MAGIK MARKERS
The SIS Interview by Jose Fritz

Brooklyn's Magik Markers have been making sweet and noisy jams for the past few years. They've now signed with Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace label, and are riding the wave of good buzz with the release of their latest opus entitled Boss. Stranded In Stereo's Jose Fritz caught up with the duo, and here's what he has to report.

Some time after midnight Pete Nolan calls in. Had I known then that he might be an ardent Satanist I would have felt a greater sense of anticipation. It’s the sort of apocrypha that perks me up after sundown. He’s coughing and sick, mumbling and having trouble stringing together thoughts. He’s not drunk but maybe suffering the effects of some prescription drug causing mild aphasia or even ennui. I start out with the easy questions hoping he has the remaining stamina to answer them all. I asked why they have used at least three different spellings of Magic Markers; looking to discover if there is a purpose to it. Pete was not the least bit coy. “I don’t know, I think our purpose is generally to confuse people. I think we’ve settled on the Alistair Crowley version.”

So there was the first admission. The Magik Markers catalog is literally riddled with references to Crowley. For example on the CDR If It's Not A Ford it Sux the opening track is titled “The Solar Lodge of the O.T.O.” O.T.O. is an acronym for Ordo Templi Orientis. Mr. Crowley was the head of its branch in England starting in 1911. But in the book LIBER AL vel LEGIS, Alistair Crowley did not use the word magik once. In their lesser texts where it’s actually mentioned, Crowley actually prefers the alternate spelling “magick.” It’s appears to be just more subterfuge from Pete Nolan of the Markers. The goal of confusion should be expected from a man who named his record label Arbitrary Signs.

But interestingly Crowley does refer to song writing in his book of law; twice in fact. On line 63: “Sing the rapturous love-song unto me! Burn to me perfumes! Wear to me jewels! Drink to me, for I love you! I love you!” Prior to that he announces his own adoration on line 37 followed by a 3 stanza love-sonnet. It’s a panegyric to the things that he does understand. He commands that the music be rapturous; in other words state of being transported by emotion. If you’ve ever seen the Magik Markers performance you’d know how apt that is.

Cut to Video: Elisa Ambrogio is sitting on a couch looking slightly stoned in a tan sweater that matches the faded wall paper behind her. “…guitar politics and the politics of like wankery and whatever. A just like it might as well just be a dick in your hand, you’re jerking it off. So what if you played guitar the way a girl jerks off?” We do not know the question she was asked, but it rapidly becomes irrelevant in the psychotic guitar noise explosion that follows. The video cut is quick with no fade and no gap between her last consonant and the first dissonance.

Elisa Ambrogio sits spread-legged on the stage floor with her guitar laying flat. She is ramming an object into it’s pickups, and the last and highest note of it’s fretboard,. It might be a screwdriver, it might be a TV remote, a baby shoe, a rock, or a dildo. The footage is grainy and the lighting poor, it’s entirely uncertain but the inference is clear. The squall of feedback tells me the object was probably a microphone at least when she started.

She is surrounded by violent flailing and a crowd that reaches out and eventually drags her in. It looks like chorea sancti viti, the St. Vitus dance: the quick movements of the feet and hands are vaguely comparable to the effects of the neurological disease. Hemiballismus, ballism, and Athetosis are all present. It’s got a beat but they are uncertain of their role. It’s arguable whether the crowd understands any of this as an artistic statement or as performance art. More likely many are just being entertained and not thinking about Elisa’s fair remarks. She and the feminists of the 1960’s had a vaild point. There is somthing vaguely phallic about a guitar in the hands of the average male rock star. She presentes her idea intellectually and then deomonstrates it in the most overt manner possible. I like that quality in a woman. Subtlty is over-rated.

The surname Ambrogio comes from Ambrogi which in turn descends from the name Ambrose. It’s from the original latin Αμβροσιος (Ambrosius), meaning immortal. But many took the name from Saint Ambrose a 4th-century theologian and bishop of Milan. He became known as the patron saint of students and learning. The meanings span those two most obvious sides to Elisa: the intellectually explained notion and the potent visceral demonstration.

Descriptions of these demonstrations range from “primitive expressionism” and “dark abstractions” to “laconic and frenzied.” Music writers reach for the thesaurus when confronted with these immortals. I read “pompous palimpsest” and “colossal teratism” just recently. These glance off their main body of work, ignoring that they rage with reason. But the most important commentary I read described their work as “Spontaneous composition.” It made me think of Alan Ginsberg. Supposedly “Howl” was written in one sitting, but this is a lie of course. Multiple rough drafts have been found and we know for certain that this was a work developed over time not vomited out in a single sitting.

We have the same evidence regarding the Magik Markers courtesy of their own Arbitrary Signs label. They’ve been releasing a cassette, a CDR or 12-inch about every 3 months since the beginning. They document their growth like rings on a tree. Between releases ideas sprout, grow, mature and die. They prove to us that it’s a progression. Their stated purpose was that it helps them work through ideas that it forces them to create. But that seems disingenuous. They have seeded the past with more than 30 releases that hint otherwise. I don’t think they need forced to create. Elisa quoted Patti Smith on the subject in titling their “I Trust My Guitar” CDR in 2004.

