Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralised, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
You know that age old rhetorical saying, “if walls could speak what would they say?” Well I’ve often found — and still find — myself thinking the same thing about other inanimate objects; bringing them to life in pondering thought through animating speech in my mind. Although I think about love in this way too, I don’t know if I would call it an inanimate thing. In the same way that “Thin love ain’t love at all” — then surely dead love ain’t love at all either? In its animatedness, I think love takes the shape of “the lover’s inward eye”, thus a wicked inward eye brings to life a wicked love, a violent inward eye; a violent love…and so on. Listening to Cape Town born and now Berlin based musician Blake’s debut EP Lovers with Tales, sounds and feels like a sonic reckoning with the grief — and pieces of an obliterated self/world — one is left with after the dissolution of a deceitful love that came masked in sheep’s clothing, and more so, the state of being undone that comes with facing the truth of that deception.
Starting live performance at age five, Blake has an extensive stage performance background. Moving into the world of fashion magazines after music studies, Blake cultivated the understanding of physical perception — understanding the image often outweighs everything else, and understanding now, that fluidity within music works the same. Perhaps, this is why in genre, Lovers with Tales exists somewhere between early 80s pop and soul. Grief demands that we get low, in the sense that it is heavy to carry and Lover with Tales is threaded with a sonic melancholy that evokes grief’s weighing-down-weightedness. However — and perhaps because of the 80s pop sonic influences on the project — there is also a sound and feeling of some sense of eventual redemption and salvation from the drowned-in-heartache sonic textures on the EP. Lovers with Tales is made up of 4 tracks in total and is a sweet 15 minute listen. The opening track named after the EP itself is also its lead single, this is followed by “Sofia” (which in my opinion is also the most ambient track) after which is “Sofia (Interlude)” and the EP closes off with the song titled “It is over” — an ending at the end, that carries promise(s) of a new beginning. There’s a First Nation’s saying that goes, “the soul would have no rainbow if the eyes had no tears” and I think of that as I listen to the EP’s lead single — released with an accompanying music video directed by Sarah Blasskiewitz — especially the part where Blake sings:
[ocean the radio
broken hearts broken hearts away float
The cost of it calling you you slipped and drained
now you are through]
Here right over
There a song there’s a murmur
Of a wolf playing soldier
A lover, a liar
[closed and it’s all goodbye
all in the eyes, how I cried]
There’s something about Blake that harkens back to the singer’s singer — and there’s an affective, sonic and narrative coherency that holds Blake’s Lover’s with Tales together in a beautifully and harrowingly evocative way. The project is textured with a vulnerability and working through pain many of us tend to conceal from the world, and I think there’s something poetic and brave about that. It brings to my own working-through-the-pain heart and mind something James Baldwin once said about art:
Art has to be a kind of confession. I don’t mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too — the terms with which they are connected to other people. This has happened to every one of us, I’m sure. You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that they are alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important. Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to them from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true for everybody.
