M U SIC
NYM: COUNTERMAGIC RELEASE SHOW
Sat., Feb. 1, 9 p.m. | Arcana, Durham
The Secret of Nym Durham musician Lewis Scaife claims to have anti-magical powers. Is he just trolling? BY BRIAN HOWE bhowe@indyweek.com
T
hree days before its January 6 release, the INDY premiered the title track from Countermagic, the sixth album by Durham-based electronic musician Lewis Scaife, aka Nym. I liked the record, a lush, sleek blend of downtempo and instrumental hip-hop enriched with live musicians and swordand-sorcery movie samples. Nothing else suggested a concept except for the song titles: “Nocus Pocus,” “Hex Deflector,” “Incan’tation.” I’d been emailing with Scaife, gathering routine background detail. Almost as an afterthought, I wrote, “There’s clearly some sort of magic theme around this record, what’s up with that?” “Countermagic is about protecting ourselves from the supernatural threats that surround us,” he replied. “It has been personally revealed to me that I am a Countermagician,” he went on. “I can render curses ineffective. I can make ghosts invisible, inaudible, and otherwise undetectable. I can turn magical crystals into inert stones or invert their magical polarity to cause a negative effect equal to their former power. Sorcerers find themselves powerless in my presence. Sometimes, clients come to me complaining that they are being harassed by psychics—I can use my powers to turn these pesky precognitions into relatively safe postcognitions. All for a very low fee, considering the personal risks involved.
Nym
PHOTO COURTESY OF LEWIS SCAIFE
“Some unbelievers have called this album ‘deep cover skepticism,’” he concluded. “This just goes to show that you shouldn’t believe everything you hear.” I had two swift reactions to this email: excitement, because nothing excites a writer like a vivid, unusual story; and wariness, because here was a guy saying he could nullify magic and releasing his album about it at a Tarot-themed bar. It’s one thing to concoct a counter-magical “protagonist” for your album promo. Insisting that it’s real is something else. Either Scaife had unique beliefs and experiences, or he was dissimulating—for media manipulation, a skeptic’s crusade, general lulz, or some other hidden purpose. I held out hope for the former right up until his closing warning against credulity. But I still wanted to know what he was up to. I asked if he was serious. “Let’s just say you can’t prove I’m not serious,” he replied. Apparently, a game of cat and mouse was underway. I was sharply aware that with one email, a subject had bumped himself from short review to longer feature. I suspected Scaife of “deep-cover skepticism” as soon as he preemptively rebutted it, and it struck me as a little icky, as Scaife is a white man invoking traditions from other cultures and communities. There seemed to be an ethical difference between applying the concept of counter-magic to things like haunted houses or fantasy novels and things like African-American spiritual folkways (“Voodon’t”) or Wicca (“Whichcraft”). Scaife claimed he believed in magic and could counteract it; I suspected he was a rationalist troll. But a troll can hold sincere, illuminating beliefs, and maybe I was wrong. So I set out to learn how counter-magic related to Scaife’s experience, what he hoped to achieve by promoting it, and whether that context shined a more or less sympathetic light on his motivations. Even though this deceptive narrative implicated me in the story in an unusual, uncomfortable way, I decided to play.
I
arrived at Scaife’s house in Durham on a sunny winter afternoon. He showed me the computer where he makes music and then led me to the back deck. I sat on the edge of a deck chair to face him and took off my sunglasses. He reclined in the other chair, facing the sun, and kept his sunglasses on. Through streams and licensing, Scaife makes his living from his music; downtempo is popular in Europe, where he has a big enough following that his album prices default to the
euro. He says he grew up in rural Virginia and lived in San Francisco after college. He moved to Durham in 2016. He’s not necessarily a reliable source, but there’s an ample online trail to support his basic biography. Scaife has been releasing albums as Nym since 2006. For someone who never played an instrument, he displays a fine ear for melody and composition on Countermagic, a joint release with Athens’s Melting Records. To compose, he listens to world music from online archives and develops a sense of its unique harmonic profiles, collaging them into a foundation. Perhaps it’s ironic, as he’ll later note, that he describes his role like that of a spirit medium. “I’ll hear these melodies that emerge,” he said. “They’re already there, and I just need to listen. It’s like you’re holding pottery and you drop it and pick it up and make a new picture out of it, a mosaic approach. I feel like I’m more like a facilitator than the driving force.” To translate his computer melodies for instruments, Scaife enlisted guitarist Zach Scribner, violinist Morgan Fleming, flutist Tonito Walls, and others, including his girlfriend, Melissa Rakowitz, who performs as Spherelet. Some of them will join him at the Arcana release show on February 1. In terms of polish, Countermagic is Scaife’s most ambitious record yet. Its theming is more ambitious, too. Warm Blooded Lizard, from 2011, had a simple Spaghetti Western concept, while 2017’s Lilac Chaser was about optical illusions. Scaife said that it was after the latter that he discovered his powers and abandoned skepticism. He shifted into the particular tone—evasive, stickling, archly orotund—that he uses when he talks about counter-magic. “I am able to dispel curses, and where I go, ghosts aren’t,” he said. Did this happen by his presence alone, or was an action required? “I don’t know. This is very mysterious to me,” he said. “The rituals are very minor. For all I know, it could just be the presence. I know it works because there are no ghosts afterward.” How did he know there were ghosts before? KeepItINDY.com
January 29, 2020
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