Purveyor of: The Word

File Next To: Bonnie Prince Billy, Bill Callahan, The Tallest Man Alive

Playing: All Toronto’s Parties a.k.a. WL 582, Nov. 22 at the Garrison

Holiday Rambler is the spirit of Lazarus made flesh. He has been returned to rove the land and herald a change in the winds of humanity. His hand moves matter, his sound moves minds. The Hooded Fang and King Weather have both bore witness to the hallowed apparition in gentlemanly clothes. Wavelength too has been visited upon by the Holiday Rambler. With countenance darkened by a thousand league stare, he spoke thusly: "Unto you I grant a glimpse trough the Window of All. Ask but six questions, and the answers shall be given."

From whence do you come, Rambler? 

I hail from South Carolina. My folks own and operate a large exotic animal park there where I grew up. It was very hot in the summertime. I moved north, then things got hot in the United States in general, so I moved north again. This strategy has served me well thus far. When things get hot, move north. It is cold at the top.

Where was There is No End to the World, and Nothing Can Shatter the Earth recorded and what was that experience like for you?

That recording was made possible by my good friends Alex Unger and Emmott Clancy, two of the finest men you will ever discover. We used to play together in a band called The Dead Elm Society of Canada, and they were among the earliest proponents of Holiday Rambler. At an opportune moment, I took them up on their long-held offer to record the project, and we took to the cabin Emmott had built in Warsaw to finally lay the thing to tape. It was that beautiful liminal season just after the New Year, when everything is permitted, a mutual holiday amidst the coldness of no-man's land. I trekked out through the snow and spent a good day singing to two fine men in a little cabin in the woods, and then we all went home. The cabin was then nameless, so I called it Caves Lodge. 

(Their operations have since relocated to a farmhouse nearby and taken the name House of Wands, and Alex is still musicking sharply as ELMS, though this has not affected the mortality of the trees in question.)

Do you recall how I came into possession of your fine record?

I believe it was a matter of geometric courtesy. Hooded Fang was playing our Tosta Mista album release party in an open space that will soon be a condominium at 1245 Dundas Street West (may the Abacus Lofts never forget the motion forged in their receding past). [and that was Wavelength #526 – ed.] The brand-new head on my snare drum had apparently suffered the sudden affliction of stage fright and subsequently broken at the first requested beat. Fairly dismayed, I did a careful dance of panic and replaced the drumhead while my bandmates did a casual dance of distraction. When I returned to the proceedings, I cast the broken drumhead into the sky, where all frightened things should be able to go. I was later informed that it had in fact decided to return to earth using your magnificent coiffure as its lodestar. I hardly knew you at the time, but was wise enough to know that a man of your goodness should never be harmed by errant flying discs. To repay the injury, I offered the closest object I had in size and shape to the drumhead, which happened to be the Holiday Rambler LP. That is what I recall. 

Holiday Rambler's limber poetics and atonal plucking are so far from your heavy Hooded Fang percussive stylings. Where does your musical heart place its strongest loyalty?

Though I am greatly enamored of making and unearthing all varieties of clatter, my musical heart feels strongly that first there is the word. A song is for getting magic.

Holiday Rambler - Dogwood from mina sewell mancuso on Vimeo.

Where did the video for “Dogwood” take place? We see a crumbling whale sculpture, a treehouse mansion, a railroad, a time-eaten house and fireworks.  

That video took place all over the Southern United States. One summer I took a trip South with my beloved to visit my folks. I knew a lot of good forgotten things I wanted to show her, but once we were down there I just drove wherever she pointed, and she took us to all sorts of unspeakably beautiful places. She often held a camera, as she is wont to do, and I suppose she trained it in my direction to maintain the sense of scope. When we got home, she cut all the footage together, and my feeling was not unlike the small smoke shape that appears briefly after the firework blast in the video, when Lazarus comes back.

What do you prophesy for the future of mankind?

As I am willing to offer prophecy only in private, I will instead turn to my friend Harry for a statement to divert this question. Please do not take his petulance for my own:

"To be aware of this time and place, and the desideratum of the individual's significance in the face of the machine, is one thing. But nothing could be more futile or downright idiotic than to express this age. Or any other age. The prime obligation of the artist is to transcend his age, there to see it in terms of the eternal mysteries, to use its materials at the same time that he transforms them into magic. What this age needs more than anything else is an effective antidote. And if the contemporary artist could actually be present in any other age, it is probable that he would feel the same about it."

— Interview by Adam Bradley