Written by: Dave Cantrell

There are artists (one might even say ‘most’) that have what might be described as a singular focus. Whether we’re talking visual art, literature, cinema, poetry or, hell, even pottery, the practitioner of said craft finds a groove and, to one degree or another, tends to stay within it, swerving to some degree inside its parameters but seldom venturing beyond the tried and true that accounts for their foothold in said art in the first place. Now, it could be averred that that’s just the nature of the human being, be they artists or carpenters or cabdrivers or longshoremen or the perennially unemployed. It’s comfortable, after all, and what’s more pursued in this life than comfort. And even in the purportedly more adventurous world of ‘rock’n’roll,’ where there’s a vaunted (if perhaps over-baked) history of smashing convention for the sake of one’s art, well, I’m sorry to say that, so far as the ‘rock artist’ is concerned – and we’re talking all across the always widening spectrum of that term – the same observation tends to hold and in fact it could easily be argued that, due the pressures of the market and the assumed expectations of one’s fanbase, the lack of adventurousness is even more deeply baked in. Which is why the exceptions, rare as hen’s teeth or even a compassionate Trump voter, tend to attract our attention here at SEM where we can think of none more adept at this ‘confounding expectations’ business as Kramer. Now, for anyone in need of a primer, we’ve hyper-linked that name for the sake of brevity but seeing as most reading this are likely a bit more than marginally aware of the guy’s multi-disciplined discography, be it as artist, band member, producer or Shimmy-Disc label founder (and, umm, re-founder after a long hiatus), we’re just gonna move right on into the gist here.

Of late, as he has actually done for most of his ‘career’ (always a weighted word in this realm), the mononymous Kramer, as many of you will be aware, has been shepherding other artists toward collaborative projects if not quite at a dizzying rate at least a healthily consistent one, from the recently released The Walk with Kato Hideki to the exquisite, writer-based Words & Music – Book One to a recent surge of partnered albums with the likes of Laraaji, Jad Fair, Bill Frisell and others, which is to say there’s been very little rest for the Kramer fan which is no surprise seeing as the pace of those releases and more besides has been, well, restless. Which brings us to the inevitable, another gem of a V/A spoken-word album (dedicated, by the way, to the too-early-gone Hal Willner) and based on/dedicated to the master Edgar Allan Poe and called Poe – To One in Paradise, from which we’re proud and excited to preview the new video of the Jennifer Charles-sung, Poe-penned (as are all the tracks here) “The Lake.” Sounding simultaneously haunted and immediate, with a presence that, in its directness, manages to unsettle, it is, in other words, the exact vehicle with which to carry the gist of its author’s characteristic dualities, landing itself as it does in that nether world between the sinister and innocent, suggesting, as was his wont, the very thin, fragile line between not just those two but a whole host of seemingly opposing emotions (“but that terror was not a fright, but a tremulous delight/a feeling not the jewelled mind, could teach or bribe me to define”). The track – and the video – are as succinct and obliquely heartfelt as the work they’re addressing, which is to say the intuitive synchronicity at work here is remarkable. [summon Poe to your doorstep here]