Koh-i-Noor: The Playlist by Michael Eddy

Koh-i-Noor: The Playlist is here! 

Michael Eddy has curated an official playlist for his debut novel Koh-i-Noor. Michael has also written sixteen vignettes, explaining how he associates each song with his book! Michael crafts a fascinating mixtape-essay that walks us through his early love of Hip Hop, his art school days in Halifax’s “Golden Age”, and later his time living and working in China, all of which heavily inspired the writing of Koh-i-Noor. Take it away Michael!

Listen to the whole playlist here.

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“Your Wildest Dreams” by The Moody Blues

I associate this song with a memory of standing outside on the asphalt in front of our house on Fenwood Road. Our parents’ friends had loaded up their car and were preparing to leave, having decided to move back to the United States, to Boston. They hugged, got in, and we watched their car roll down the hill. I remember my mother crying. Maybe the song played that day? I listen to this song now and I project this emotion I thought I witnessed, of devastation and loss, onto everything in my own life that could have been. Their names were Ken and Karen.

“Let Me Ride” by Dr. Dre 

The Chronic was the first album I chose on my own to purchase (1993) that wasn’t Weird Al Yankovic content or TV or film soundtrack. I had no idea what they were saying when I first heard it at Summer Camp, but I hallucinated a beautiful Californiacartoonscape over the sky-dried grass and in the worldliness in the green eyes of Jabula, the older American boy with the tape. I carried my fervour into junior high—commending Luis Ramirez’s Snoop Doggy Dogg t-shirt on the first day, sealing our friendship—and went on to procure further baffling testaments such as Outkast and the Wu Tang Clan. I remembered that I had been born in New York and blocked the more Scotian flecks of my accent, the effect of which continues until today in my nonspecific manner of speaking. The album opened the door on an era of fervid, ineffable devotion to rap music that lasted into the new millennium, at the expense of all other genres. Today, as the next generation takes a renewed interest in 1990s rap music, I urge them to keep an open mind, son. Purity is no buckler against the deserts of this contemporary world, and certainly there is no secret knowledge anymore.

“Robbin Banks” by Jeffrey Frederick, Michael Hurley and the Unholy Modal Rounders

First encountered in the Rockies on a tape or CD player around 1999. My task for weeks was preparing a pair of lodgepole pine logs with a straight draw knife that ate huge pink blisters into my palms. I liked to chew the strips of root-beery phloem that I flayed off. The goal was to thin the log out to the point where it could be soaked and bent into an arc for a little footbridge leading up to the great stupa of Dharmakaya. At night we drank Jim Beam if we were lucky and sat before a campfire with the Nepali craftsmen overseeing the accuracy of the sculptural production (the Western master had been rendering the figures too sexy, their ankles and other joints weren’t sufficiently puffy like those of the gods). I was no longer present, but I understand that when the attempt was made to bend the logs, they snapped.

“Patsy Cline” by The Guthries

We all know which market the Guthries are talking about. They are talking about the original Halifax Farmers Market location in the old Alexander Keith brewery. At the Market, you saw everyone, your friends worked at the stands, it was the weekend, you were off. If you didn’t see her at the market, and you couldn’t find her anywhere in the North End, and she didn’t respond to the messages on her answering machine, perhaps it was some kind of ghost or apparition you were after.

“She’s Stepping Out” by Piggy

Every place where I have lived, my arrival was too late, the Golden Age had passed. That said, were Halifax in my early 20s up for Golden Age election and I had to nominate one contender, it would likely be Piggy. A calypso ensemble, crystallization of the anarchist possibility of a place like Halifax, where you could make your own radical culture and community. Of course, these days they’d be considered extremely woke. To you that might be a pejorative term, but if you recall, in the early 2000s we hadn’t been beaten to an absolute pulp by the right wing. Well, okay, Bush Jr., Iraq War Jr., War on Terror the First, etc. But we felt we could live well together, there was an ethical spirit, and we were art students. The famous Tre Arrow (born Michael Scarpitti in 1974) cooked Food Not Bombs meals with us a few times in our apartment until he disappeared. He was later denied asylum by Canada and remanded to American authorities to face 14 counts of arson and conspiracy committed on logging and cement trucks in Oregon as part of the Earth Liberation Front. You see? Golden Age. Piggy or the Piggy spirit was playing in the old wooden church on North Street for the party before our departure. It was to be the last time I lived in Halifax. We left on a cross-continent hitchhiking trip that turned into 11 years living outside of Canada.

