Our trees shall not be cut by the root! As it is with them, so for our children. We must interrupt insatiable men, even before we grow hungry. We have to halt that system man, even before he cuts his road.

We are weeds who shall not be cut by the root. As it is with us, so for our children.

So listen. Listen for a renaissance; listen for or[i]sons in the rocks; moving through trees. Let go of your eating, needing mind. Even in the “weeds,” these little prayers burning into the air like pollen, like birds, like dew!

^{Note on music: remix of an old tune by wella tuls.}

It must have been the winter of 2020, maybe late November, when Raflum’s Melodies of forests and springs first hit me as if it came from inside my own chest. I had been listening to the album for some time by then, but there was something about the experience that afternoon which brought me to tears. I had defended my thesis earlier that year, and that accomplishment, along with months of alone time with my partner in our one-bedroom apartment in Spokane, WA, and the masked walking through the mid-size city, those half-relations with grocery tellers and park-walkers, the new normal, the stimulus checks and isolation and now the cold, had really been like some kind of incredible dream. And that afternoon this dream was bursting from me, as if it had taken form in someone else’s music, or perhaps it was that all of a sudden I could see the dream for what it was, just a dream, and the music was everything more real than vagaries.

Who knows really, but the point is, I cried, big time. :)

The silent and cold fog that divines its way out of ponderosa forests and off black basalt in fall in the inland northwest had been making the actual world into that dream since at least the mid-part of September. But, oh, how I had come to love cold fog when it replaces wildfire smoke

Sure, there was so much fear back then in 2020, almost as tangible in the air as the vapors. Worry for relatives and for the world in general was like an old mare in the night, and the news was a shoulder imp, always a demon (nothing changes).

My friends and I loved us some John Prine in those days. Still do.

“All the news just repeats itself

like some forgotten dream that we’ve both seen”

On the other hand, that musical moment with Raflum was such a time of fruition for me, when I discovered a new kind of joy and responsibility in myself.

I haven’t the time here to go into it all, but the several years prior to this time had been rather unstable for my partner and I. Poverty had been a biting snake in the grass for years; we moved so frequently, and all the roommates and the smaller and smaller spaces had started to take their toll. My health and resolve had been challenged in ways I had never expected. I had felt helpless in the face of generational trauma. I had run away (across country and continent) from so much that still latched on like hookworms in the heart

I had become deeply anxious about making life easier for my partner, as I saw these effects on her and as our sense of ourselves as bohemians (or minimalists… or something) had revealed itself to really be just a clever way to cope with the realities of being born to working class/poor parents in American capitalism, and the ways that sort of fact holds onto you, at least into young adulthood.

This sense of ourselves had got us through college as first-generation students and brought us so far beyond that too, but my sense of who we were had started to feel tenuous, stretched, unreliable through these years. Through my encounters with affluence, I had begun to develop this deeply felt sense of class consciousness which was actually painful, and the recent experience of moving to a new city and attending graduate school had only deepened these ruts in my psyche; BUT

by late 2020, “even though the whole world (was) burning” (Merwin), we finally had our own place, a beautiful and affordable (probably not anymore) space in a nice neighborhood with a community garden. And weirdly enough, the stifled pace of the city during lockdown and especially the unemployment subsidies my partner received which might have seemed a meager portion of salary for some, had vaulted us into an unprecedented (for us) kind of leisure.

All this, just after I had put myself through exposure therapy by editing and revisiting some of the psychological loops from my early forays into poetry writing.

Really focusing on my manuscripts in graduate school had given me a kind of peace and passing feeling about the soliloquies and characters which had represented the odd, seemingly insurmountable facts of my childhood. Deeper practice and understanding of form had helped me find a place for these old ghosts. The sonnet form for instance, with its accommodation of turns and unrequited desires, had helped to wrap up traumas like little gifts. I was finding intentionality and meaning, not just expressions in my work, and that made me happy

Years of focused practice in reading and writing had also given me another incredible gift: the moment, a deeper sense of placement in the world, especially the natural world, but really every place I had been. I was now at home somehow, even though my many sisters and brothers, familiar bugs, and the hills which grew me were far away. The silence of the western forests, which had so frightened me before, was now comforting, and even the ornery cries of the big roads and train tracks funneled between the terrifying mountains had become my friends.

