(2009 Jul 7) V Magazine publishes 'Trial By Fire' - interview with SALEM

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(2009 Jul 7) V Magazine publishes 'Trial By Fire' - interview with SALEM

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Available in print and online.

Date confirmation: https://www.facebook.com/VMagazine/post ... bC5vTqzm9l

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https://web.archive.org/web/20090818095 ... hp?n=13288

Page 40: https://issuu.com/vmagazine/docs/v60

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[photo]
Salem in Rome, Italy, May 2009. From left: John Holland, Heather Marlatt, and Jack Donoghue

[photo]

MYSTERIOUS NEW BAND SALEM SHARES LITTLE WITH THE WORLD ASIDE FROM ITS SONGS, BUT GOOD LUCK SINGING ALONG

Photography Terence Koh
Text Jacob Brown

Download: Salem's "Water" MP3

Not six months ago, Salem emerged suddenly from the shadowy depths of the Internet, already possessed of full cult status. The band is a phenomenon. It has released no real album, has no record deal—what music has been published, has been pressed on vinyl in limited runs of five hundred and given titles like Yes, I Smoke Crack EP. It has played only a handful of shows, and as of yet, has no tour plans. The band has granted few interviews, the only one of any substance showed up in Butt’s last issue and read more like collaborative theater than journalism. False rumors swirl; no one knows much about its members. Perhaps in a time of uncertainty, utter vagueness is appealing. But regardless, Salem is the band everyone is talking about, the author of the most interesting electronic music to be produced by Americans in years.

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According to front man John Holland, whatever mystery surrounds the group is not intended. “There’s no mystique going on here,” says the 24-year-old, who lives in the living room of a 1-bedroom apartment in a part of Bushwick that seems only barely safe. His walls are decorated with pentagrams, crowns of thorns, bits of dead tree branch, and a severe, American Gothic-style self-portrait painted by his grandmother. A shelf holds five or six pairs of nearly identical slouchy leather boots. A large and rambunctious mutt runs around. “We have this thing where we don’t want everyone to know what we’re doing all the time. We are just very close and sometimes we like to keep things to ourselves.”


The “we” that is Salem—aside from Holland, there is Heather Marlatt, who sings, and Jack Donoghue, who makes the beats and raps—met in high school and college, but as of the last year or so, have lived apart, Holland in New York, Marlatt in Detroit, Donoghue in Chicago. They collaborate on songs by e-mailing tracks around to each other. The music draws from Chicago and Detroit’s ghetto-house scenes (subgenres with names like juke and footwork lend Salem tracks their deep bass, repetitive lo-fi raps, and overall gritty inner-city sensibility). But elements like Marlatt’s dreamy, floating, slightly garbled vocals make Salem its own beast entirely.

[photo]

Listening to Salem is like listening to beautiful songs being sung in foreign languages. The emotion and gist of the meaning are there, but the details are fleeting. On about half the tracks, it is Holland singing, his voice slowed down and distorted. He purposely obliterates the words. “I want the lyrics to be there, ’cause I want the song to be about a certain thing,” he explains. “But I don’t want anyone to know what that thing is. It’s too personal.”

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To that end, Salem publishes its lyrics nowhere, and Holland has no plans to ever do so. He’s hesitant to shed any light on them at all. But he offers, in a roundabout way, to illustrate the emotional place that inspires him and his bandmates. “Me and Heather and Jack, we have these really ideal situations we would like to be in. To be lying in a big field with goats or butterflies. Or not butterflies, but, like, animals. Or in a big sandpit riding dirt bikes. We have all these ideas of things we would like to be doing because none of us are very happy.”

Pressed, Holland agrees to contextualize a single song, an unreleased track called “The Boy by the Sea.”

“I know how to think about these things but not always explain them,” he says. “But this song is about a boy. He’s on an island. And he looks out at the ocean. And the ocean wants to be a sea.”

There’s an awkward pause during which he looks around at the objects hanging on his walls. It’s unclear whether he is thinking, or waiting for a response.

Then he asks, “Do you understand?” The answer is no, but somehow that seems right.

www.myspace.com/jjhhmm

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