90
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y R E V I E W
Cut to a photograph of Jeanie the post-punk queen as pigtailed toddler. She sits in the lap of a woman on a DIY driftwood throne on a forlorn beach. Her hands wound through the woman’s long hair. A caption fades in on the bottom left – with musician Nyssa Adcock, 1972 – and fades out again. No explanation; the photograph is window dressing. When the camera cuts back, Jeanie is glaring at her interviewer, waxing furious about the implosion of the commune when she was eight, thanks to the preening ambition of its abusive, sellout founder ( Jeanie’s father, natch). I pulled the image backward, hit pause, plucked my copy of the album from its hallowed shelf above my bed. I held the album up to the computer screen, clutching it with both hands. The woman next to Virgil in that sepia album-cover photograph: wild curls cascading; dead eyes in a broad, heart-shaped face; slack, rosebud mouth. The barest hint of freckles spackling her nose and cheekbones. The woman in the photograph, in the Jeanie Skull documentary: angular, dark, a curtain of straight black hair framing her face. A forehead like a sweep of naked cliff. A long, straight nose. Her mouth a slash of imperious amusement. It wasn’t the same person depicted in the dual-portrait album cover two years later. No way.
Fall 2023
“Blowing past cheap psychedelic tricks to land at the sonic godhead, Nyssa and Virgil are no art-school tinkerers. The duo has built a contemplative architecture for the ages – and they ask us to swing from rafter to rafter, naked.” —Warren Grainger, Rocks Off Magazine, December 1973
There are only ten songs on the album. “Make Me Mayhap” is folk music wrung through a 1920s Dada readymade apparatus – what sounds at first like a mechanized bird call is, according to one critic, a tinny off-key player piano. “Our Ouroboros Burrows” is little more than whispers, until the marching-band drumline and fuzzed out upright bass drop in. In “Idyll Wild,” two children sing a capella in Inuit. The final track, “The Effing Barouche,” is like a lullaby broadcast by a deranged cephalopod – a muffled, twisted call from the Abyss. At the center of the album – the final piece on Side A, on the LP – is the duo’s twelve-minute opus, “Devil’s Elbow.” The song and arrangement credited to Nyssa alone, though Virgil lent his hand to several instruments, according to the sparse liner notes. You have to listen to it to believe it. Every time I slip my headphones on, I’m sent somewhere I’ve never been; there’s some sound, or space between
Night Jam In Blue Light, 2022 (acrylic and oil on panel, 30x80) by Jeremy Russell