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Le Mat/Fearfully and Wonderfully

Le Mat

Where to start? 2024 was a weird year. After having a bunch of high notes in 2023 (my Bedouin Temple record finally came out, Prayer for Cleansing played 2 huge festivals, and Bedouin Temple ended the year with an awesome festival performance), 2024 seemed to start with me staring down a creative cliff. I was telling myself that this was the year I’d make more art, and more music, start a podcast, start a coffee project, print more stuff, create cool merch. And then the depression set in. I did none of these things. And in doing none of them, I listened to the voice in my head that said I was incapable of doing anything. Fuck, that voice is loud. At some point that voice became my own. I spent most of the year thinking that anything I had to say was meaningless.

I’m trying to use this thing as a way of combatting that voice, that depression, that stagnation. I don’t have any illusions that this will be anything life changing, but it’s a way of opening up new channels for me and my head. I used to write a lot in my free time, but at some point I just stopped and never started again. This is my way of trying to again find that voice inside.

Fearfully and Wonderfully

In the summer of 2008, while speeding through the backroads of a small mountain in Austria on the way to his house, my buddy Albin asked me if I had heard the newest Daniel Higgs record. I hadn’t, I didn’t really know much about him, I sheepishly admitted. Completely surprised, he looked at me (not at the winding road, which made me super nervous), and said, don’t you know Lungfish? I knew the name, my friend David from high school/university loved them, and often said I’d probably hate them. At the time he would have been right, but I decided to give them a shot, seeing as Albin seemed to like Lungfish. That short car ride had an intense lasting impact on me.
For reasons unknown to me at this point, the song Fearfully and Wonderfully from the album Love is Love by Lungfish has been on my mind for the past few days. The title comes from the book of Psalms in the bible. I don’t think there’s an implicit biblical meaning behind the title, and I don’t mean to imbue any meaning or interpretation by mentioning it, but it’s a beautiful phrase. The lyrics paint endless pictures, and each one seems so strange yet so familiar and easy to imagine. My current favorite line is:

With wings like rainbow oars of fire
Inscribing signs across the water

The music is typical Lungfish, a single riff repeating for what feels like an eternity and yet only a short moment. This kind of repetition is part of what fascinated me about their music. Just as the images in the lyrics felt so familiar, the repeated riff felt familiar, too. You could lose yourself in it. For me, one of my goals in making music was to try to help/enable/facilitate the listener in losing themselves in the music. I’ve included it in the playlist below, just in case you’d like to check it out.

Substack Playlist of the Week

A few things

Favorite coffee: Tropical Punch by DAK
Netflix series just finished: The Madness
Current acoustic guitar tuning: CGCGCE
Current print project: Lungfish/Daniel Higgs shirt for friends
Concert I’m looking forward to: Jozef van Wissem at Zirka Space in Munich

And lastly

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