Chris and Molly read Infinite Jest, pages 74-81. The psych ward doc gets a little more info out of Kate Gompert. We meet Coach Gerhard Schtitt. Discussion starts at 23:10.

Infinite Cast

Part 11

Hymns to the collapse of western liberal-democratic hegemony

"Destabilisation and disfigurement at its core... Fantastic discomfort" - The Wire

buzzkillsquad [at] yandex [dot] com

Factotums is the working handle of songwriter, Jack Gain. Raised in Macclesfield, after graduating he returned to his hometown and suffered several fitful bouts of employment before finding work at a library. There he took to composing songs silently in the stacks, recording his arrangements to tape in the kitchen of his flat.

    The resulting series of demos tread a line between upbeat, mid-60s guitar pop and British social realism. A sunny oeuvre, combining back bedroom dreaminess with a narrow-eyed wit, and tethered to the doleful, northern romanticism of Shelagh Delaney and Alan Sillitoe. Sweet, but salted with vernacular.
    The songs are short and neat. Flecked with chirruping guitars and impelled along by low, keening vocals. Chiming leads echo Nico and the Byrds, while wandering, tape-chorused bass parts evoke their C86 disciples. Occasionally, the springs shudder and the songs thrum with the three-chord urgency of Jesus and Mary Chain and Nuggets-era American garage.

    Here, Factotums enters into a fine European tradition - that of mimicking American cultural forms only to create something inadvertently new. In this case, the product is a kind of ersatz, California jangle pop steeped in the experience of being young and bored in small English towns, where "West coast" means Crosby and Bootle. Lovelorn and moneylorn, it speaks from a callow wisdom founded on split shoes and long afternoons. Of cheap fun savoured in the most austere settings: the library, the workplace, the rented room.

    These influences are brought together with some cunning. Makeshift, kitchen counter percussion (featuring tambourine, Jew's harp, spring-bound sofa cushions and wooden spoon castanets... less a "wall of sound" than a bright, melamine partition) is a nod to Spector pop and '60s girl groups. As is Gain's own flat-vowelled croon.

    The sense of amateur enthusiasm here recalls such lo-fi luminaries as Beat Happening and the young Beck Hansen. This is not the lo-fi of Instagrammed nostalgia, but rather of a live sound captured on the hoof, by cramped means, before it disappears.

    It is from these cramped quarters that we can catch a glimpse of a wider picture: that of the "graduate without a future". The songs evoke a sense of anomie and placelessness - of a youth poised between promise and disappointment, tested on the fraying rub of the adult world. And of the unlikely bonds of kinship that adhere amid the moil. It is an insight which will resound beyond the kitchen tiles.


DC

a podcast about a book called Infinite Jest. 

By Molly O'Brien (@missmollymary on twitter)
And Chris Wade (@saywhatagain on twitter)