"Fugitive Traces" (Punctum Books) is a CD album and accompanying PDF booklet that collages the director’s commentary from over a dozen Werner Herzog films with electronic, chamber, and rock music to both pay homage to one of the world’s most visionary filmmakers and critique an artistic practice rooted in contradiction and frequent disaster.

You know the stories. Werner Herzog exploited native workers to clear a swath of rainforest and pull a steamship up a mountain in Peru. Werner Herzog climbed an active volcano on an evacuated island, and then claimed embarrassment that the volcano had not erupted. Werner Herzog brought about the deaths of 10,000 tame rats he’d smuggled into the Netherlands for the filming of "Nosferatu."

The album’s accompanying “lyrics” comprise an essay that explores the consequences of being seduced by Herzog’s unique brand of recklessness, documenting a disaster on the set of young filmmaker Joe Sacksteder’s "Silo."

Tracks from "Fugitive Traces" previously appeared on Sleepingfish, The Collagist, Textsound, Quarterly West, and Queen Vic Knives. The Young Vish is joined on this album by Chris Westhoff (guitar), Mark Dickson / Nests (guitar, mandolin), Hannah Robbins (cello), and Brian DiBlassio (piano).

Design by Quemadura

A Very Remote Place

The Last Poetry of Capitalism

Forbidding World

Norman Take a Knife

Christian Bale's Courage

Fantasy Enough

The Echo and Weasel

By Dint

A Sense of Irony

The Young Vish is Joe Sacksteder is a Midwesterner, originally. So he was totally unprepared for the earthquake that struck the Osa Peninsula as he sat outside a hostel reading Werner Herzog’s "Conquest of the Useless." Even less prepared to turn back to his reading and encounter the sentence that had been interrupted: “Lord Almighty, send us an earthquake.”

He's the author of the story collection "Make/Shift" (Sarabande Books) and the novel "Driftless Quintet" (Schaffner Press). His album of audio collages, "Fugitive Traces," is available from Punctum Books. Recent publications include Michigan Quarterly Review, The Offing, DIAGRAM, and West Branch. He has his PhD from the University of Utah and teaches at Sweet Briar College in Virginia.

By Dint

The Young Vish

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