“I Like Chopin” by Gazebo

The first time I visited Beijing was in 2005. I walked around aimlessly, daunted by the scale, confused about where to go and what to do. I hated it. Perhaps I was on the way to Red Gate Gallery, which used to be located in the 600-year-old corner tower of Dongbianmen, an appropriate destination for someone to go if they are completely oblivious, and I wandered the alleys southeast of Chang’an Boulevard. In one makeshift stall in the wall of a squat domicile, I came across some tapes for sale. Thinking I was finally chancing on some current Chinese music, I bought a tape with partially nude figures and a dragon, fantasy motifs one might see on the cover of a Conan the Barbarian comic book. When I finally had access to a tape player on which to play it, this was one of the songs, and I had no idea what it was, as there were no labels, or at least none that I could read. Also, I was somewhat disappointed. Somewhere along the line I lost the tape. The song becomes one of the many lost tunes that have lurked in my brain for decades. One day, thirteen years later, living in Montreal and listening to podcasts while working in my studio in the old Bellechasse canning factory, I heard a scrap of it unexpectedly used in an episode of the (frankly, often overproduced) podcast Radiolab. I wrote to the producer immediately and armed with a timestamp asked what songs had gone into the episode. The reply: “All of the music was original. We sampled a variety of things throughout, but by and large it was all written in house. Sorry to disappoint.” The term gaslight doesn’t even come close to such a betrayal of the promise of relief from decades of uncertainty. I was so upset I laid out the whole scenario wild-eyed to my partner, and showed her the clip. It was familiar to her. Give me a couple days, she said. She came back with a different version, in Japanese. It had been covered by Asami Kobayashi in 1984. The original authors, Gazebo, were an Italodisco outfit (a genre I had only vaguely heard about at the time), and listening to other similar songs—confirmed when Michael Bedford’s “More than a Kiss” came on—I realized the whole forgotten Chinese tape must have been an Italodisco sampler.

“Permanence” by Soft Boiled Eggies

The choice to move into a doomed old danwei complex in Beijing’s Central Business District when I first arrived in 2008 did not make it easy to survive my first year of life in China. I didn’t know anyone but my coworkers at the gallery, and didn’t leave the neighborhood much. My closest friends were a family who operated a malatang stall on a backstreet. They let me give them each their English names: Michael Jr., Michelle, and Mickey Mitch, and I drafted plans for a conceptual lighting system above their vats of bubbling spicy numb soup. I would cross back over the howling Chang’an Boulevard to my apartment in the shadow of night and skyscrapers, listen to MP3s I had brought along with me, such as the Softboiled Eggies, and produce hesitant art work in my empty sitting room.

Only last year, reading the book Where Art Belongs, I was zapped by Chris Kraus’ profile of Janet Kim (singer of Softboiled Eggies) and the Tiny Creatures space. I realized that I had been listening to the now-vanished band at the precise moment when their little scene in Los Angeles reached its apex and then dissolved. My own engagement with such a collective experiment (HomeShop) trailed that of Tiny Creatures by only two or three years. This discovery was particularly poignant for some reason. The shock of seeing a zeitgeist behind me in the mirror.

“If You Touch Me I Break” by Daniele Brusachetto

The danwei complex was almost empty. The sound of maul hammers on cinderblock was constant, with new gaping holes between apartments cropping up daily. An elderly neighbour showed up at my door holding ownership documents and asking if I could get my journalist friends to look at what was happening to these buildings and their tenants. The journalists I found (not my friends) said, “Sorry this kind of story is no longer news in this city.” Not long after, an eviction operation took place in which hundreds of police cordoned off the courtyard to remove one man in his 50s. I took photos from my apartment but I wasn’t sneaky enough. Cops came up, questioned me and forced me to erase my photos. It was an analog camera—I showed them the blank black square under the viewfinder on the back, where the photographer normally puts a scrap of the film’s packaging to remind them of the type and speed of film, “See, no more pictures,” and the cops seemed satisfied enough, The next day my boss arranged to meet at a café, not at the gallery, and she told me to take a week off for my stupidity. She didn’t want any heat. Daniele Brusachetto’s early albums were on heavy rotation in my lot of MP3s.