“What I feel when I’m playing guitar is completely cold and crazy, like I don't owe nobody nothing and it's just a test just to see how far I can relax into the cold wave of a note. When everything hits just right (just and right) the note of nobility can go on forever. I never tire of the solitary E and I trust my guitar and I don't care about anything.”

Were their “lengthy noise excursions” truly just a test for themvselves? It makes it all the more interesting that Thurston More is infatuated with Smith as well. He interviewed her in 1996, and photographing his hands for an art exhibit. Of course Sonic Youth happened in that window of time that Patti missed. In 1979 she shacked up with Fred Smith of the MC5, not reemerging on the music scene until 1988 with the single People Have the Power. While Thurston never bowed out, he’s left the forefront of things. His familiarity with Patti has taught him what it is to leave and return. So he never left. Sonic Youth’s throughput has become less frequent and less relevant over time and so he’s kept his hand on the tiller in other ways: solo albums, his record label and writings etc. But Moore started Ecstatic Peace in 1981 the same year that Sonic Youth was formed. He telegraphed this transition two and a half decades before passing the torch through the hands of Lee Renaldo to Pete and Elisa.

In fairness the transition was probably much more intimate. He’s played with Pete in The Bark Haze, toured with the Magik Markers and even written an ode to their greatness in poem in a folio that served as the liner notes for the album “I Trust my Guitar.” Elisa herself is a published poet, she contributed 5 pieces to the book Slit Pink Eye Engulf Shadow. She addresses love, television and tape loops but does not address the markers or her music.

Regardless of the intentions of Thurston to inject himself into their music and to project himself into the future, they have made their own record. When questioned about this kind of influence he tends to attribute it in a historical context. “Sonic Youth is a real access point for these people. I know that and appreciate that. I would never want to compete against it.” He acknowledges his place as a historical influence on culture, music and art but tries to deny his own present and active effect on current events. He is not a meddler or a tinkerer. He is a conduit connecting three decades of art rock. Elisa knows this confessing in an interview “Thurston and Sonic Youth have opened sonic doors in my mind that needed to be opened.”

But in interviews Ambrogio uses the term “language of sound” to refer to this effect. It’s an archaic idea best explained by Thomas Hewitt Key in 1874. “On the other hand the language of sound has in its favour that once invented; it calls for the aid of no external material. The voice is ever with us; and the ear is ever-ready to receive impressions from every direction, above, below, and around us. …The language of sound then will be the leading theme of what follows, and in this sense the word language will be always used.” In other words all sound is language, because all sound communicates something.

In that respect Boss is a behemoth, their magnum opus. They come having shed much of their noisy accouterments of the past but still toting some of their influence from no-wave and hardcore. The record was not a single night’s show, or a one-stop recording. They spent three months in the studio. Pete said “We sort of approached this record a little differently. There have always been themes and stuff that’s repeated in the past, but this time Elisa worked really hard on the words in advance. A few songs we had were loosely structured in advance. We took what we had in there and paid down what we knew for sure and then flushed it all out from there.” So the similarities to Youth are not because of the direct connection to Thurston but because of the indirect connections that they and so many other bands in this generation cannot avoid.

After 5 years, and about 30 releases you they didn’t just decide to do a studio record. There were two huge changes that brought this about. The first was time, they actually had some. Pete explained that when they first got into the studio with Lee the result wasn’t drastically different from any other Markers record.” It really evolved. It was a natural process. It was a chance to do what we really wanted to do.”

The next big change was the departure of Leah Quimby. She’d played bass with them from the very beginning. She lived upstairs with the band in a split-level house owned by Elisa’s grandparents and she played the basement shows with them in the basement. But she had some of her own ideas about the music. Leah was resistant to change. As Pete put it gently “She was content keeping things as they were and not get into any new territory. Elisa and I had sot of different ideas about the direction the band should go.” Leah left of her own accord, life intervened, school, and other external forces there was no awkwardness or prodding. It was just time.

So they picked up Julie Tomlinson to handle keyboard and bass duties on tour. Pete Nolan made it sound so simple. “We really want to approximate this record live when we go out on the road this time. There isn’t any way we can do that as a two-piece so we’ve been working on that. I think we’re just trying to play this record on this tour live.” In the resulting record is an extremely varied. They exceed even Von LMO and Burmese for viciousness in their song “Circle.” But they also float out a wistful “Bad Dream” and the catchy 70’s psych-rock tune “Taste.” The cohesion is the content. The record is peppered with obscure cultural references that out do even the most arcane Dennis Miller moments.

So this sick obsession rages on. In three months there will probably be another CDR or cassette or 7-inch cataloging the development of these songs and the ones that follow. This constant churning throughput is the sacrosanct proof that they are the real thing. Somewhere while listening to the degenerating noise squall at the end of “Circle” I am reminded of the opening lyrics of an early album by the band Cursive:

“And now we present
songs perverse and songs of lament
a couple hymns of confession
and songs that recognize our sick obsessions.”