| Larkin Grimm – Soul Retrieval (2012) |
Larkin says:
It’s not easy being free. And why would you want to find yourself if you don’t love yourself? /// Links:
Larkin Grimm – Soul Retrieval
Born: September 18, 1981
Location: Memphis, Tennessee ~ Blue Ridge Mountains in Georgia ~ Manhattan, East Village, NY
Album release:
Record Label:
Tracklist:
01 – Paradise And So Many Colors 4:55
02 – Flash And Thunder Came To Earth 5:03
03 – Without A Body Or A Numb And Useless Mind 4:14
04 – The Road Is Paved With Leaves 5:46
05 – Be A Great Burglar 2:56
06 – Dirty Heart Dirty Mind 3:14
07 – Lying In A Pool Of Milk 3:51
08 – Hello Pool Of Tears 2:55
09 – I Am Not Real 2:39
Website: http://larkingrimm.net/
Larkin Grimm was born 27 years ago in Memphis TN to hippie devotees of the religious cult The Holy Order Of MANS - her parents were runaway kids that met in San Francisco in the late 60’s and eventually found their way into the cult, which later moved to Memphis. Larkin spent her early years in this communal environment, raised by several parents at once. When the cult disbanded Larkin was 6, and her nuclear family moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Georgia and quickly grew to include 5 siblings. Larkin says she ran wild in the mountains and was “raised by the family dog.” Larkin got the taste of music in her from her fiddler and singer father and her folksinger mother. She dropped out of school at 10 and didn’t return until 12. At 13 she was sent to boarding school (courtesy of Georgia’s Coca Cola, which funds the school with the intent of helping gifted Appalachian children). Larkin excelled, (though her erupting hormones and wild imagination were already roaring) and she won a full scholarship to Yale to study art. She spent a while there then freaked out at the elitism of the place. She left and returned several times, somehow along the way managing to find herself in Thailand, where she studied Thai healing massage and “befriended strippers and watched them being humiliated and abused by sex tourists”, bummed around Guatemala, and also hitchhiked around southern Alaska by herself, until she found a place “so beautiful I couldn’t leave, camped out there in my tent for about 2 months with the plan to starve to death, get eaten, or get enlightened.” Larkin says a Cherokee shaman named Jezebel Crow found her on the mountaintop and lured her to her truck with the promise of maple syrup and sausages. She became her “first great teacher, initiating me into the shamanic practice of using natural hallucinogens to gain spiritual wisdom. On one such trip, I got my first jolt of golden light to the brain and was possessed by a forest spirit who taught me to sing.” Jezebel drove her down to her commune in Olympia, Washington, where she would live off and on for a few years, soon hanging out with “eco-warriors, vagabonds, sexual deviants and various other miscreants.” But Jezebel encouraged Larkin to go back to Yale and when she returned Larkin started incorporating singing into her art practice, which led her finally to decide to become “a real musician”.
Back at Yale for the last time (eventually “graduating” with one credit left to go) Larkin met Dave Longstreth and became a member of Dirty Projectors for a time. When she left that band she joined up with the Providence RI Noise/Art scene, and was active in arranging gigs and festivals there, as well as working on her own music. Larkin soon made 3 self-recorded albums of freeform, improvisational songs (or “acoustic noise” as she calls it), 2 of which were released by Secret Eye (Harpoon, and The Last Tree). She books her own tours, travels constantly, and has by her own force of will, itinerant nature, and sense of reckless adventure managed to build a supportive network of friends and fans around Europe and the US/Canada. Larkin has shared bills with The Mountain Goats, St. Vincent, Vetiver, Sleepy Sun, The Great Lake Swimmers, Lightning Bolt, Devendra Banhart, Spires that in the Sunset Rise, Espers, Mi and L'au, Brightblack Morning Light, Entrance, Viking Moses, the Microphones, and Old Time Relijun to name a few. She currently resides in Manhattan’s East Village.
You can contact my publicist, Howard Wuelfing, howlingwuelf@aol.com
Book me a show through Leafy Green Booking, www.leafygreen.com
About LG website: monkey@larkingrimm.net
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/larkingrimm
Larkin Grimm - Advanced Shapeshifter
Photo by Ports Bishop.
Larkin Grimm is an elegant warrior, strong and tall and crowned with unruly ringlets. Her eyes change color, and her calm gaze penetrates even the most fortified defenses with a chthonic wisdom far beyond her 26 years.
