13
Jan
Song of the Week: Party Balloon
Topic: TV, Movies, and Music
This week I bring you Party Balloon, from the 1992 album Prison - a posthumuous release of spoken word tracks by poet Steven Jesse Bernstein, set to music by producer Steve Fisk.
I was introduced to this album by my friend Pete right after it came out. I thought it was one of the strangest, saddest, funniest, most compelling narratives I’d ever heard. And it still is. What follows is an excerpt from the Unappreciated Album of the Month review of Prison. It’s a great review, and while it gives you a good sense of the sadness and emotional harshness of the album, it doesn’t mention the humanity and humor you’ll also find while listening to it. I picked Party Balloon as the track to highlight from the album, as it emphasizes those aspects of Bernstein’s work.
Bernstein’s published and unpublished body of work has started to surface in bound volumes over the last 10 years, but his own spoken-word recordings, rare as they are, remain somehow more vital than what stands on the printed page. His stream-of-consciousness-inspired texts are volatile, emotional works with images that writhe and twitch and pull switchblades on the reader. Bernstein’s recordings of his own work, though, are even more vicious and affecting beasts. Aside from sparse appearances on comps like the infamous Sub Pop 200, the posthumously released Prison is the only real document of this, a nuanced gem of a spoken-word record that pairs the writer’s readings with the sound collages and arrangements of Seattle musician/producer Steve Fisk.
From first breath, Prison is a strange and upsetting little document. Instead of using guitar drones or other sounds with their own inherent or apparent narratives to back Bernstein, Fisk casts the writer’s words against manipulated music that calls to mind a much different time and place. The album-opening “No No Man (Part One),” the only track on the disc completed before Bernstein’s suicide, and “This Clouded Heart” use looping pieces that could have sold kitchen appliances on black-and-white TV in the 1950s. Warped with turntable lurching and cuts, the soundtrack only makes Bernstein’s words — first-person narratives that wander around images of lust, urban decay, and self-examination — all the darker and more disorienting.
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