“We Could Be Skweeroes” by Eero Johannes

I had finally met some potential friends and we were supposed to meet at a music festival funded by the Scandinavian countries, held in one of the new leisure palaces of Sanlitun. It was new for me to have a mobile phone, and I can’t remember if we ever managed to actually find each other in the crowd that night. I believe vodka was being served for free and I took advantage of it. When the Finnish musician Eero Johannes came on stage in a t-shirt and demonstrated his specialized Nordic sub-genre Skweee on an assortment of piatars and samplers, I was so energized and drunk that I immediately fell in love with him and called out to him from the front row, shouting aggressively for more when his set was coming to an end, and did he want to hang out. The excitement of cultural exchange, of money flowing from foreign governments and brand sponsorships to juice up these relations, and I HAD FRIENDS, somehow all descended on poor Eero’s sweaty blond bangs.

“月亮代表我的心 (Moon Represents My Heart)” by Teresa Teng

I don’t have to introduce Teresa Teng to most of you—over her career she recorded 1,700 songs, in her native language, Mandarin, but also in Hokkien, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Japanese, Indonesian, English, Italian, and arguably holds the title of Dreamiest Singer of the 20th Century. This remains the only Chinese song I can really sing at Karaoke.

“Shake the Disease” by Depeche Mode

I shared my studio at HomeShop with Gao Bei, a children’s book illustrator who referred to me as “crazy man.” I had made a chair and table from scraps bound by rope and they teetered like a stack of plates as I worked. I recall Gao Bei’s eyes switching instantaneously from perturbed annoyance to glossy and warm when she heard the plea sung by Martin Gore on my laptop to understand him. She repeated it after him, her head cocked sympathetically.

“Reed Mouth Organ Leap (Lushengtiao Group Dance)” by Naxi People Troupe

The tourist literature calls Naxi folk orchestras a “living fossil of Chinese music” characterized by the Three Olds: Old men, Old instruments, Old songs. In my opinion, the sheng, or Chinese mouth-organ, is the sickest-looking instrument in the Naxi folk orchestra, which is saying something, because the guzheng, the erhu, the snakeskin zhongu, the metal and walnut sugudu, the shimian yunluo with its ten mini-gongs in a frame, and the dizi bamboo flute, all look friggin sick.

“#3” by Aphex Twin

Some of Koh-i-Noor was written with the 10-hour loop of #3 playing, either on speakers blasting out the studio windows over Griffintown, or in my head as I stared at the Lachine Canal.

“That’s Where I Went Wrong” by The Poppy Family

I do remember that this was one of the forgotten songs lurking in my brain at one point. But I have forgotten when and where it had been originally heard and where I had heard it again and came to know its name, which is a different sort of agony.

“This Town” by Rotary Connection

A man wakes up in a nondescript windowless room. He can’t open the door, the television plays undated tape, he is fed the same nauseating food every day, until it starts to rot him from the inside. Weeks pass, he thinks, then months, maybe—he has no sense of time. To count the “days” he scrapes almost undetectable numerals with his plastic fork against a little patch of concrete hidden under a flap of wallpaper, but one day they disappear. He wakes up with a bandage on his head and recalls that the previous night, or previous morning, he had been striking his head against the wall, trying to end it all. More time passes. One day the door opens. He departs the room and stumbles out of the building. The sunshine burns his skin and eyes.

“The Last Waltz” by Cho Young-Wuk

Warning: Contains spoilers for the movie Old Boy (2003)

The man finds the city has changed. He walks straight into traffic and gets walloped by an electric car speeding silently along. Knees shaking, he quakes his way into a sushi restaurant and points bleary-eyed at whatever is in front of him. It happens to be a live octopus that he stuffs into his mouth and he faints with its tendrils caressing his protruding cheekbones. When he wakes up he has been adopted by a young woman, a waitress at the restaurant, who nurses his ravaged, Jesus-like body back to health. She streams his process of recovery online, and teaches him how to interact with the chat. He minds her plants when she is at work. He feels peace for a while, despite their age difference. He has discovered he was locked in the room for fifteen years. He is smiling as he reveals to the chat the emptiness he feels. I must find out what happened to me, he confides, otherwise I can’t live out these remaining years in happiness. When the young woman comes home, she urges him to be satisfied with the life they have. Let’s just be free in this world, as free as we can be, she says. But he isn’t smiling anymore. He’d followed the link sent to him by a devoted fan in the chat. You’ve been making money off of me for fifteen years, he cries, this has all been for subscriptions. That’s just it, darling, she replies with a sad smile, we’re rich!