The Varieties of Exile trilogy comes to an end with these two long pieces. 

Simultaneously the most personal and most cryptic recordings Tallinn has ever released, they range from the windswept prairie to the fetid rainforest; from delicate ambient jazz to howling full-spectrum electronics. 

In 2022, Tallinn will return, casting its fate to the trade winds… 

Artwork by Brian Vu 
www.brian-vu.com 

Mastered by Warren Hildebrand 
warrenhildebrand.com

The limits of my language

https://xtallinnx.bandcamp.com/track/gauguins-death

Out in Timor-Leste, your dad’s doing deals with the junta, but back in the compound my dad is bedridden with the tropical malaise. Papeete is corkscrewing into his brain; its sunlight would blind him...

You’re prince of the demimonde at the international school. I’ve been to your parties; I’ve seen the Dutch boys getting in and out of your pool, like Hockney’d have painted.

You’d leave it all — your parents’ world: so rich, but also so small — for the shock of the new and beauties in a state of nature.

I’d love your freedom (to live with such liberation) but can’t stop thinking of the things I could lose if I cast my fate to the trade winds.

I’ve been thinking about Gauguin’s death; I’ve been thinking about "The Moon and Sixpence" and where to run to when high society's descended on the south seas, touring the things that you've lost on the breeze as everything changes.

I can just see you: thirty years passed in torpor, gone by so soon, with a lifetime of sketches spoiled on mildewing paper.

But would I be any better? Always wondering what the wind could bring to the doldrums, remembering you and everything that you’ve wagered?

I’ve been thinking about Gauguin’s death; I’ve been thinking about "The Moon and Sixpence" and where to run to when high society's descended on the south seas to get drunk and then sunburned and leave, everything wasted...

•

Jeffrey Lamoureux: drums
Scott Whittaker: voice / guitar

Gauguin's Death

(Joan:)

Your first nights in Los Angeles were a blur of wild parties as the honoured guest.  You were so charming as the young ingenue with your backwoods notions left on the sea far behind you.

New in the canyon as the sixties came to an end surrounded by laughter: sound without sense.

You knew that to focus, you’d need to be left alone: the city was churning outside your front door.  You wrote your confessions, then you let them go, and guarded your freedom as flashbulbs went off all around you.

All these reflections on the people you’ve been are echoing outward, sounds without end.

A new age of freedom has come for men: you put on your lipstick and step out again to see them ignore the mounting chaos outside.  America’s tripping on decadence.  You’re down here observing what all of it meant: everything’s started to change and you’ve only arrived.

(Frédéric:)

In ’77, in a classroom in autumn: you had just landed in Tehran and wondered how you could practice your grammar while the reckless gendarmes on the streets outside had begun to fire on the students.

You hoped you weren’t early for revolution to begin, for a hero's burial in the sandalwood wind.

At a feast with drawn curtains you recited violent poems: you’d perfected your accent ’til no one could have known how you had grown up with only French on your lips until you left everything to invent a new home.

You hoped helicopters would spray a rose water mist onto your burial in the deafening wind.

Overheard at the party with your new friends as you drink and debate all the means and the ends you see up close, not through a lens that’s too wide.  The thing that you’re still new to learning here’s how to live when you have everything to fear in a city that echoes with names where you’ve only arrived.

(Francis:)

A provincial arriving on a late September ship, from a new country, sea-stung and sick, you left your lumber town to live on pity and wits: Ontarian at Oxford, 1936.

“Abandoned to the waves”, then alone in the great hall: as your cohort surrounds you, you say nothing at all.

After the dinner you’re back in your rooms hosting a party with your roommate who sees the wilting girl crying with wine stains on her lips.  She’s new from the country and learning who lives

in endless indifference between these opulent walls in a “low dishonest decade”. You can see through it all:

too nouveau to die with the communists, too well bred not to see the century’s sick.  You’re so far from home this Michaelmas, learning for the first time that everything you’ve come to envy here is the last breath of a world soon to disappear.  Everyone's leaving for Spain. You’ve barely arrived.

The Arrivistes

Leaving the city I see you wait for your flight: the beard and blue collar all new since I’d last seen you nine years ago in another part of the world when we were eighteen.

You say you’ve been working three weeks at a time in the boreal forest, charting the lines in the past where a billion years ago this was the edge of the ocean, pools of fossil weeds.

I’m in year three trading currencies in Jakarta, windblown and free, exiled in the east from my family. Back again in the homeland I couldn't wait to leave, it isn’t how I thought it would be to feel so free: to be nothing and nowhere and endless...

