Secteur: Emily's Story

February, 2023, Southwestern France

I can hear the jet’s swelling boom as I wander out of the walled enclave and onto the rough, muddy path through the vineyard. The stiff, northwest gusts are shaping the low rumble in a modulating decay, like a noise oscillator sucked through the curving envelope of a lowpass filter. The French military has been conducting training games along the coast, so I'm on alert for sounds from the sky.

Last week I was rapt as a sleek, grey fighter darted low across the hills near the coast. I gasped with awe, startled by the roar, and for a moment I sensed the anticipation of rescue that must have greeted the planes along a different French shoreline many decades ago. Wondering if this is another encounter with the sorcières de la guerre, I scan above the vines for orange engine dots but have to settle for a thin, white trail skirting a lonely cirrus cloud in the late Sunday sky.

Like me I guess, this pilot is on a mission well-underway, catapulted west, high over the ancient fortresses of Occitanie, off toward the Atlantic. And harrowed by the same sharp headwinds that sting my eyes as I brace for the last kilometer of my afternoon walk. 

Navigating back through the stubby vines, the neighborhood water tower looming like a sentinel, I wrap my head tight with my mom’s green scarf and tuck it into the neck of my shapeless black parka. After last weekend’s provocative summer preview, the bitter tramontane has been back for a few days now, its brick-tunneled howl more tuneful than the mountain gales that tossed my porch chairs in Virginia down onto the field last spring.

My cartographic history is marked by the moody, elegiac menace of legendary winds – the febrile Santa Ana yanking my skirt up on the playground with her ticklish devil fingers, the Swiss Foehn that plied exotic physics on the pressures in my head, the Pacific storms that tormented the redwood in my California backyard, her snapped-off spears barely missing my bedroom window.

And the Scirocco. The spectral cloud that dusted our French patio geraniums in 2002 with its yellow powder, then coalesced gracefully out over the Mediterranean, an inverted brown triangle, balanced on the horizon like the dissolving memory of a deep sea explosion. Emilie dans l’orage. Always trying to understand the wind, so I can lean into it at the perfect angle, and stay on my feet.

I’ve woken to a light snowfall, the flakes gently lacing the oleander leaves and weed-flecked winter grass. No vineyard rambling today, I guess. There’s only one rug on the patterned tile here in the living room where I have assembled my tiny nomad’s music studio. The wall radiators are cranked and gurgling, and I hope the ceramic will absorb enough heat to stay warm through evening.

My good friends Michael and Liz, artists who’ve recently moved from the USA to France, have inspired me to come to the Languedoc for a few months, where they are living for the winter. It has been so nice to have companions to wander with during this quiet season, through the sleepy villages, the vast and empty beaches, watching windsurfers skirt the swells near salt flats that line the shore in a cluster of pinkish-purple rectangles, the snowy Pyrénées presiding over this coastal panorama from their station at the Spanish border.

During the first several years of the pandemic, I worked a full-time office job from a desk in the lower level of my home in Virginia, one tall staircase away from the temptations of my music studio. But in the evenings after dinner, I’d set my iPad on my piano to capture new fragments of songs and piano improvisations. Gradually, some coherent music came into focus, dead-ends were discarded, my little iPad catalogue whittled down to the most promising bits.

I eventually left my job, yet in the months that followed I was struggling to find motivation to put on my record producer’s hat again, which had been sitting in a dark closet since I released Out of the Moment in early 2019. Thanks to Michael and Liz’s encouragement, I broke through my inertia and prepared to fly off to France.

Now settled in here, just one village and a few small hills away from my friends, I’m feeling refreshed and excited to be revisiting these songs-in-progress, my producer’s hat having made safe passage from closet to suitcase. But I’ve also come here with a specific musical mission, one that won’t need my voice or my words.

I lived in southern France once before with my ex-husband and my young son, from 2001 through 2003. Yes, we were here on 9/11 and I watched the towers fall on a TV screen above the counter in a Café near our village square. I wrote my album Angels’ Abacus during that time period. Over the years I’ve often paged through the sepia-toned lyric booklet, always remembering how captivated I was by the varieties of ancient stone buildings, framed against the sky.

My bedroom shutters are rattling tonight in the damp air, and I smell a faint whiff of that aromatic wood-smoke haze that floats on some winter evenings over the garrigue. It must be seeping under my window panes....like a lingering smell of incense, long after the ceremony is over. I think the scene is set. I’m ready to remember with sound. No memory from afar, however vivid, can trigger the inspiration that rushes in when you land on terrain where all your senses were once ignited and immersed.