Her legendary upbringing tends to precede her: she was raised in Memphis, Tennessee by devotees of the religious cult The Holy Order Of MANS. When she was six years old, her family moved to the Blue Ridge region of Georgia, where, as one of five children of folk musicians, she found herself largely left to her own devices. She was a wild mountain witch child who dropped out of public school at age ten, yet went on to attend Yale to study painting and sculpture. Nomadic by nature, she has rambled all over the world, learning healing arts in Thailand and engaging with entheogens with a shaman in the Alaskan wilderness. She taught herself how to sing and play music during these mind-expanding journeys, locked in dark rooms and deep in the woods, possessed by spirits. She recorded two experimental albums, Harpoon and The Last Tree, both of which were improvisational and intensely cathartic works.
After corresponding for years, Michael Gira (of Swans and Angels of Light) signed Larkin to his own Young God label, and was instrumental in the birth of her latest album, Parplar. In her own words regarding their time working together, “…he has this great ability to make me feel comfortable being my flamboyantly perverse Mary Poppins self, and the songs I’ve written under his whip are probably the best I’ve ever come up with, so I am super grateful for this time in my life.” Gira’s appraisal of Larkin captures her aptly:
Larkin is a magic woman. She lives in the mountains in north Georgia. She collects bones, smooth stones, and she casts spells. She worships the moon. She is very beautiful, and her voice is like the passionate cry of a beast heard echoing across the mountains just after a tremendous thunder storm, when the air is alive with electricity. I don’t consider her folk though — she is pre-folk, even pre-music. She is the sound of the eternal mother and the wrath of all women. She goes barefoot everywhere, and her feet are leathery and filthy. She wears jewels, glitter, and glistening insects in her hair. She’s great!
In a time when our culture seems to openly scorn –but secretly craves– magic, Larkin Grimm is an unashamed and forthright power to be reckoned with.
Coilhouse: Listening to your first two albums (Harpoon and The Last Tree), I get the impression that there was something of a strange sea-change in both your music, and your mode of self-expression, kicking off with Parplar. It’s an incredibly powerful album, and it’s clear that you ventured to some fantastic other-worlds while making it. What was that process like? I’ve read that you recorded the album in a haunted mansion: did the ghosts put their two cents in?
Larkin: Well, my first album was incredibly strange. I was still thinking of myself as a visual artist and a noise musician at the time. I had no interest in songwriting back then. There were some elements of folk that came through, though, and on the second album I tried to explore my folk roots a bit, but still avoided song structure. The big change came when I met Michael Gira and we blew each other’s minds and there was a lot of excitement in our exchange of musical ideas. Michael would force me to sit down and listen to these tunes by Bob Dylan and Neil Young and The Beatles, all bands I avoided like the plague before.
Interview continues after the jump.
Of course, I listened to a lot of Swans as well. He wanted me to write songs, so that he could produce them. It was a new thing for me, and definitely an experiment in collaboration. I wrote all of the material, but Michael provided a valuable frame of reference. Of course those were the pre-recession days and he had all this money from Devendra [Banhart] and he just spoiled me rotten. I was living in this slum in Providence, Rhode Island and the label would send me money so that I could write and eat. I was sleeping on the floor in a bare room with a few instruments and a typewriter. I was studying to be a psychic at the time and the experience was pretty overwhelming. I cut myself off completely from friends and lovers and focused inward, on work and meditation. I was writing songs in my sleep. It was great.
I don’t think that experience could ever be duplicated.The stars were just aligned in my favor at that moment. When it came time to record, we did it mostly analog, with great engineers and dynamic characters going in and out all the time, ghosts and pirates and even a succubus showed up while we were staying in that old mansion. I tried to keep my psychic channels open and let the ghosts have a say in how the music should turn out. Michael was going out of his mind, mostly in a good way.
You have been described by many as “a force of nature” or “an elemental spirit”. I know you to be an environmental activist, and an extremely magical woman- your connection with the land, and with spirituality and healing work resonates through your music. What’s it like working within an industry that at times is dominated by a lot of cynicism and waste?
I just ignore that stuff. I turn inwards at a certain point when bullshit is going on, and visualize the experience that I want to have, and with a certain force of will I end up associating with the good people. I only have enough energy to focus on my own personal growth and responsibility. Like attracts like. You have to embody the change that you want to see in the world.
When I saw you perform during SXSW, you talked about Paris Hilton and Brtiney Spears and your fascination with pop culture and these “leggy, surgically enhanced blondes” that inspired you to write “Blond and Golden Johns” and “Dominican Rum”. What is it about these women that sparked your muse?
