When you're asleep, you're you. When you wake up, you are, as well. But how… Read Full Bio ↴When you're asleep, you're you. When you wake up, you are, as well. But how that works, how we can be as ethereal as vapor at night, and then feel so solid during the day, is more than a little strange. That mysterious, single, connecting thing that persists through all of our states of mind is elusive, and worth seeking.

In Dragon Chinese Cocktail Horoscope, the new record by Michael Zapruder, we just might hear that thing speak. Dragon is a record of contrasts and oddities that moves with easy dreamlike logic from the everyday to the everynight, presenting opposites without attempting to resolve them. In the process, it offers a glimpse of wildness at the core of humanism.

Zapruder and Scott Solter (Spoon, Mountain Goats, Two Gallants, John Vanderslice) recorded and mixed the record in a two-week session at San Francisco's Tiny Telephone Studio. Somewhere in that undertaking, like fishermen dangling a net deep into the darkest waters of the Pacific, they ensnared something loose, weird, old, formless, and potent.

Zapruder brought a two-part mission statement with him. First was the idea of negative capability, the ability to be "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason". The second was a line from a poem by contemporary poet Joshua Beckman: "This party is fucked without the karate chop of love".

With these in mind, Zapruder set about making something that would reside squarely where discontinuity and faith meet. Twenty-five songs went in and eleven came out, the survivors supported with the contributions of Zapruder's Rain of Frogs, a loose cadre of musicians and friends that now number in the thirties, and which sometimes includes members of the Decemberists and Tom Waits' bands (see www.michaelzapruder.com/rof.htm).

Minimal and tricky, Dragon Chinese Cocktail Horoscope presents a world of large spaces and tiny details. It revels in contrast and juxtaposition. Whatever intuition made Zapruder set the two-week limit on this record, it was a good one, because the recording lacks oversight and planning and thereby exposes common threads in songs that might have initially seemed too dissimilar to belong together. What results is a larger world that feels strangely effortless and surprisingly unified. And thanks largely to Scott Solter, on Dragon Chinese Cocktail Horoscope for the first time, the quality of the recorded document equals the quality of Zapruder's always-fine songs. This is the best record that Zapruder has yet made.

At times, Dragon's songs show signs of deep formal warping, where for example you might find a song with two different, alternating choruses instead of the usual one (see "Ads for Feelings", "Can't We Bring You Home"). And there are simple songs as well ("Second Sunday in Ordinary Time"). These counter-directions come together in the album's nearly nine-minute centerpiece, "Black Wine," which materializes the record's two intertwining branches by alternately asserting the symbolic and the concrete sides of the same story.

Not long after the record was completed, Long Beach based label Sidecho Records was one of a few labels to receive an advance copy in the mail. Owner James Cho and Zapruder struck up a correspondence, and through a kind of mutual getting-to-know-each-other process, came to feel that Sidecho would be a great platform for this piece of music.

Ultimately, a record either means something to you or it doesn't, and so now we come to the all-important bit. However it is that music feels soulful or meaningful without overdoing it, and without over-dramatizing things that ultimately are revealed to be mundane; that power comes not from ideas or craft or anything technical, but from the feeling that there is something worth encountering in the record. It comes from the sense that the people making the record are striving for something special and are getting it right somehow. And mostly, it comes from the feeling that someone is communicating with us.

That, friends, might also be called the karate chop of love.

Michael Zapruder elsewhere on the web:

MYSPACE ( http://www.myspace.com/michaelzapruder )
OFFICIAL SITE ( http://www.michaelzapruder.com/ )

August
Michael Zapruder Lyrics

Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴

Low lights
Lights all around
A sudden meanwhile of joined lights

Low lights
Lights of a city
A summer heaven of low lights

This August, meanwhile
Black and green, silver, serene
Moment to flower till anything comes around

Low lights
Lights of children
A sleepy brightness, young lights

This August, meanwhile
Black and green evening
Moment to flower till anything comes around

Giant night with silent footstep is moving in
Evening hears, it pauses and waves its silver hand

Low lights
Lights all around
A sudden meanwhile in evening's chains

This August, meanwhile

Black and green summering scene
Darkly to flower till anything comes around

Overall Meaning

The lyrics in Michael Zapruder's song "August" highlight the theme of transformation, almost a metamorphosis of the environment around us as summer fades away into fall. The opening lines, "Low lights, lights all around," encapsulate this shift from the bright and vivacious summer season to a time of darkness and change. The use of the word "meanwhile" throughout the lyrics further emphasizes this transformation as a sudden shift in the surrounding environment, almost as if everything is happening all at once in this moment of transition.

As the song progresses, the colors black and green are brought up repeatedly, which can be interpreted as a metaphor for the end of summer and beginnings of fall, where the once colorful foliage now turns to dark hues of green and the absence of light that accompanies this shift. The lyrics "moment to flower till anything comes around" suggest that this time of transition is temporary and that this darkness will give way to new beginnings, much like how a flower blossoms in its given season.

The last two lines of the song, "Darkly to flower till anything comes around," leave the interpretation open-ended, but it seems to suggest that even in times of darkness and change, growth and new beginnings are always possible.

Line by Line Meaning

Low lights
Dimly lit environment

Lights all around
Multiple sources of light

A sudden meanwhile of joined lights
An unexpected occurrence of clustered light

Lights of a city
Illumination of an urban landscape

A summer heaven of low lights
An idyllic representation of a calm, mellow energy

This August, meanwhile
In the present time frame of August

Black and green, silver, serene
Colors symbolizing tranquility and equilibrium

Moment to flower till anything comes around
A fleeting moment in life to reach full potential before a shift occurs

Lights of children
Radiant energy of youth

A sleepy brightness, young lights
A sense of peaceful and cheerful playfulness in young ones

Giant night with silent footstep is moving in
The darkness of nighttime slowly encroaching