This chill should pass by tomorrow and maybe I’ll even plan to forget my ugly parka when I drive east on Thursday toward the fancier stretch of France’s luminous southern coast, which has inspired centuries of artists before me. I expect the mimosa trees to be in high bloom by now, their vivacious yellow tassels getting ready to wave goodbye to winter in just a few weeks.

I’ve come back to France to find traces of the desert dust. To wipe it off my mirrors. To scan the vistas again from the hillside where I wrote song after song in that soft Autumn sun streaming through the panes of my small window, so long ago. I’ve come back to re-measure the beautiful collisions of sea, sky and mountain. To navigate my past, my present, and maybe my future, with a new map.

20 years ago this month, on a different expanse of French terra-cotta, a collection of dismembered CD jewel boxes, booklets, jackets, back inserts and discs lay sundered and splayed. These were my study categories, ready for analysis, dissection, reference, for evidence, for proof. Les signes.

Prophecies of the coming deluge foretold in album covers, lyrics, every color a signifier, every word a clue. The position of her hand, the fabric of his jacket, the rhymes, the first line of the chorus, the way the bridge transitioned into the last verse. You couldn’t miss it if you examined the metaphors carefully.

Some were beginning to understand, but the codes were well-hidden and the investigators were still few. I was one of the first to start figuring it out. My son’s colorful band of plastic soldiers, his shiny statuette of Sir Percival, the precarious angle of a toy airplane, the way a tiny French flag was perched just so, near the edge of his little desk. Each figurine had a message for me alone.

Hierarchies and dependencies emerged, theories were rejected then reconsidered as new tranches of logic superseded each other in rapid succession. No time left for contemplation or doubt – everything was happening at once and I had to get ahead of it. Only calculation and gathering before they arrived to steal my sources. They were already outside in the white van, listening with their devices.

On February 14, 2003, I was committed to the lockdown ward of a psychiatric hospital in the south of France. I had special knowledge that the world was going to end in May, and I was frantically making plans to prepare for my salvation, waiting to receive a signal through my mobile phone that it was my turn to be retrieved from Earth by an alien rescue ship.

February, 2026, Southwest Virginia, USA

It has now been 23 years. I’m finally casting to the world my sonic recollection of that surreal, life-changing time, paired with the collection of songs that emerged out of my hermitage in the pandemic years. Dual periods of personal isolation, one mental, one more physical, separated by two decades.

Two versions of me in counterpoise, echoing and informing each other across the years, exposing unexpected connections and crosstalk. Having moved into my seventh decade now, I’m starting to understand why it always seemed like my elders had a 360 degree vista.

Words can’t describe the altered state of psychosis, they can only describe the memory of it. And that memory itself is suspect, forged inside a displaced, rearranged mind that may have stored what “really happened” in some data-bank deep in the 15th layer of the universe. My music in Secteur will never be able to show you exactly how it felt to be trapped inside Escher’s Relativity, running breathless laps on his endless stairs.

The best I can do is to find some small access points and snatch a few peeks as I squint back through the pinholes. To harness even a little bit of my extravagant craziness and repurpose it for oscillation inside a time-bound box. But my success as a musical storyteller rests on my ability to lead you back out of that box, with sound alone. 

Did my distracted, anxious solitude through the pandemic qualify as depression? Some of my songs on Radial Mind surprise me with what they reveal. But it’s impossible for me to disentangle my own mood from the ambient communal angst of that time. Those of us who endured it alone in our homes share the painful memory of being caught out on the water in a solo kayak just as the storm hit. No salvage tug on the horizon.

And I had no idea whether the virus and its ingress into my neurons might flip me into psychosis again. What mischief could “brain fog” wreak in a vulnerable brain? My hillside sanctuary with its view of the gentle mountains across the valley gave me solace through the seasons of the pandemic, and I was OK.

After deliberation and some hesitation, I am publishing alongside Vista the small portfolio of paintings and drawings that I created during my stay in the lockdown ward near the Mediterranean in 2003. Whatever genre my music falls into, this is my Art Brut debut. Just before I left for France in early 2023, I spread these pictures out on the pink paisley rug in my living room and photographed them, lit by the Appalachian winter sun.

They accompanied me on my trip like a satchel of memory tokens, assuring me of my recovered sanity as I set off to appraise my own past and try to render it in sound, twenty years later. And this might be the place to mention that yes, I brought those iPad piano improvisations along with me too. A small selection of them are enmeshed within two tracks of Secteur.