It’s just incredible how we sacrifice those starlets on the Hollywood altar. We love to build them up when they are young beautiful virgins and then humiliate and dismember them. Paris Hilton was smart because she degraded herself first, and after the sex tape came out the tabloids couldn’t take her down. They work for her. She is in control of a lot of things, including Britney Spears’ pussy. I am impressed. But of course I am also disgusted by the whole thing, and see those girls as the lowest of the low in our culture. So I wrote this album wondering, “What do Paris and Britney need to know in order to become enlightened beings?” And you know what? I think Britney is getting there. Her most recent album, Circus, is GREAT.
You have identified as transgendered, and it seems that in making Parplar you went through some major shifts in your perceptions of gender and sexuality. In exploring these different aspects of your persona, you’ve played around with different roles: most noticeably in your stage attire. What transformations sparked your shift from moccasin boots to spike-heeled, red-soled Louboutins?
So, say you want to be enlightened. The first thing you have to do is get rid of your societal imprinting, the things that people tell you you are, things you have been forced to do since childhood. I’d say the two biggest problems are gender and religion. These things take you away from your self, and blind you against your intuition, making you easy to control, making it easy to predict your actions and tastes and exploit them in the nasty world of economic and political power.
If you want to be free, you have got to escape the expectations and rules of gender and religion and be your self. The scary thing about your self is, it’s just and empty void. It is a beautiful nothingness.
I have a certificate on my wall given to my by this shaman named John Perkins, who wrote Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. It says “Larkin Grimm: Advanced Shapeshifter.” It’s right next to a statue of Kali, the goddess of necessary change and destruction.
When I was a kid, playing music involved climbing trees and picking blueberries with a dulcimer on my back. I wore moccasins and played shows in canoes and gardens. Nowadays, I am living in New York City, and there is a new concept: The Indoor Shoe. I am over six feet tall in my stilettos, and men are powerless against the sexual exploitation of the Indoor Shoe. For me, this is a fun trick to play. I question everything.
There’s a dark thread that runs through Parplar that separates it from typically optimistic freak-folk, especially in “They Were Wrong”, when you sing “Who said to you you’re going to be all right?/Well they were wrong, wrong, wrong/In my mind you’re already gone.” It’s not often these days that we are told so bluntly that no, it’s actually not going to be all right. Your work is almost brutally honest, but also strangely comforting. Where does that come from?
Fearlessness in the face of total disaster is really fun, really empowering. Enjoying life, even when it seems inappropriate, will make you powerful and kind.
I’ve heard a legend that you were kicked out of a town in Alaska for being a witch. True story or tall tale?
Oh, no. They kicked me out for being a bitch! I was dating several men at once in a town where men outnumbered women 7 to one. I thought I was being generous, but the dudes disagreed. I was also only 20 years old at the time, and partying at the bar with my fake ID, trying to pick up married women. I was young and stupid and irresponsible. I nearly started a riot. Oops! At that point in my life I brought chaos and drama with me everywhere I went, because I wanted the world to change faster than everyone else did. Only lately have I learned that it is much safer to put this energy into the music. I try to channel my energy wisely these days, and visualize a benevolent outcome. I think it has to do with growing out of that teenage rage and deciding to do something positive with my time on this earth. /// Original page: http://blackisstrange.blogspot.com/2011/01/larkin-grimm-advanced-shapeshifter.html /// Records:
Harpoon cd 2005
The Last Tree cd 2006
Parplar 2008 - Young God Records
Limited Releases:
Time is a Spiral - 10” vinyl, limited edition of 500 (Released by VPRO in Amsterdam)
After You Men Explode The World, We Women Will Sing it to Sleep (cassette tape, limited edition of 100) released by Sloow tapes in Belgium.
Larkin Grimm and Rosolina Mar (7” Vinyl) released by wallace records in Italy July 2009.
Italians!
Kathleen Baird from Spires that In the Sunset Rise is a genius and is my friend.
The imaginational galaxy...
Pony Avalon, Stainless Steel as Nicky Pellicula, and Me as Pony Avalon. A belgian band.
All photos from Martin Bisi show, January 24, 2012 - 
Larkin Grimm abducts you into her dreamscape/homeland, hidden behind veils of kudzu and falling water, populated by old friends and deadly monsters. Urgently direct, she is offering us a New World couched in old Georgia sounds: thunderstorms, dulcimers, footstomps, handclaps, and pleading soul-blues. This is not precious forest-pixie music; this is the beautifully flawed sound of the force of Nature, a Siren call to bind all souls and draw them into the deep Woods.
This photo was taken on October 18, 2006 using a Canon EOS 30D.
Copyright: prupert
| Larkin Grimm – Soul Retrieval (2012) |