Life is full of important, invisible things: a sweeping, ambiguous sort of statement, to be sure, but true as anything nevertheless. At some point in my life, probably my teenage years (when I overcompensated for my own turbulent internal chemistry by attempting to behave in ways that I believed were uncompromisingly rational) I denied concepts of the unseen as a matter of course. All things, I tried to convince myself, could be seen, put in compartments and rationalized. Matters of spirituality and emotion were separated. I saw little link between physical states and mental states. The outcome of this delineated sort of mindset was a sense that I had engineered myself into a fragmented person, struggling to reign in the pieces of my life that seemed to be running off like wild horses. This is not an empowered way to live, because being disconnected in this manner means you are always looking to an external source to either find your happiness or explain your lack of it. There has been plenty of popular literature in recent years about the connectivity of all things, of awareness, wholeness and unity within and between people, that sort of thing. So I need not explain it. Intuitively, now, I feel like I know that this is all correct, since, if we think of this as a spiritual law, transgression equals short-term unhappiness and long term… well, unhappiness.
At University I did a unit on silent films, and one genre we spent some time on was slapstick comedy, which, prior to studying, I’d pretty much written off as a dead art with nothing good to offer a modern audience (yeah, that was the “rational” part of me sermonizing on a soap box again). Turns out that in the right hands silent film slapstick could/can be brilliant and full of emotion and substance. I read an essay during this time that explained slapstick with this image: the slapstick scene is contrived like a machine; roaring, steaming, and spinning centrifugally. Each rotation is like an event, propelled by the previous event; and then characterizing/causing the following event, the following rotation. The machine spins faster and faster and momentum builds exponentially until it can no longer contain its own outward force and it breaks itself. When it breaks is when we laugh; the gag is the catharsis for the tension that propelled the inevitable breaking point (often in slapstick this is an elaborate series of events that end in an injury).
Why even bring this up? Well, I suppose for the reason that I see a human who is unaware of its own wholeness is like a machine that spins and doesn’t know why. It’s a tragedy or a comedy depending on how you look at it. My own niggling bipolarity is a machination not unlike the spinning gag machine. We spin because of growing inertia. We react. Then we break. Then we slowly start spinning again. I guess the symbolism is pretty obvious.
And like this spinning gag machine, the force that propels us does not work from the outside in, but from the inside out. A fragmented person, as I am apt to be, is somebody who fails to recognise one’s own culpability in this comedic/tragic whirlwind. We look to locate our problem externally, compartmentalize, and solve it. Like some sort of emotional amputation.
Forgive the long wind up (no pun intended), but this was party the genesis of the song Phantom Pains.
The lyric of the song is simple; a man cuts off his hand to atone for some past wrong he feels he has committed with that hand. After amputating his hand, however, he discovers that in fact nothing is fixed, he just in pain. (Comedy and tragedy; the material is the same, its only the tone that differentiates the two.)
Oh! These phantom pains of some lost past,
Things I used to want that did not last,
Urges I contrived to ease in vain
All it left me with is phantom pain
Along with this, the idea of a phantom limb is pretty fascinating; if you haven’t heard of the phenomena, it is the instance whereby somebody who has lost a limb still experiences the physical sensations of that limb, often in the form of pain. Phantom pain, therefore, is like the haunting pain of something lost, which I think is a nice bit of symbolism.
Bringing all that back to the rational man, the man who feels all things can be defined and contained and separated; this man sees figurative ‘amputation’ as a solution to the undesirable aspects of life, and is inevitably disappointed to discover that it is not. Cutting out a person from your life, for instance, does not necessarily remove them from your heart. Denying a waking act or repressing a shadowy thought does not ban it from your dreams or save you from erupting in strange physical or emotional symptoms.
These thoughts had been swirling around in my head for sometime and then seemed to crystallize one day for me when one of my closest friends, Matthew Chandler, sent me a short film called “The Budget Cut” that he had made while studying film in New York City. The film itself was shot in a peculiarly decorated house on Long Island. It was a strange, dreamlike space; child-like murals on bedroom walls, bathrooms tiled in gaudy colours, and so on. It appeared to be from another time, and the feeling was exaggerated further by the way Matt had shot the film. Matt had used 16mm film, which gives the now almost forgotten square television format (these days we are spoiled with wide screen). Furthermore, the camera he used had a broken lens that, like some Cold-War Russian spy camera, invented it’s own rules of focus. Like an emotionally short sighted person, this camera brought the foreground into sharpness, and everything beyond that blurred. The film grain too, seemed dreamlike somehow.
Beyond these technicalities though, was the story of a man who intentionally cuts off his thumb to receive the insurance money, only to black out and wake up in hospital with a doctor’s bill that is double what his insurance contract pays. The film, only 5 minutes long, was silent other than some quirky backing music, and played out with the kind of underplayed irony and humour that I have always found so entertaining about Matt. Straight away, I wanted it to be a film clip; it just needed a song.
At the beginning of 2010, I went to London, where Matt now lives, to play a couple of live solo shows, and I slept on Matt’s couch for two weeks in the apartment he rents with his girlfriend. The shows were on the first few days of my trip, and after that Matt and I basically just wandered the streets of London, drank endless pints, and talked each other’s ears off for two weeks straight under the dark, drizzly winter sky. There was lots of catching up to be done; lots of things to discuss, you see.
Inspired, I returned to Australia and wrote Phantom Pains the song on an acoustic guitar while watching the short film that Matt had given me on disc. To me, the two things (my song and his film) go hand in hand, though the exact storyline of the two things differ.
In regards to the final EP, the concept of Phantom Pains seemed strong to me right away: Each song on the EP was about something I did not have, or something I had once had that was now gone and whose absence hurt. Each song was a little phantom pain. So naturally, the thumbless hand from Matt’s short film seemed to become the fitting central image for the songs on the whole. I began working on drawings of thumbless hands, and eventually settled on one that would become the EP cover art. I think it’s a strong image, conceptually.
There were some other omens that made me feel like Phantom Pains was right: the day before going into the studio to record, I cut my left thumb badly with butcher’s knife at work, and wore a bandage throughout the recording session. Going back further, the first song I had written for the EP, called Dog, was written just after a tour I did with Lisa Mitchell where I had played piano in her band, since she had cut her finger very badly and could not play guitar. So there were some little cosmically aligned things like that, which I took as reassurances (see, I’m not so rational anymore.)
As with the rest of the EP, the recording of Phantom Pains the song features me on piano and guitar, Carlos Adura on drums and Nick Weaver on bass. Tony Buchen, the producer, also played a little guitar on it. It was written only a week before we went to the studio to record.