My ears, trained up on the sounds of an isolated hillscape, church songs, and very few cars, had been aching with the subtleties of harsh sound in new environments for so many years now. I mean, in some places I would swear I could hear the squeal of electricity. These sounds had made me afraid, but with time fear had become a kind of relative. I did not jump in that presence anymore, and I was pleasantly baffled at how fear can be transformed.

When I cried that afternoon over the minimal plucking of guitar strings coupled with the sounds of a cricket and water, I think it was out of recognition of how truly subtle meaningful representation in art, especially sound art, is. I had spent countless hours listening to incredible environmental compositions, especially since I lived in cities, as a way to calm my nerves and find peace; but this moment in this particular composition by a relatively unknown Japanese artist, in my listening, was different somehow. It was so familiar. The guitar did not seem to be dramatizing the environmental sounds as you sometimes hear. There was a unity at work in the music that transported me to the waterside with the crickets I had missed so much living up north; but this organic unity also penetrated my memory gently, revealing a feeling which comes from within. Furthermore, it made the place where I was listening, the world around me in that moment, come alive. In that sound in that moment I felt joy, and I did not feel longing.

***

It was around 2020 that I first started tossing around ideas for a new alias under which to publish music.

I have played and sung since I was quite young and by the time I was a young adult I was performing original music. My playing back in the day was so formative, and I was lucky to have been able to compose with many haunting artists, particularly a group of rag-tag makers in Montreal, Quebec. Some of my early songs were recorded in the Mile End neighborhood. There we produced an EP called River all the way back in 2012. Though I remember someone back then saying I should go by Vandamien, I ended up publishing this originally under my birth name.

It is difficult to know the lasting value of many of those old songs I wrote, but some of them have stayed with me, and looking back I am impressed by the quality of artistry that went into generating a certain timely sound for the EP, folksy, spacious. This would have been the work of the musicians backing me up, as well as those behind the booth producing. I am finding I still have so much to learn, particularly as I have been recording and mixing my own music lately.

By 2020 though, I had been working on sounds very different from what people who knew my music might expect, and frankly, I guess I needed a different name to give me some lateral perspective on this whole making sound thing. The name wella tuls is the result of a simple mixing and matching of letters, with perhaps a nod to the naming styles of post-rock bands and artists who make environmental music. It has no meaning, though a couple people have read a kind of “keeper of the well” feeling in the name, and I have no quarrels there.

The album I made in 2020 is called adrift. As a note on just how subtle a good piece of sound art is, I have found that though I might have achieved some intrigue with this album in terms of composition, I was (still am) still learning the ropes as far as recording and mastering is concerned. Recently, I have been working to remix some of the pieces from that album. Here is an example: come on shadow. Let me know what y’all think about the new mix, especially if you remember the old one.

***

More recently, my partner and I moved to Oklahoma and have been living and working on our small farm Fox Hollow Farm and Herbary

A big part of our regenerative work here has been focused on recovery and management of the prairie and forest ecosystems for food and medicine, as well as the general well-being of pollinators and all our wildlife. We have so much fun out here. Something as simple as a rainy day on the farm can liven the senses and inspire reflection. I have hope to capture some of this in what follows:

In a way, the farm and the ecosystem represented in the piece above and in the video below, as well as the music and film is at least partly the result of that moment I have described from back in 2020 in Spokane and the possibilities that were birthed from a moment of clarity in terms of joyfulness and intentions. This was a gift from an artist who found a way to capture the right sound, which found me in the right moment to hear.

My hope for the near future is to become more fluent in these subtleties which make good music and recordings, as well as videos, and to produce more work which captures that real good sound, the kind that makes you remember and makes you feel present in a blooming world.

This piece was released on the summer solstice of this year. Perhaps it is worth revisiting as the winter solstice and the shortest days arrive.

Let me know in the comments what you think about these works, and/or what musical artists keep y’all going, keep y’all present.

Cheers,

Damien (aka wella tuls)