Since my pictures are incompletely dated, I can’t be sure of the order in which I created them. But they chronicle my period of gradual come-down from the peak of grandiose psychotic mania as the drugs began to work their rough mercy, like heavy wet blankets thrown over the blaze in my head. I haven’t retrospectively titled them, though one seemed to me strikingly perfect as the album cover for Vista, evoking both Part I: Radial Mind, and Part II: Secteur.

They don’t correspond directly to any of the album tracks on Vista, but if they suggest no connections at all for you with my music, then I guess I haven’t done my expressionist’s job very well. You can create your own multimedia tableau and put a puzzle together. You may learn things about my mind that I will never figure out on my own. You may even shudder, as I do, if these melodramatic scenes seem even more ominous today than they did in February 2003, when the war in Iraq was just weeks away.

And somewhere in a musty, lost-bits hospital closet may remain a small, lumpen clay model of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia spires, sculpted by my shaky Zyprexa hands in the ward’s sunny arts-and-crafts room, while Norah Jones’ first album played on repeat to keep us all calm.

I visited Gaudi’s temple again on my composing trip to France, to be surrounded once more by his arbors, his mezzanines, his asymmetries and alignments, the dazzling kaleidoscope of his windows.

Psychiatrists might call my particular mania a “mixed episode with paranoid features” or something like that. Mixed, because the ecstatic grandiosity of my rapture delusion was interrupted by waves of existential fear and some terrifying moments of pain and sensory disorientation. But the swirl of beauty, hope, redemption and love that soared through me on that last day before I was admitted to the hospital swelled like a crescendo into my anticipation of the moment when musicians of the world would gather at the Sagrada Familia for a final Ascension concert.

In the last days before deliverance and rescue from earth’s destruction, artists would strip the mantle of power from the titans and technocrats of a collapsing material world. Art would soothe, exalt and escort humanity on to its next epoch through technologies of beauty.

“Art will save the world”….the timeworn cliché, illuminated and elaborated throughout musical, literary and cinematic history. The psychotic mind reduces as it convolutes. Everything is framed in mythic oppositions…heaven-hell, pleasure-pain….even as delusions keep building into ever more intricate, teetering structures laden with symbols and meaning. I’m glad that in my core fantasy, the good guys were going to win. I’m relieved that my insane mind confirmed my faith in the power of art and our irrepressible human drive to transcend through creativity.

Soon before I packed up my cables and gear to return home to Virginia in the late spring of 2023, I took one last walk along the small roads and vineyards near my neighborhood.

Grape vines were exploding in green, warm breezes rustled the brush and wild red poppies traced random designs in the fields. Nature’s jewel tones drew my eyes down from my habitual skygazing, until my attention was stolen again by a flock of birds riding the expansive blue.

We musicians use our own red, green and blue fundamentals to build big things out of small elements. Frequency, amplitude, timbre… sculpted in time, manipulated into invisible architecture that shakes the air around us and tricks us into thinking it’s right out there in front of us, doing its dance.

But all we ever know of music is the magic it works as it comes alive in our own head, its shape and dimension ours alone. I can never know if my musical red feels to me like your musical blue feels to you. If going crazy gave me only my endless curiosity about how the mind translates sound into feeling, into thought, into action, then it was worth the cost of the trip.

I’m grateful that I have been graced with the chance to integrate my experience of madness into my life and to find some closure through my music. I am indebted to my family and friends for their love and support during my illness and my recovery. And I understand well that I am truly lucky – that others who have journeyed the liminal borderlands and beyond may still be there, desperate to find their way back.

Maybe, in some way, this album can offer a vista of hope and comfort, some proof that a lasting recovery is possible. That you can return intact from your voyage without shame, strengthened by your memory of the awe, the fear, the ecstasy and truth you discovered in the far secteurs of your radial, ravenous mind.

Thank you so much for reading and listening.

Love,

Emily

You can hear Vista on Bandcamp, where you will also find my lyrics and my other albums. My immense gratitude to Brian Mesko, Jason Hoffheins and Joe Costa, who helped me bring Radial Mind out of my head and onto the stage in your mind. Thank you for supporting musicians who release their music independently.

Note: Free speech, including artistic freedom of expression, needs to be balanced, under French law and EU law, with other fundamental rights that may protect both individuals and institutions, such as intellectual property rights, privacy rights, and reputational rights. Thus, I have decided to identify only the regions, but not the specific towns where I lived in France in 2001-2003 and in 2023, nor the location of the hospital where I was treated in 2003. The photographs I am using in this essay are my own, and have been determined not to infringe on any third party’s rights.