 debut Does You Inspire You, released with Kanine Records. “On this record, we discovered that we now are foremost a studio band. We feel at our most creative, and are most at home when we have all the production tools around us. So I think this record is us sort of coming into that as a band.” She adds, “In the past we’ve taken either our live versions or our rehearsal studio demos and worked with another producer, but this time around we thought; we’ve been working together for a few years; we’ve both professionally produced records outside of Chairlift; and we thought, OK, now we’re grown-ups, now we can do this.”
In the years since their last album, 2012’s Something, released by Columbia Records, Chairlift have been honing their approaches to songwriting and production through collaborations with a diverse group of artists. In 2013 they both collaborated with Beyoncé on No Angel from her self-titled album – a track written and produced by Polachek, and co-produced by Wimberly. The following year, after a residency at the Villa Medici in Rome, Polachek released and toured her self-produced solo album Arcadia under the alias Ramona Lisa. She also collaborated with Deloreon, SBTRKT, and Blood Orange amongst others, while Wimberly collaborated with artists such as Solange Knowles, Fort Lean, Wet, Kelela, and Tecla. Their experimentation paid off, with Moth reaping the benefits through a new found confidence and trust in where they needed to go with their sound.
“Another thing that came with that moment of stepping up to the plate of self production and building our own studio, was also realising that New York is now fully home for us” explains Polachek. The city has been home to the band for nearly a decade after relocating from Boulder, Colorado, where they initially formed along with ex-Chairlift member Aaron Pfenning. “When we first moved here, we had a sense that we were a bit like kids who had just come to this big city, and then all of a sudden it hits you, that this place is you, and you’ve become this place. This record is sort of our way of reflecting on it, but also becoming really sensitive to all of the ways we really are affected by this city … like the commute. Walking down the sidewalk, walking in the metro, and then passing by a hospital, project housing, and then finally arriving at this factory building – all these things sort of contributed to our mindset everyday when we came to the studio, which was different than it had been before. It made us really want to write these songs that are set in New York City.”
In the lead up to Moth’s release date, videos for the tracks Ch-Ching and Romeo debuted, depicting two contrasting New York vignettes — the former, set underneath an industrial concrete freeway by day, the latter, shot in a vibrant Chinatown at night. With time kept short for our interview, I only get to ask about one of the songs, the opening ‘Look Up’. In a nice surprise, it turned out to be a good summary of the recording process for Moth. “That song came together super fast…after much of the record was done, if not all of it,” says Wimberly. “We set out with the goal of writing an opening to the record. We wrote that and recorded as we were writing it. I think the whole thing took a few days. That’s one where we applied a lot of the techniques that we had refined over the two-year process of producing the record. That’s one of the reasons why it happened fast. I think it was originally written on our new piano, and we have our MPC where we just lay down some loops really fast … and then we came up with the melody and wrote the lyrics I think by the end of that day. And then I replayed a lot of the piano stuff on the marimba, which was the instrument that I was traditionally trained on at university. Then we called up our saxophonist friend who had played on about four or five different songs on the record and we added his part.” He adds, “The song came together so fast that in a way it was summing up the whole process of making the record. A lot of the other songs were written pretty quickly, but then the process of producing them and finishing them up was a very explorative process, so we were just trying to learn and figure out new ways to make songs and make sounds that felt really good to us.”
Polachek disentangles the track a bit more: “One of the inspirations for Look Up was this film that I found on YouTube by way of my father who is a Chinese historian. In the last few years he has been particularly interested in Chinese dance and he’s been sending me a lot of things. One particular video I found kind of scared me a little bit, because it was a type of dance that was done with political or socialist intentions. I think it was like the overture, an opening scene, for a whole concert of dance … People were moving in unison… It was very anti-individualist… but I remember feeling, especially as a New Yorker and as an American, sort of frightened by that idea of being part of something that is much bigger than you, and that you have no control of. That thing of being a cog in the wheel… this idea of selflessness in choreography. I realised I was frightened by it because I think that is just a part of life in general and there’s actually no way of getting away from it, but so much of pop culture taught me the opposite — you’re so important, you’re the shit, you can do whatever you want. It was so interesting that a pop culture from another tradition was actually telling you the opposite. And what I thought was actually so texturally beautiful about that piece was that it opened with the sounds of birds and these sort of pastoral country sounds … and I thought well what’s the equivalent for that overture for our record, that gives you right off the bat this sense of competing largeness and smallness, and sets the scene sonically for the rest of the record? And that’s where the bird sounds and also that tone of, you know, here we are, in this year, in this place … it came from having found that film.” She concludes, “The New York City that we recorded is very much worded in our current experience”.
Chairlift’s Moth is out now on Columbia Records.
Words: Sharon Phelan
Photos: Chairlift