Ambition

This year the summer’s dry, the breeze thick with the smoke of wildfires blowing through foothills to the prairie.

I’m here for just a few nights: my old home where I once ran wild, then left the scene of my impatience.

Downtown in glassed-in miles I flash back to my once-restless life: Jasmine alone out on the terrace.

Oh it’s been such a long time since we were young on starlit nights in swimming pools of absent parents.

The passing of seasons since you married the golden boy who wasted these four years of your life. They called you when they found him bleeding on a mountain highway by her side: the wreckage of a fast and short drive. They felt the painful thrill of being caught at the scene of their impatience.

Impatience

“Drive me to the checkpoint at the entrance to the compound”: It’s winter in Kabul in 2002 and I’m in the back seat. Looking out, I see cartography superimposed on Shar-e-naw streets, contours and magnitudes inadequate to the land that they meet...

I’m just here for a moment: I’m just here on rotation, idealist months in the desert. America spins.

We pass through: sepoys wave us over the threshold to the UN zone. I could be anywhere and so could you, waiting for me outside the same western rooms in which you’ve tried to sleep in Laos and Khartoum as your plans go to naught, dizzy with fever: the occident, too, inflamed and in rot.

I’m just here for a moment: I’m just here on rotation, idling drunk in the desert. America spins.

Land Cruiser

Lyric video: youtu.be/gTTNG4Wvw0g

Stuck in the valley while the mountain’s mad with spells tonight: primroses under snow on the path beneath my window. My foreign studies are over. I’m back in Davos, home on doctors’ orders with shadows in my lungs…

No more drunken lovers, no more dissipation in the eighteenth arrondissement. How could I leave you like this — laid low by this hunger, consumed by vulgar nature?

In your bedsit you told me I just wasn’t made for life here: too cold to let go in the realm of the senses. So I left a whole life beholden to modest joy and discipline and swooned to vulgar nature, consumed by vulgar nature...

Swooned to vulgar nature, consumed by vulgar nature...

The priest speaks to me now, knowing I’m a dying man lost and unmoored by the liberty I’d chosen. How could I be free and be bold and gaze toward the infinite and still lose to vulgar nature, consumed by vulgar nature…

Vulgar Nature

Lyric video: youtu.be/YfHOtsAV_-k

Looking out on the bay, we’re alone on emerald water, languid, following the current and the lust-sick air in this strait that takes us through these latitudes.

You’re shaping your nails in the breeze of the mid-morning, slowly polishing acrylics like the ones you used to break before I gave you luxury.

All I’ve ever wanted has come to me here along the captive coast, but freed from desire I’m drifting out here on the easterlies, far from home.

The pleasures of the table, all of this indulgence, wasted these years in the doldrums: the things you want can all change as soon as they’re enjoyed.

I hardly remember the days when I’d just left Vancouver, starving, following a fortune and when you’d sing for your wage in a squalid seaside road...

All I’ve ever wanted has come to me here along the captive coast, but freed from desire I’m just drifting here on the easterlies, far from home.

On the Trade Winds

Captive Coast

Born two hundred years ago, I'd leave my life just to behold Rupert's Land. Young in the Americas: driving pelts across the frozen ground to the passage, always looking for the smallest sign of Franklin.

But now I'm a comprador as the North Sea becomes the new hinterland. Down at the terminal, I raise their take from below the water I know.

To be buried on the shore of desolation, to lay beneath the stones with the winter closing in...

Leaving the offices, I feel the wind as it blows toward the Faroes: the seabirds are migrating away from bankrupt Europe. Born four hundred years ago, before the Act of Union, I’d be sailing for Panama, with everything my family had to lend...

To cast your fate adrift in desolation, bankrupt on the shore of the gulf of Darién...

(In The) Gulf Of Desolation

We're drinking makgeolli by the Pacific Ocean in a hotel where the bar is inside of the pool.

We're drinking umeshu on a tropical island. The breeze, when it comes, is drowsy and cool.

I'm back in Wassenaar, just outside of the Hague: under the porcelain sky, the inconceivable strain of the ocean.

I'm pouring one out for the submerged sirens, drifting suspended in hibiscus and violets.

The wine-dark sea is my finger bowl.

Biographies of Seaside Flowers

A new version of Sebald's Death from Expatriate (https://xtallinnx.bandcamp.com/track/sebalds-death). Shout out to Bryan Ferry and Slowdive

Sebald's Death 2

Last Christmas

New album "On the Trade Winds" October 13

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